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Tampa insurer to acquire 86,000 homeowners policies
Tampa-based insurtech firm Slide Insurance may acquire up to 86,000 Florida homeowners policies from Farmers Insurance.
The acquisition follows Farmers Insurance’s ongoing plan to reduce its coverage in the state.
Farmers agents in Florida will be offered appointments with Slide, with renewals issued by the company beginning February 2024.
“We remain bullish on Florida’s insurance market and believe the market is ripe for an innovator like Slide,” Slide CEO and founder Bruce Lucas said in a prepared statement. “The recent reforms are working, and the Florida insurance market is stabilizing.”
Lucas said the transaction with Farmers will “provide all policyholders a seamless transaction and ongoing coverage.”
He thanked Jimmy Patronis, CFO for the state of Florida, for working with Farmers and Slide on the agreement.
In a prepared statement, Patronis said the transfer “demonstrates that carriers are finding more opportunities in Florida’s insurance environment, after the reforms we enacted. The coverage that Slide will provide will make policyholders’ lives easier – and we’ll continue working to attract more carriers to Florida.”
Slide, founded in 2021, has received thousands of policies from other competing insurers.
In August, Florida regulators allowed Slide to take up to 100,000 policies from Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, the “last resort” taxpayer-subsidized insurance group.
At the time, Slide had 175,000 policies, but the team was not expecting to assume all of the 100,000 additional policies.
“We still have Citizens policies that almost uniformly across the board are underpriced for the market, and that’s going to hamper our ability to take policies out,” Lucas said.
Slide also recently acquired the exclusive renewal rights for over 91,400 Florida homeowners insurance policies from insolvent insurer United Property and Casualty Insurance Company (UPC).
UPC was the ninth property insurer in Florida to go insolvent since 2021, and the largest to do so in 15 years. Since 2017, nearly a dozen property and casualty companies that offered homeowners insurance in Florida have liquidated.
“Florida continues to be considered a high-risk market for insurers, there’s a greater need for competition, especially as 15% of homeowners are uninsured,” Mark Friedlander, Insurance Information Institute (Triple-i) director of corporate communications, previously told the St. Pete Catalyst.
Florida’s catastrophic and severe storms are a leading factor driving insurance companies out of the state and/or reducing certain offerings and increasing rates.
This month, executives at Tampa-based property and casualty insurer Heritage Insurance Holdings Inc. announced it anticipates seeing $40 million in net retained losses in connection with recent natural disaster events.
The insurer, which has financially suffered significant losses over the past year, noted that the expected catastrophe losses during the third quarter are a direct impact of the Lahaina wildfire in Hawaii, one of the four blazes that swept through Maui in early August.
Heritage reported that it also received roughly 12,000 claims connected to Hurricane Idalia, which made landfall earlier this year as a Category 4 hurricane in North Florida, causing damage across parts of the southeastern U.S.
Tom Brown
October 16, 2023at7:42 pm
Acquiring Renewal Rights is not the same as acquiring existing policies. They can pick and choose,reprice or reject as they see fit.
I view Slide as the smartest people in the space. The real story is a year from now when the number of rejected/accepted renewals is published.
Slide has done their homework, the algorithms must indicate the majority of the Farmers business is good risk..
But how many and at what price is the real story.