I have been out of the game for awhile, but ~8 years ago I worked at a regional carrier and they were using Iowa as an anchor region to support expansion in other markets.
Today, there is a slew of news stories about folks getting non-renewed as their carrier is pulling out. Even if frequency goes up, weather events out here are isolated and sporadic, which to my education is the 'textbook' case for insurance.
What is really going on in Iowa?
byu/digitaltransmutation inInsurance
Posted by digitaltransmutation
3 Comments
Costs of repair have gone up dramatically in the past 2-3 years. A roof replacement 8 years ago may be $5k, now it’s like $10k. In certain states like California, rates have been frozen since the “lockdown”. Then the worst wildfires recorded have only happened in the past 5 years. I think one fire season in California had $10 billion in insured losses, but that is more than the total premiums collected that year. Rinse & Repeat couple of years in a row.
We’ve had some pretty devastating storms over the past several years (think derecho) that have contributed to some market instability.
I live in Iowa but work for a CA agency, so I’ve been out of the IA game for awhile, but was utterly surprised by the difficulty I encountered in shopping my own home and auto earlier this year. All of the agents I spoke with expressed frustration with the current market and fear that we’re going the FL direction.
I think there was a lot of fallout from that December derecho a couple winters back. My company had claims in every single county in the state from that. I think it precipitated a spike in repair costs since there was more work to go around than people to do it.