Homeowners Insurance For Florida
homeowners insurance rate
If you're with Florida's state run insurance provider, your home insurance rates 're going up by approximately 10% this year. If you have your Florida property insurance with a private company, you will be facing rate increases from 10-15%. However, if Florida insurance providers have their way, you will be losing significant discounts that may dramatically increase the price of your homeowners insurance.
homeowners insurance rate
Presently, Florida homeowners enjoy what is known a wind mitigation discount for assorted home features which make your home more resistant against hurricanes. Home insurance companies are required to give you this discount under Florida law and a specific formula can be used to calculate it. It includes discounts for things like the shape of your roof, whether your homes roof has a secondary backup system for removing water, the methods used to attach your homes roof to the walls of your property, and whether or not your property has hurricane shutters and others.
Home insurance consumers in Florida have enjoyed these discounts which is often up to 50% of the wind premium over a home. However, homeowners sometimes are disappointed with those discounts too. One homeowner who had been showcased in the St. Petersburg Times invested $5,225 to boost the garage door and then for hurricane shutters on his home in Spring Hill, Florida. He was very upset to learn that his $5,225 investment would only provide him a discount of $16.11! Other homeowners in Florida have saved a lot more.
Started in 2002 in addition to improvements to the Florida building code, these wind mitigation discounts were an important step in the process to provide lower Florida property insurance rates to those with homes not as likely to sustain serious damage in a Florida hurricane. Those discounts were doubled by the state of Florida in 2006 so that you can provide some rate relief following the 2004/2005 hurricane season.
At the moment with the approach from the 2010 Florida legislative session, home insurance companies are asking legislatures to lessen some of those discounts. In a few areas the companies may have a point. For starters, there does are a certain amount of fraud connected with those discounts. This fraud could be the result of homeowners misrepresentations and in addition due to errors inside the findings from the home inspection. In any event it could lead to homes being granted discounts they're not entitled to. Companies also explain that the doubling of the discounts in 2006 was much more of a political response to high rates than a scientific process to properly price the discount in line with the real way a house would perform within a hurricane.
Some companies are ordering and investing in new mitigation inspections to get a more accurate picture of the home hardening mitigation steps which have been performed on your home. If a re-inspection on your home produces discrepancies, you might lose some of your discounts and face a huge increase in your Florida property insurance premiums.
From your perspective as a homeowner, rolling back these discounts would add significantly for the cost of your Florida home insurance. And this would happen during among the worst recessions during our lifetimes. For a few Florida homeowners having these mitigation discounts modified or eliminated you could end up thousands of dollars in additional premium costs.
It is a critical development that most Florida homeowners should be following. Even slight changes towards the mitigation discounts might lead to massive increases in Florida property insurance premiums that will make the rate increases already approved appear to be small change!