Florida’s Citizens picks up exposures at rising pace in January

Florida's insurer of last resort Citizens started off 2023 with an acceleration in new policy additions to keep the annual pace of gains above the 50% mark for six of the past seven months.

The Citizens in-force policy count rose 1.9% or 21,700 in January, an acceleration from the prior two months, but below the April-October 2022 string of monthly gains all above the 30,000 mark.

After a year of running insolvencies and insurer pull-backs form the state, mark the Citizen in-force policy count at 1.168 million, the highest level since points in Q4 2013.

Citizens continues to take on some rather pricey properties, with total exposure still growing well in excess of the growth in the policy count: Total exposure is up nearly 82% year on year versus the 50.3% gain in policies in force.

The Citizen calculation of premiums it inherited did not quite keep pace, now up 78% year on year at end-January.

Coastal exposures have fallen as a portion of total exposure, now at 22.7% versus 25.7% a year ago.

Citizens’ growth has been driven by a Florida market said to run insurers out of business. Southern Fidelity, Avatar P&C, St. Johns Insurance, Weston and FedNat have all gone to receivership in regulator moves. United P&C bid farewell to southern states on its own. Universal P&C recently went from a garden-variety run-off to outright insolvency. 9M financial results showed no shortage of insurers running losses in excess of $100 million, including ASI Preferred, Castle Key, Privilege Underwriters Reciprocal Exchange, American Strategic Insurance Corp, United and Universal.

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