Weekly Review for Florida Insurance Law for Monday, October 6, 2014

Florida Insurance Law Weekly Updates

Florida Insurance Law Weekly UpdatesHere are some recent articles of interest that I found this week for the insurance industry, Florida insurance law, Florida insurance claims, and Florida insurance trends. Enjoy!

Florida Insurance Law: Florida’s Citizens Pays Off Bond, Drops Surcharge 2 Years Early
Florida’s state-backed property insurer will stop collecting a one-percent assessment that had been used to retire a bond issued following the 2004-2005 hurricane season.

The Citizens Property Insurance Corp. board of directors decided the insurer will have the necessary funds to retire the bonds as of June 15. The bonds had been scheduled to be paid off in June 2017.

Citizens Chief Financial Officer Jennifer Montero said the decision follows last year’s vote to continue the assessments.

“When we came before the board last year, we recommended continuation of the one percent for another year in anticipation in the future or even elimination of the assessment,” said Montero.

Citizens issued the bonds after the 2004-2005 hurricane season when eight major storms struck the state. Those storms left Citizens with a $1.7 billion shortfall. As a result, in 2007 the insurer levied a 1.4 percent emergency assessment paid for by all the state’s property policyholder.

That funding decision allowed Citizens to start paying down a 10-year post-event bond issuance that had a total price tax of $1.38 billion.

Read more here

Thank you for reading (and sharing). Stay tuned for next week’s weekly review for Florida Insurance Law!

Weekly Review for Florida Insurance Law for Friday, September 26, 2014

Florida Insurance Law Updates

Florida Insurance Law UpdatesHere are some recent articles of interest that I found this week for the insurance industry, Florida insurance law, Florida insurance claims, and Florida insurance trends. Enjoy!

Miami Hopes Storm Pumps, Seawall Will Protect Against Rising Seas
Climate change is not only already visible in iconic South Beach, but so is climate change adaptation, in the form of new storm water pumps meant to keep rising sea levels from swamping low-lying streets, city officials said Wednesday.

Extreme high tides in the fall and spring push seawater up through aging infrastructure, flooding some Miami Beach streets with more than a foot of water even on sunny days, snarling vehicle and pedestrian traffic. National and regional climate change risk assessments have used the flooding to illustrate the Miami area’s vulnerability to rising sea levels.

Watching a new storm water pump being readied for installation along the city’s bay front, officials said they hoped the project would make Miami Beach, a barrier island with an average elevation of 4.4 feet above sea level, an example of climate change adaptation instead of only risk.

A system of about 60 new pumps across the city will keep streets dry for the next 25 to 30 years, said Mayor Philip Levine. A higher sea wall also is being built to cope with storm surge flooding.

Read more here

Commercial Rates in Florida’s Citizens Going Up 3.3%
Rates for the almost 100,000 commercial property risks insured by Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance Corp. will rise an average 3.3 percent next February.

The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation (OIR) has approved the increase, which is less that the average 5.2 percent increase requested by Citizens. The decision came after 45-day deliberative process and a public hearing on Aug. 27 in Tallahassee.

Commercial polices are found in both Citizens’ Commercial Lines and Coastal Accounts and represent 99,009 of Citizens’ total 933,807 policies statewide.
OIR previously approved new rates for homeowners accounts, a statewide average rate decrease of 3.7 percent.

Read more here

Thank you for reading (and sharing). Stay tuned for next week’s weekly review for Florida Insurance Law!

Weekly Review for Florida Insurance Law for Monday, September 15, 2014

Weekly review for Florida Insurance Law

Weekly review for Florida Insurance LawHere are some recent articles of interest that I found this week for the insurance industry, Florida insurance law, Florida insurance claims, and Florida insurance trends. Enjoy!

Florida Insurance Law: Florida’s Citizens No Longer ‘Out of Control,’ Says Exec Defending Rate Cut
Its successes in reducing its insured population and securing low cost catastrophic coverage are driving the request by Florida’s state-backed property insurer for a statewide average 2.9 percent decrease on residential policies.

Citizens Property Insurance Corp. officials in a public hearing before the state’s Office of Insurance Regulation (OIR) painted a picture of an insurer that has downsized significantly while financially improving over the last several years.

Read more here

Florida Insurance Law: Crist, Scott Spar Over Property Insurance in Race for Governor
Democrat Charlie Crist said he successfully reduced rising property insurance rates as governor and will do so again if elected, vowing to repeal a law enacted under Republican Gov. Rick Scott that he said provides weaker coverage at a higher price.

It’s a familiar theme for Crist, who campaigned in 2006 on a pledge to lower insurance rates that were skyrocketing after eight hurricanes battered Florida in two years. One of his first acts as governor was to call a special session to deal with rising rates. Lawmakers expanded the amount of state-sponsored reinsurance, which brought down costs for private carriers, and froze rates by the state-created Citizen’s Property Insurance Corp., which took on more policies as national companies backed away from Florida.

Read more here

Florida Fraud Law: Home Depot Confirms Its Payment Systems Were Hacked
Home Depot Inc. confirmed on Monday its payment security systems have been breached, a data theft analysts warn could rival Target Corp.’s massive breach last year.

Home Depot said the data theft could impact its customers in stores across the United States and Canada, but there was no evidence that online customers were affected or debit personal identification numbers (PINs) were compromised.

Read more here

Florida Real Estate Law: Free Florida Quit Claim Deed Form and Filing?
Reading this article will teach you the hazards for using a free Florida quit claim deed form and other do-it-yourself solutions to transfer your home or property.

Countless people are searching for and using free Florida quit claim deed forms they find online. These same people then without legal knowledge or training try to fill out the quit claim deed not even knowing if the form itself is proper for the State of Florida or for their specific purposes. As a Florida real estate lawyer, I am horrified that people think this is actually a good, prudent and financially wise decision.

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Florida Real Estate Law: How Strong Is Florida’s ‘Revived’ Homeowners Market?
As Florida seeks to revive its private home insurance market after almost a decade without a hurricane, homeowners are pouring $6 billion a year in premiums into a new generation of small, in-state insurance companies with an unproven record of withstanding a major hurricane.

A consumer-oriented rating agency, Weiss Ratings, recently awarded the companies a median grade of C-minus, and even without a major storm to drive up claims, 11 of them have already failed in Florida since 2006, according to state records.

Read more here

Thank you for reading (and sharing). Stay tuned for next week’s weekly review for Florida Insurance Law!

Weekly Review for Florida Insurance Law for Friday, August 15, 2014

Florida Insurance Law Updates

Florida Insurance Law UpdatesHere are some recent articles of interest that I found this week for the insurance industry, Florida insurance law, Florida insurance claims, and Florida insurance trends. Enjoy!

Florida Legal Help: When Should I File a Florida Legal Claim?
Normally I do not write in such broad strokes. Originally, I was going to write about when a Florida insurance claim should be filed. Then after thinking about it for a moment, I decided the advice applicable to insurance claims is equally important to all Florida legal claims. So, if you have a Florida legal claim that involves business deals gone wrong; contracts breached; monies that have not been paid; insurance claims denied; personal injuries suffered; or real estate deals that are upside down; then this article is for you!
Read more here

Thank you for reading (and sharing). Stay tuned for next week’s weekly review for Florida Insurance Law!

Weekly Review for Florida Insurance Law for Monday, August 4, 2014

Weekly Review for Florida Insurance Law

Weekly Review for Florida Insurance LawHere are some recent articles of interest that I found this week for the insurance industry, Florida insurance law, Florida insurance claims, and Florida insurance trends. Enjoy!

Hurricane Watch: Tropical Storm Bertha forms in the Atlantic
Tropical Storm Bertha barreled toward the northern end of the island of Martinique in the eastern Caribbean on Friday, the National Hurricane Center said.

The storm had maximum sustained winds of 50 mph and was churning through the Atlantic at 24 mph.  Bertha was located about 20 miles northwest of Fort de France, Martinique, the hurricane center’s 5 p.m. advisory said.  It formed on Thursday.

Read more here

Florida Insurance News: Federated National Launching Another Florida Home Insurer, Monarch National
Florida homeowners’ insurer Federated National Holding Co. and the Canadian bank and investment manager C.A. Bancorp Inc. have agreed to form a new Florida-based homeowners insurance carrier to be named Monarch National Insurance Co.

Both FNHC and C.A. Bancorp are each putting up $14 million for a 42 percent ownership stake each in the new venture.

Read more here

Florida Insurance: Homeowners insurance fee may soon expire 
Florida’s so called “Hurricane Tax” on homeowners and drivers is expected to come to an end at the beginning of 2015. Policyholders have been paying an extra fee for their property and auto coverage for some time, but the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation has ordered that insurers put an end to these fees 18 months ahead of when these fees were initially meant to expire.

Insurers have until January 1, 2015, to put these fees to rest.

Read more here

 

Thank you for reading (and sharing). Stay tuned for next week’s weekly review for Florida Insurance Law!

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