ST-6 - How Recent Hurricanes and Legislation Impacted the Florida Homeowners Market

The Florida homeowners market, fragile in the best of times, has been in tumult over the past few years. A combination of devastating and surprisingly long-tailed hurricanes, particularly Irma in 2017 and Michael in 2018, abuses of Florida-specific legal practices, and dramatically hardening reinsurance markets led to numerous insolvencies and pullouts, as well as significant rate increases and exposure changes for those companies that remained. While the Florida legislature had passed bills to respond to this crisis following Irma and Michael, the landfall of Hurricane Ian in 2022- a storm anticipated to be costlier than either Irma or Michael- occasioned the passage of Senate Bill 2A, a sweeping reform package aimed at stabilizing the Florida market. This presentation examines the ratemaking pressures in the Florida market leading up to SB 2A, explores the immediate impacts of this legislation in the first year-plus following its passage, and examines how Florida hurricane catastrophe modeling is accounting for this new and ever-changing landscape.