California, Florida, and Louisiana property owners can relate to the Iowan coverage issues
Homeowners insurance customers across Iowa are discovering that obtaining coverage isn’t as easy as it once was as a number of insurers have decided to take their business elsewhere.
The companies have been leaving Iowa recently
The homeowners insurance companies that have decided to leave the state say that they are doing so due to the rising number of severe storms the state is facing, and the skyrocketing costs associated with paying for the repairs. According to insurers, the situation is only worsening, and they don’t see an imminent change to that trend.
“I’ve never seen it this bad,” said Ed Faber of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, owner of Insurance Guru in a recent KCRG report.
According to Faber, many insurers are looking to the history of the state and based on the trends they’ve seen, they are deciding to leave.
Homeowners insurance coverage gets harder to find and afford
Faber pointed to the state’s recent history of hail, tornadoes, damaging wind, and tornadoes as some of the primary reasons insurers have decided to head elsewhere in recent years. Since 2020, these storms have been increasingly common and severe. Last year alone, insurers faced $20 billion in underwriting losses.
Faber underscored that with bad weather events hitting year after year, insurers have been reducing and withdrawing their business.
With the increasingly common and damaging storms has arrived a rising cost as well, said Florida State University’s Professor Dennis Smith. What’s more, this trend doesn’t appear to be going anywhere.
The warming world is becoming an expensive one
Smith pointed out that it simply cannot be denied that “the earth is warming.” He underscored that “the science is there” and that it’s something “we can’t hide from.” At no other point in recorded history has the planet warmed as quickly as it is currently doing, and it is “because of some of the actions we take as part of our civilization.”
Along with a broad spectrum of other impacts on the environment and on people, the cost of living in a warming world is also rapidly on the rise. This includes homeowners insurance policies, as the coverage industry is among the first to be directly impacted by the rising expense associated with climate change’s symptoms, particularly in the Western world.
