Hurricane season is here: Reduce the potential for damage & update your insurance
As summer nears, Floridians are looking to enjoy the warm weather and sunshine. But there’s another important season they must also take time to prepare for – hurricane season.
While most know to stock up on water, canned goods, and batteries, it’s also important to take steps to reduce the potential for damage to your property and review your insurance coverage.
There are low-cost ways to make your property more resilient against the high winds and heavy rain hurricanes bring. Check around your home or business and trim back any nearby branches or trees, inspect the roof and repair any loose or damaged shingles, secure loose gutters, and seal gaps and cracks around windows and doors. Installing a wind-rated garage door or hurricane shutters and upgrading the home to the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety’s FORTIFIED construction standard are additional measures to consider.
Insurers encourage taking these steps to help reduce the potential for damage if a storm strikes, and many offer premium discounts for mitigation measures. Talk to your insurer or agent about what discounts might be available.
To prepare for this hurricane season, it is also imperative that homeowners and business owners review and, if needed, update their insurance policies. Check your deductible – what you will pay out of pocket before insurance kicks in – and make sure you are comfortable with the amount. Your policy may also have a separate hurricane deductible, which is applied when there is a named storm and is typically higher than the standard deductible.
Inflation, supply chain issues, and increased demand for skilled labor and construction materials have all contributed to a significant increase in the costs to rebuild homes and businesses. Homeowners and business owners need to ensure the coverage provided by their policy is keeping pace with these elevated costs. There are key additional coverage features, such as automatic inflation guard, extended replacement cost, and building code/ordinance coverage, property owners can consider to help prevent being underinsured.
Actively preparing for hurricane season by conducting an insurance check-up and making our homes more resilient also helps support the overall property insurance market in Florida, which remains extremely challenging for consumers and insurers. Floridians pay some of the highest property insurance costs in the nation, and Florida residential property insurers experienced back-to-back net losses of more than $1 billion a year in each of the last three years, despite no storms making landfall in the state in 2020 or 2021, underscoring the costly impacts of legal system abuse.
Florida’s property insurance market was driven to near collapse due to years of rampant legal system abuse, which led to skyrocketing insurance costs and fewer choices in the marketplace. Gov. DeSantis and the Florida Legislature have shown tremendous leadership in addressing this crisis by passing historic reforms to reduce legal system abuse and ultimately help increase the availability and affordability of insurance. Recent news of more insurance companies entering the market is already a hopeful and positive sign.
Over time, these reforms are expected to help stabilize the market and lower costs, but it should not be expected to happen immediately. Before the reforms went into effect, billboard lawyers – worried only about their own payday – rushed to file tens of thousands of lawsuits. Insurers are working through the latest surge in lawsuits, but with so much litigation still pending, it could delay the anticipated positive impact of the recent reforms.
Another devastating hurricane this season could set the marketplace back again, but by strengthening our homes and being financially prepared, we can make our communities more resilient and help improve the market for all Floridians.
Logan McFaddin is vice president of state government relations for the American Property Casualty Insurance Association.
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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Hurricane season is here: Reduce the potential for damage & update your insurance
