If the hurricane season this year is an active one for the state, policyholders will pay the price
Florida’s home insurance market has already been in crisis mode for the last few years, worsening with each passing hurricane season. If this year is another active one, it could be “detrimental” to the market in the state.
Unfortunately, predictions aren’t good
Though predictions are far from fact, the current predictive models are indicating that there will be a number of storms during this hurricane season. This is leading to rising concerns about what impact this will have on the cost of home insurance in Florida, since the market is already struggling, to say the least.
“Large losses would have a detrimental impact on Florida’s recovering market,” said the Insurance Information Institute’s (III) Mark Friedlander. “The overall trend is more activity for the Atlantic Coast versus the Gulf Coast and Florida with the highest probability of any direct state for direct landfalls.”
Insurance modeling indicates an active hurricane season
Predictions from Colorado State University have indicated that there is a 75 percent chance that Florida will be impacted by at least one of those storms before the end of November. Coastal counties have the greatest likelihood of being affected by a named storm.
Still, while predictive models are becoming increasingly accurate, there is no way to know for certain how a hurricane season will pan out other than to wait through it and find out what develops. Even when a storm has formed and has been named, there is still always great uncertainty as to whether it will make landfall, where it will hit if it does, and how powerful it will be as it moves over the state. While some storms aim straight for land, others remain out to sea and will miss the region altogether.
Not a great track record
As much as it’s comforting to know that many storms never make it to land, the trends over recent years certainly don’t suggest that state residents should become too easy about their risk. Storms have been getting stronger and more frequent, and damage is increasingly expensive to repair.
Data now shows that if the already struggling market is hit by a large storm in a densely populated area, the impact could be a substantial and costly one.
