Homeowners Insurance For Florida

Homeowners Insurance For Florida

In case you are with Florida's state run insurance carrier, your home insurance rates are getting up by up to 10% this year. If you have your Florida home insurance with a private company, you will be facing rate increases from 10-15%. However, if Florida insurance firms have their way, you will be losing significant discounts that may dramatically increase the cost of your homeowners insurance.

Presently, Florida homeowners enjoy what is known a wind mitigation discount for a number of home features that will make your home more resistance against hurricanes. Home insurance companies are required to give you this discount under Florida law plus a specific formula must be used to calculate it. It offers discounts for things like the shape of your roof, whether your roof has a secondary backup system for removing water, the techniques used to attach your homes roof to the walls of your property, and whether or not your home has hurricane shutters amongst others.

Home insurance consumers in Florida have enjoyed these discounts which is often up to 50% of the wind premium on the home. However, homeowners sometimes are disappointed with those discounts also. One homeowner who had been showcased in the St. Petersburg Times invested $5,225 to boost the garage door and then for hurricane shutters on his home in Spring Hill, Florida. He was very upset to learn that his $5,225 investment would only provide him a discount of $16.11! Other homeowners in Florida have saved far more.

Started in 2002 along with improvements to the Florida building code, these wind mitigation discounts were a significant step in the process to deliver lower Florida property insurance rates to those with homes not as likely to sustain serious damage in the Florida hurricane. Those discounts were doubled by the state of Florida in 2006 in order to provide some rate relief after the 2004/2005 hurricane season.

At this time with the approach of the 2010 Florida legislative session, property insurance companies are asking legislatures to lessen some of those discounts. In a few areas the companies could have a point. For starters, there does appear to be a certain amount of fraud related to those discounts. This fraud could possibly be the result of homeowners misrepresentations as well as due to errors within the findings from the home inspection. In any event it could lead to homes being granted discounts they're not entitled to. Companies also mention that the doubling of the discounts in 2006 was much more of a political response to high rates than a scientific process to correctly price the discount depending on the real way a property would perform within a hurricane.

Some companies are ordering and investing in new mitigation inspections to get a more accurate picture of the property hardening mitigation steps that have been performed on your home. If a re-inspection on your home produces discrepancies, you may lose some of your discounts and face an enormous increase in your Florida homeowners insurance premiums.

From your perspective like a homeowner, rolling back these discounts would add significantly to the cost of your Florida property insurance. And this would happen during among the worst recessions during our lifetimes. For some Florida homeowners having these mitigation discounts modified or eliminated you could end up thousands of dollars in additional premium costs.

This can be a critical development that Florida homeowners should be following. Even slight changes to the mitigation discounts could cause massive increases in Florida home insurance premiums that will make the pace increases already approved look like small change!