Louisiana Citizens Releases Nearly 7K Homeowners Policies

November 20, 2012

Louisiana Insurance Commissioner Jim Donelon announced that Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance Corp. (Citizens) has completed a sixth round of depopulation with 6,877 residential (personal lines) policies being transferred to the private insurance market

With the recent depopulation efforts, Citizens policy count dropped below 100,000 residential policies and to around 105,000 total policies, including commercial.

Citizens is predicted to have dropped to an estimated 3.8 percent homeowners market share, ranking it eighth in market share size in Louisiana. Citizens’ market share was approximately 4.1 percent at the close of 2011. This round of depopulation will reduce its overall policy count from an all-time high of 174,000 policies in February 2008.

The four companies successfully making offers to write homeowners policies currently written by Citizens are Access Home Insurance Co., Centauri Specialty Insurance Co., Lighthouse Property Insurance Corp. and Maison Insurance Co.

Altogether, 29,241 unique policies were requested by these companies and 6,877 policies were authorized to be moved. This is the first time Maison Insurance Co. has participated in the depopulation program.

Citizens’ policyholders who authorized their policies moved to another company have 60 days to decide whether they prefer to remain with Citizens beginning on the assumption date of Dec. 1, 2012. In prior rounds, typically less than two percent of Citizens policyholders opted out and chose to remain with Citizens.

With this sixth round of Citizens depopulation program, Citizens will have reduced its policy count by 74,539, a 43 percent decrease from the all-time high of 174,000 policies. In the five previous rounds of Citizens depopulation, Citizens saw the following reductions in policy counts: round one – 26,595 policies on June 1, 2008, round two – 13,343 policies on Dec. 1, 2008, round three – 3,368 policies on April 1, 2009, round four – 13,466 policies on Dec. 1, 2010 and round five – 10,890 policies on Dec. 1, 2011.

Source: Louisiana Department of Insurance

Topics Louisiana Homeowners

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