Rising Home Insurance Premiums: Impact on Investors and Markets

Insurance premiums are soaring, forcing investors to adapt their strategies and better understand coverage risks.

### Rising Home Insurance Premiums: Impacts and Investor Strategies
* 📈 Since 2019, insurance premiums have **surged by 33%**, outpacing inflation and causing **significant concern for investors** regarding home values and investment protection.
* 🏠 Homeowners in high-risk areas, like Southern California, face particularly **steep increases and challenges** in obtaining insurance, with many being **dropped from traditional policies**.
* 🔥 Kathy shares her experience of being on the California FAIR Plan due to her home's location in a fire zone, highlighting the **complications and limitations** of state-sponsored insurance options.
* 💡 In contrast, Henry notes that Arkansas has seen **more manageable increases in insurance costs**, emphasizing the importance of **understanding local market dynamics and regulations**.
* 🌪 Experts attribute rising insurance rates to factors such as **increased home prices**, **construction costs**, **climate-related damage**, and a rise in **insurance fraud**, particularly in **rural areas**.
* 📊 A study revealed a stark **40% difference in insurance premiums** between neighboring counties in Oklahoma and Arkansas, suggesting that **state regulations significantly impact costs**.
* 🤝 Investors are encouraged to **proactively engage with insurance brokers** to tailor policies to their specific needs and to **stay informed about local insurance market trends and government regulations**.
* 🏛 As insurance companies withdraw from high-risk markets, there may be **increasing pressure on government programs to provide adequate coverage**, highlighting the need for investors to **adapt their strategies in response to these changes**.

insurance premiums have risen 33% since the beginning of 2019, which is way faster than the rest of inflation. That is difficult for investors to deal with, but the question is: what happens if the cost of Home Insurance keeps climbing across the country over time? What would that mean for home values, and how should you, as an investor, protect your Investments? Regardless of what happens, today we're going to be digging into this topic. [Music] What's up, everyone? It's Dave. Welcome to On the Market. Today I have Henry Washington and Kathy FY, who might be the least insurable person I know, on the show today. True, Kathy? You live in a place that's just like famously no one wants to insure you, right? Yeah, it's crazy. It's really been an issue the last few years. I live in Southern California. There was a huge Malibu fire. Hundreds of homes were burned, and these were not low-cost homes. So, you know, yes, we've seen insurance go up, and many people get dropped. So, this is a

really important topic. Well, we're going to dig into your plight more over the course of this show. Welcome, Henry. I actually was reading an article preparing for this, and it said that Arkansas is one of the better markets for insurance, so congratulations on that. You can contrast Kathy here today. We are seeing rates come up, but they're up from what would be considerably low for California. All right, well, I want to talk more about Arkansas later, but we'll get into that in a little bit. The point of today's episode is all about home insurance. If you haven't heard, it's been super volatile. It's going up, and it varies a lot state by state. We're going to get into that as well, and we've seen the headlines of folks who have abruptly lost their insurance or had their cost skyrocket. I have a friend who actually had his prime marry triple in just 2 or 3 years, and these issues just used to not really exist that much. Like, as an investor, I don't know if you guys

agree, but I used to just not even think about insurance. It was just like something that went up like 2 or 3% every year, and then you just kind of like sign the check, and that was it. And now it's like something we got to be talking about and thinking about all the time. So that's what we're going to do today, and Henry and Kathy are along for the ride. So let's just start with you, Kathy, because we sort of alluded to this, but you've mentioned that you've been rejected for insurance. You've had a hard time getting insurance in the past. This is on your primary residence, right? It sure is. And I live in a fire zone, so this should not be shocking news to anyone that insurance is going up. Our home is more new, and so it hasn't gone up as badly as other areas. Plus, we've done the things that were required to do. In fact, when we got our CO, our certificate of occupancy on this house, they made us cut down all the

trees. Oh, really? So, yeah, yeah, because they were actually typical of California. We were required to plant certain things, and we did. And then, when it came to se, we had to take it out, um, because there were different departments. It was the fire department that required that, uh, and they, and then people said, Please don't plant any more trees, because you technically could after you have your certificate of occupancy, but that is one of the things that keeps your insurance high. We also get checked every single year to make sure that we've cleared any brush, that any weeds are picked, you know, and that there's nothing dry around the house. We planted, um, basically agave plants, water-resistant plants, all around the property, so these things help keep the insurance down. But with that said, there are limits. We are on the California fair plan, which we're going to talk about in a bit, what that means. We, no, no regular insurance company would insure us. We're only on the state plan, which is the fair plan, and that has limits to how much it will

cover, and as we'll talk about in the article, it's very unorganized because it's grown so quickly, because so many people are getting dropped that they're all going to the California FAIR Plan. There are 350,000 Californians on it now, so their systems are just overblown. Can't get through to anybody. They mix things up. We've gotten dropped even from that because they said we didn't pay, and we have to prove we did pay. Your records are wrong, so it's a problem. So why I'm saying you're the least insurable person I know, but it sounds like this has been going on for a long time, right? It's not super recent. Well, as you probably recall, the Malibu fire and the paradise fire happened at the same time in 2018, okay? And the paradise fire wiped out an entire town, right? And that's where my parents used to live. It was just gone. You had to rebuild the whole town. Um, and at the

same time you know Malibu had hundreds of uh homes disappear and and of course we've had the Napa fires and Rosa fires and these are Big you know it's like the Maui fire like every year and uh and so of course there's going to be consequences of that and in another area having a million dollar coverage might be okay that'll cover your house but in California a million dollars really doesn't get you very much so you wouldn't have enough money to rebuild yeah so it it is really a difficult situation that's a situation I've been running into as well is where I can get coverage but not for a replacement Val that's really going to do anything for me where it's like they were this is for a mountain property in Colorado and they were like the replacement cost it's a pretty luxurious place it was like 92 bucks a square foot I was like where are you coming up with this like it would be at least $300 a square foot to rebuild this place and so it just basically

defeats the point of having insurance because you're just paying a premium for something that's not even going to help you that much in case of an emergency. So, obviously, there are a lot of challenges out here, and these are just two examples in two totally different states. But Henry, I'd love to hear your input on this because it sounds like Aransas is at least a little bit better. Yeah, insurance prices, like I said, they have gone up comparatively to the past 2 to 3 years, but not substantially. I mean, 5% okay increase in insurance cost, like it's not crazy, but it is higher than before. And as we have been evaluating our portfolio recently in the past couple of months, we have seen that insurance costs are by far one of our largest costs in our business, in our portfolio. And so, we are actively shopping our insurance policies and making sure that our policies are actually matching what we are doing to monetize the property, which I think a lot of

people get stuck with, as an example, like I might buy a property with the intent to fix and flip it. Well, that's a kind of coverage than I would need if I'm going to have a tenant in that property. And because the market has been so volatile, we've pivoted strategies on some properties, and that has now forced us to go back and pivot insurance policies to make sure that we are covered given the new exit strategy that we have. But the costs have gone up a little bit. All we're doing is really just adjusting our underwriting so that when we're making offers on properties, we're taking into consideration what those higher insurance costs are, and then we're making our offers with that in mind so that we are basically writing it into the offer we're making on the property. So yeah, I mean, it sounds like they're going up similar to the pace of inflation, at least in Arkansas, whereas in other states like California, Florida, Louisiana, actually Illinois, which I was kind of surprised to see, they are going up way

way way faster than the rate of inflation. Side note here, actually the way the government calculates inflation barely factors in insurance costs, which is a little bit crazy. But uh, I think that that's sort of one of the big key differences here is yeah, everything's gone up, but in certain states, it's like really outsized. I mean, it's one of the benefits to Arkansas being in the middle of the country, right? We don't have the extreme weather as a lot of those coastal areas. You were talking about the biggest weather-related insurance issues we have are flooding when we have really, really heavy torrential rains. Other than that, it's just really hot here in summer, and that doesn't really do anything for your insurance cost other than a bunch of HVAC going all out at the same time, so it just makes you mad. Yeah, makes you just makes you upset. But we do have flooding issues, and we do have to be very careful about uh, when we're insuring properties and making sure that

it's covered for flood insurance because that is something completely separate typically, and I do want to focus most of our conversation today about what investors should do. So, I'm actually going to just quickly go through some of the reasons, at least why experts cite that insurance prices have gone up. First and foremost, the most obvious is that home prices have gone up, and so the cost of replacement, as of construction cost, so the cost of replacement when something bad does happen and there actually is a loss, it's way more expensive for the insurance company to replace that home, and so they pass that price along to the policy owner. There are increasing amounts of weather and climate-related damage, like we see every year, it seems like the most expensive storm on record hits somewhere in the country. You know, we've seen in Houston or in Florida or in Louisiana, these very expensive big disasters, or fires in California or Colorado as well. I've also seen that something was interesting when I was researching this, the rate of insurance fraud has actually gone up in a lot of

states, and so the insurance companies have to compensate for that. And specifically in rural states, there are fewer homeowners to share the risk, and so the people who do have policies have to bear more of a cost for the risk of loss. So those were some of the common things. All right, so that's why insurance rates have gone up. But when we come back, we'll talk about what you could do to navigate these costs as an investor, plus a data point from Henry State that caught my eye and gave me some thoughts about how you can game the system a little bit. So stick around. Hey, everyone, welcome back to On the Market. Henry, I wanted to share with you because I was reading this article in the New York Times. It shared some research that some professors from, I think it was University of Pennsylvania and University of Wisconsin, did, and they were showing how states and areas that have very similar climate risk have very, very different insurance premiums. And Arkansas was one of the examples. So they showed that in McCurtain County.

Oklahoma. The typical homeowner paid an average of $2,337 for insurance. But right across the state line, it's on the border with Arkansas in Little River County, Arkansas. I don't know where this is, but it's just right across the border, so basically the same climate, right? Similar risk, $1,673. That's a 40% difference in insurance cost just by going over the state line. So, it feels like there is something other than just risks going up, going on here. Clearly, something on a state level is going on. These professors tend to believe that it's due to different levels of regulation. Like Arkansas has some laws about how much you can raise premiums. Oklahoma doesn't, and that's why they've gone up so much. So, you should take some solace, Henry, that someone in your state government is looking out for you. Hey man, Arkansas never lets me down as a landlord-friendly state. I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but we were doing a looking at fourplexes just

over the border of Texas and Oklahoma, and those fourplexes had really low insurance, and I thought that was strange. And, you know, every State's got their issues, and obviously in Oklahoma, it's tornadoes. But for some reason, just over the border in this particular area, it was more hilly, and it was harder for the tornadoes to really take flight in those areas. So, I wonder if that has anything to do with it. In this case, interesting. That's very interesting. Well, we are talking here about what investors can do about this if insurance premiums keep going up. And so, what I learned from this article is that you should very much be in tune with what is going on in your local area with insurance policy, not just like the policies that you could buy, but government policy around insurance. And we'll get into that more, but what this article was saying is that in Oklahoma, I'm just picking on Oklahoma, but in Oklahoma, the regulating office, whatever they're called there, has never once

exercised its right to limit premium increases. Never whereas if you look in States like Florida where they know this is this is obviously a really big problem. Their government is getting more involved in trying to figure out a solution with private companies. So this is just something as an investor you can do pro-actively. You probably can't control it but at least you understand what's going on in your market so that you could at least forecast a little bit about where premiums might go. I think what investors need to do in terms of insurance is the same thing that we do in terms of lending or other areas of investment that are more on the Forefront of our mind. It's that we leverage relationships in order to understand how to navigate these Waters and you're right. Insurance has always been one of those things where it's like all right get a policy and let's move on right cuz typically it's been affordable. You understand it. It's underwritten into your deal but now as weather is more extreme in certain areas of the country.

uh, we just had a tornado here in my local market, and I had to file three different insurance claims. Fortunately enough, all of them were covered, but what it did was force us to go sit down and have a conversation with our insurance broker. When we had that conversation, we were able to look at our entire portfolio and make sure that we were covered both for the exit strategy that we have and for anything that they're seeing on the horizon. Because they are involved in the insurance industry, they understand what's happening in changes in policy and different companies, and so they were able to help us. They were able to make some recommendations for us to make some changes on insurance policies and insurance coverages to better protect us and to save us money. That's not something that we did prior to this year because, just like you said, Dave, it was just what it was: get a policy and move on. I think that especially in the more coastal states, where the weather can be more extreme, you really have to be a little more

proactive about your approach with insurance and having those conversations so you understand what it's truly going to cost you, and you truly understand what is and isn't covered. 'Cause sometimes what you think you may be covered for, oh God, you are absolutely not covered for. I just toured a house from a guy who had tornado damage. His whole bottom floor flooded because of the tornado. The tornado caused rain, the rain filled up the area behind his house, and then that water came into his house. And technically, they did not cover the tornado damage 'cause they said it was flood damage and that he didn't have flood insurance. And if you're in one of these more at-risk markets, you really, you've got to understand insurance more, and you have to understand what you're covered for, what you're not covered for, and what risk you have out there when you're buying property in these areas. Oh my gosh, I cannot emphasize the importance of that enough. Most people have no idea.

what they're covered for um if they're if they're landlords. If they have the proper landlord insurance, this is a major problem. Most people don't even have their policy. They never asked for it, you know, so make sure you've got that in front of you. And if you don't understand it, get someone to help you who does. There are nonprofit groups to help you with that. One of the big things is called named storm insurance. We had an investor at Willth come to us and say we weren't covered for this major storm in Houston. And they said something about a named storm. If a storm has a name and you don't have coverage for it, you don't get covered. Wait, what stupid names they come up with storms actually impacts your coverage. Yeah, yeah, you like talk to your insurance agent and there's a chance they might not even know what this is because there's just like you. They'd be like, What? But this is extremely important. Yes, if you live in a named storm area, which is basically Florida.

and Texas that I know of. I don't maybe Louisiana. Louisiana yeah ask about that. You know what I'm just going to say it this sucks. I as a beginning investor I just decided I didn't want to learn about taxes cuz it was too boring. That eventually bit me in the and so I learned about taxes but I've been holding out for like 15 years not learning about insurance and now no longer my friend I have to do it and I don't want to. I really don't. I don't want to read the policies. I don't want to do any of this but we definitely should. You're not alone. I mean who does even if you read it could you really understand it and the answer is no no. So you have to have an advocate for you and you know in California again because it's California there are nonprofits to help homeowners understand their insurance policy because it it matters. You you may not even know you know what you're what you have to come out of pocket or in our case in during the

Malibu fire. We had some trees burn, like no big deal. We didn't even have smoke damage. And the next day, there were insurance companies walking. I'm not kidding, coming down the street. Not the next day, 'cause we couldn't, we were evacuated, but like the next month. They were coming down the street with checks, and most people accepted it, you know, so we did. It's like, Oh, a check, we get to fix our backyard. It was like no big deal. But guess what that does when you accept money? Raises your insurance policy goes up. So, you know, and it was something we really didn't even need. But you know who's going to say no, right? Like, Oh, money. This is what they do in Malibu, Henry. They just walk around down the streets and just hand out money to people. They're like, I knew wants money, and they're hoping you'll, and you're, they're hoping that will be enough, like you say thanks. But you know, for people who had smoke damage, um, it, you could get much

more uh again in our in our case. It would have been much better to not take that $20,000 check and not have our insurance go up. But it probably would have gone up anyway. Yeah, yeah, for sure. It probably would have. Yeah. All right. So, I want to turn to sort of the question of what happens from here, and I have two main questions. The first is, do you think that higher insurance premiums will have an adverse effect on home prices in areas like Florida? And I'll give an example. No, this is not like a causal relationship. You can't say because insurance premiums are going up, Florida's having one of the biggest corrections in the country. But both of those things are true. Florida's insurance premiums have gone up, and we're starting to see a pullback in the Florida market. Florida is still way, way, way higher than it was in 2019. So, don't take that all with a grain of salt. But I'm just curious what you guys think of that. Do you think there's a connection?

there and uh Henry. I'll start with you. I'm going to give the political answer. Like, is there a connection? Yeah, there's probably a connection. But like, I don't think because the insurance premiums are the way they are that like everyone's just going to leave Florida and then that's going to create this oversupply of housing. And people don't want to live there because of insurance. Like, I just don't see that. So people who want to live there and can afford to live there and afford to pay for the premiums will pay for it. And sure, that might have an effect on real estate prices a little bit, right? If there is more supply and less demand, prices should come down a little bit. But I don't see it being this, you know, 20, 30% drop in housing prices because insurance premiums have gone up so much. I just, I can't see some mass exodus of people out of Florida because of it. No, I personally don't think so either. I think it's more like, hey, insurance went up 5 grand a year. Like

what is the corresponding correction in home prices that makes the monthly payment escrow payment the same? Essentially, that's definitely not 10 or 20%. It might be 2%. I don't know exactly what it is. I don't know the math, but that's sort of more what I was thinking. Kathy, what are your thoughts on this? The cost of living is really important. People follow where they can live better, and businesses too. But one of the reasons people move to Florida is there is a huge cost savings in overall tax, right? If there's no state income tax, so if you balance that out, where else are they going to go and get a good deal, right? Like they could go to Texas, no state income tax, but boy, you're going to pay property tax. So it just all comes down to affordability of your lifestyle, not just your housing payment, not just your insurance, how it all adds up. But in Florida, yeah, people will leave. There'll be people that leave that say this is

too expensive. I need to go somewhere cheaper, but they also might look at Florida and say, Maybe I just moved to another part of Florida that's less expensive, or a different product. For example, we did a lot. Our business model up until 2018 was buying older homes, fixing them up, basically the BRRRR model, or TurnKey properties where a team would do that for you. They buy the old house, fix it up, and you'd be getting a deal. Well, today it's not the deal because the older homes have so much higher insurance. It went from about $1,500 a year to like $4,000, so that really affects your cash flow. However, on a newer home, it's like half that. It's still pretty cheap because you've got, let's see, cinder block constructions, slab foundations, reinforced roofs, windows. Everything's built to a different standard when it's new, and insurance companies recognize that. So, it could be that people just maybe move into newer product or they move into parts of Florida that are less

affected which be would be more Central Florida. Obviously, Miami, Sarasota. We saw anything Coastal is expensive, and especially if it's an older home. It just can't withstand the hurricane, you know, winds. Yeah, that's a good point. I also want to just call out though we're beaten up on Florida a little bit here and California, but it's not just Coastal States. Like we've seen huge increases in, I mentioned Illinois, Maine. Well, Maine is Coastal but doesn't have the same, you know, hurricane. Illinois is Coastal too. That's a big lake. Yeah, there's a big lake with no waves on it, but there's a lot of snow around there. Okay, time for one last Quick break. When we come back, things get a little spicy as we talk about how the government might need to step into the insurance market right after this. Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. The reality is as of right now a lot of insurance companies are just pulling out of States. They're offering less different policies or they're being much more restrictive on what types of

properties that they will ensure. And my mind, when I hear this stuff, is that the government is going to have to step in. And before you have a reaction to that, the government steps into the situation. You should know that this is very common and already exists, right? Kathy mentioned it earlier. There's something called the fair access to insurance requirements. It's property insurance sponsored by states. I think it's something like 32 different states already offer this. So Florida has one. Kathy mentioned that she has one. There are New York, Hawaii, North Carolina. So this is not something that doesn't exist. But from what Kathy said and from what I've read about Florida's state-sponsored program, is that it's just inadequate. Is that your experience, Kathy? The black suits are listening. Um, we, you know, again, it's growing so fast because everybody's getting dropped. So they're going to the California fair plan, and they're overwhelmed. So it is inadequate right now. And then I just heard that it's sort of first come, first serve, like there's

not enough money to cover everybody. Interesting, yeah. So, it's like, well, how do you be first, you know? Um, it's a really scary situation, and it is for the first time. For the first time, I've considered moving out because I love it here. I love where I live. I would be hard to leave, but you know, at some point, like I just said earlier, the cost of living is what drives people to live where they live. And if it's just too risky, if I couldn't rebuild my house but I'm still paying my mortgage payment and my insurance that I've been paying ridiculous amounts on, like it has gone up, it's high even on the fair plan, but then I don't get the coverage. It's scary. Don't worry, they're just going to walk down your street and hand you money. This just what happens about my husband who somehow thinks I like my house more than he's like, I'm going to stay and fight the fire. And no, I kind of need you. I've told you that in

the past. If it's Wildfire versus Rich Kathy's husband, I'm picking Rich. I think he's got it. If you know Rich, he would win that fight. He's going to get an oxygen tank. He's got a h. It's like, but I'll tell you, people do, people who live in Malibu, and I don't know about other places, they stay and they try to fight it because they say it's the Embers, the small that um, that you, the little Embers that really C the problems. I mean, I think it's the fire that causes the problems, but um, but anyway, if you stay in your pool, you will die unless you have an oxygen tank, and families have done it, or they jump in the ocean. They think, I'm going to be okay. No, it's not. It's not like that. You can't breathe. It's so bad. It's so get, get an oxygen tank if you're going to be like my husband. Not recommending that to anyone. If there's a fire in your area, get the

hell out of there. Just go, please follow the evacuation orders. Leave it to the professionals. I wanted to bring it up because I think the reason that a lot of these state insurers are seen as inadequate is because they're not designed to be primary insurance. They are designed to be what is known as an insurer of last resort and basically serve a purpose of filling a void in the private market where for, I would say, state-specific challenges. So, like in Florida, the state insurance there is designed to help people with flood insurance or with hurricane insurance. In California, it's wildfires. In Oklahoma or in the Midwest, I'm sure it's for tornadoes. And it's supposed to be supplement insurance on top of your primary homeowner insurance policy. But what seems to be happening is that people are just getting dropped in a lot of these places from primary insurance, and so they're going to the state and being like, I just need any insurance, and they're just not set up to do that. And so I keep thinking that

states are going to have to figure out a way to make their insurance policies more robust. But you know what that means? Probably higher property taxes or other taxes because the state's not. Most state governments aren't just flushed with cash. They're going to have to raise that money somewhere to help support homeowners. Yeah, I think all this just plays into the affordability issue. And I don't want to say this is good news, but if you are listening to the show and you hadn't heard about this before, now you have some information to help you make a more informed decision before you go buy something and then get surprised. But there are a good subset of people in the first-time homebuyer category who bought a home with a high-interest rate and then now, after a year or two of ownership, have been hit with new insurance costs and are not able to afford the new mortgages. And these people are selling their properties because they can no longer afford. And so, I do think that something is going to have to happen so that people can

continue to afford homes or, uh, because if you're in that subset and you say you were paying the story I read, there was a young lady paying about, I think it was 14 to 1500 bucks a month, and that was about all she could afford. And then insurance and taxes both went up on her, and she ended up paying close to like $22,100 a month. Like, that's a really big shift if you're a first-time home buyer. Like, those things are killing people when they're trying to, you know, afford the American dream. We had an expert from Ice, it's that mortgage data company, uh, come on a couple of months ago, and he was talking about how in Louisiana the insurance and taxes are now equal to principal and interest on a lot of mortgages. Just if you guys don't understand that, when you make a mortgage payment every month, most people, everyone who has a traditional mortgage, not interest-only, pays principal. That's paying back the bank. You have interest, that's the bank's profit. Um, so some

people just pay P&I, but most people wrap their taxes and insurance in their mortgage payment and an escrow payment. Typically, the principal insurance, I don't know about you guys, what, 75-80% of the payment is usually something like that, but now it's like 50-50. And it's not that principal and interest went down; it's because taxes and insurance are up. And it's like almost like paying two mortgages now in Louisiana specifically. And the reason I just think the government's going to step in is this is going to be a political issue. You know, this is really impacting not investors. I mean, it is impacting investors, but this is just ordinary folks who are going to be dealing with this. And you know, 66% of the country owns their own home, so it's like two-thirds of people are going to be pretty frustrated with this and trying to find a solution. And I would be pretty shocked. And insurance is really handled on a state basis, that if this isn't on the ballot in most states.

uh going forward, like trying to find creative solutions to this problem. Yeah, I mean in one of these articles that you sent over, Dave, in preparation for this. It basically said that if it continues at a loss or even break-even, insurance companies aren't coming back. They're not in the business to break-even or lose money. But maybe the government is. So, it sounds... I don't understand it well enough, but it sounded like the fair plan isn't actually government money. It's insurance companies still involved in that. But we'd have to bring on someone from the fair plan to really explain that. That they're somehow still involved, that maybe they're pooling money or something, but now I'm just making stuff up. So, Henry, what should people be focused on in terms of how to deal with this situation? I mean, I think the answer to that question is insurance. I think the problem is we weren't really focused on it before because it was so easy to get. You were going to get coverage. It

was typically going to be affordable, uh, and now that's not the case. So, we have to treat it like we treat other aspects from an investor standpoint, guys. We have to treat it like we treat other aspects of our investing business. We shop around lenders to find the best interest rates and terms. We shop around for properties that give us the best, uh, price points, and we ask for concessions and all these things. We're doing everything that we can to maximize our expenses and increase our profits with relation to everything else in the underwriting process, and insurance is kind of that last thing that we now cannot just set it and forget it any longer. We have to be more proactive as investors and understanding where you live, what weather implications impact insurance, where is your property located, does the insurance company think that your property is in a more high-risk area. You just have to be a little more educated about what insurance is in your area, how much it costs, and what you can do to maybe make some adjustments. And I would like to redeem myself, you guys, for

I looked it up. This is how easy it is to get information these days. Contrary to popular belief, the California fair plan is not a government-backed program. It is financially supported by California's private home insurance companies, not taxpayers. But recent turmoil in the California Home Insurance Market has left the fair plan overburdened, strained, and increasingly expensive. As of June of this year, the California FAIR Plan has around 48,000 policies, an increase of 164% since 2019. Um, so you know, it's my understanding that was kind of mandated like, Hey, if you want to insure our state, you have to also be a part of this. And um, but at some point, when does it become like, Hey, we don't want anything to do with California. We're pulling out. Yeah, you know, if we have to be a part of this because it is growing so fast. Well, this has been a lot of fun, great conversation about a topic that no one wishes they had to pay attention to, let's be honest. But this is why we're

here talking about what's going on, what's changing in the real estate market, and this is something that we're all going to have to become at least proficient in, at least literate in, in the next couple of years. Henry and Kathy, thank you so much, and we will, of course, put their contact information in the show notes, or you can find them on the Bigger Pockets website. For Bigger Pockets, I'm Dave Meyer, and we'll see you back on the market in just a couple of days. On the market was created by me, Dave Meyer, and Kayin Bennett. The show is produced by Kayin Bennett, with editing by Exodus Media. Copyrighting is by Calico Content, and we want to extend a big thank you to everyone at Bigger Pockets for making this show possible.

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On The Market

The Impact of Rising Home Insurance Premiums

Home insurance premiums have increased by 33% since 2019, outpacing inflation and causing difficulties for investors.

The volatility in insurance rates varies by state, with some areas, like Arkansas, experiencing lower rates.

Kathy, a resident of Southern California, has struggled to obtain insurance due to living in a fire zone, leading to her being on the California FAIR Plan, which has grown rapidly due to many people being dropped from regular insurance.

The Challenges of Home Insurance in High-Risk Areas

Home insurance coverage is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain in areas like California, where a million-dollar policy may not be sufficient for rebuilding.

Insurance costs have risen in places like Arkansas, but not as dramatically as in states with extreme weather events.

The rising home prices and increasing weather-related damages are key factors driving up insurance premiums, while the rate of insurance fraud has also increased.

The Impact of Climate Risk on Insurance Premiums

Insurance rates have increased due to factors like extreme weather and fewer homeowners in rural states.

A study showed a 40% difference in insurance costs between similar climate-risk areas in Oklahoma and Arkansas, suggesting state-level regulations play a role.

Investors should stay informed about local insurance policies and government regulations to better navigate rising premiums and protect their investments.

Understanding Insurance Coverage for Property Owners

Being proactive about insurance is crucial, especially in at-risk markets, as many people are unaware of what is and isn't covered.

Named storm insurance can significantly impact coverage, and it's important to have an advocate or seek help from nonprofit groups to understand policies.

Accepting insurance money after a disaster can lead to higher premiums, making it essential to carefully consider the implications of accepting such assistance.

The Impact of Higher Insurance Premiums on Florida's Housing Market

Higher insurance premiums in Florida are likely to have some effect on home prices, but not a drastic one.

While there may be a slight correction in real estate prices due to increased supply and decreased demand, a mass exodus of people from Florida is not expected.

Many residents are drawn to Florida's overall cost savings, including no state income tax, and may choose to move within the state to more affordable areas or into newer homes with lower insurance costs.

The Impact of Climate on Housing and Insurance

Central Florida, along with coastal areas like Miami and Sarasota, is experiencing a surge in housing costs due to the challenges of older homes withstanding hurricane winds.

The trend of rising housing costs is not limited to coastal states, with significant increases also seen in places like Illinois and Maine.

Insurance companies are pulling out of states or offering more restrictive policies, leading to a growing need for government intervention, with state-sponsored property insurance programs already existing in 32 states, including Florida and California.

The Inadequacy of State Insurance Programs

State insurers are designed as a last resort, filling gaps in the private market for specific challenges like floods, hurricanes, and wildfires.

Many people are being dropped from primary insurance and are turning to state programs, which are not equipped to handle the demand.

The rising insurance and tax costs are significantly impacting first-time homebuyers, leading to affordability issues and potentially driving them to sell their properties.

The Challenges of Home Insurance in California

The California home insurance market is struggling, with the FAIR Plan experiencing a 164% increase in policies since 2019.

Insurance companies are hesitant to operate in the state due to the rising costs and high-risk areas.

Investors are urged to be proactive in understanding their insurance needs and the factors impacting coverage.