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Most Inland Homeowners To See Rate Cut Under Citizens Insurance
September 7, 2014
Homeowners covered by Citizens Property Insurance Corp., mostly those with inland properties, will see an average rate decrease next year, the first since an effort to artificially lower rates ended in 2009.
The Office of Insurance Regulation on Friday approved a 3.7 percent average decrease for homeowners. Citizens had requested a 3.4 percent reduction.
The reduction doesn’t automatically mean a drop in prices for all policyholders, as individual rates vary county by county, by the locations of properties and by property owners’ different types of coverage.
Still, about 70 percent of Citizens policyholders, mostly inland residential customers, are expected to benefit due to a 6.1 percent average reduction for multi-peril personal line accounts.
Citizens, which is rapidly moving to reduce its overall number of policies, had requested a 5.8 percent reduction for such policies. Multi-peril personal lines make up 614,678 of the policies handled by Citizens, which as of July 31 had 933,807 overall policies in place. The decrease is due in part to efforts over the past couple of years to move more than a half-million policies into the private market, and because of efforts in past years to increase rates and bring the state-backed insurer more in line with the private market. Citizens has also been able to bulk up its surplus, as Florida is now in its ninth hurricane season without the center of a major storm making contact with the state.
Many of the 30 percent of Citizens customers that will see increases next year are in commercial, condominium and coastal properties. Rates for businesses and condominium associations, which comprise about 36,000 of Citizens’ policies, will grow from 0.2 percent to 10 percent depending upon the type of coverage. Also, residential coastal wind-only accounts will increase 3.8 percent, the amount requested by Citizens. And while owners of mobile homes have been approved for a 4.3 percent decrease in personal line accounts, coastal wind-only policies are set to go up 8.2 percent.
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