Texas insurance agents — want to show your customers that the common perception that homeowners rates in Texas always go up but never come down is false? Look to your agency management system, say educators from the Independent Insurance Agents of Texas.
They say that when studied on a cost per $1,000 of property value, homeowners insurance premiums have fallen fairly steadily since 2002. And the information agents need to show those statistics to their customers is contained in their agency management systems.
IIAT examined Texas Department of Insurance data on homeowners rates from 2002 through 2008 and came up with a statewide average premium cost per thousand dollars of property value for the study years.
“What we did is figured out what the average rate per $1,000 of value is for a homeowners policy in Texas,” explained Jim Gavin, IIAT’s continuing education manager. He added that the resulting figures aren’t “actuarially precise” but can be used as a guide.
“The average rate for all the properties written in 2002 was $8.65 per $1,000,” Gavin said. “That continued to drop all the way through 2008, when the average rate for all homeowners in the state was about $6.35 per $1,000 of value. So if you had written $150,000 in homeowners value in 2002, using the average rate in the state that would have run $1,284. By 2008 that premium was $952.”
Texas homeowners may not be actually experiencing a downward trend in their homeowners premiums, however, because during that same period of time home values have risen substantially in the state.
“The biggest driver of the cost of the homeowners pricing in the last five or six years has been the increased cost in the dwellings,” said Lee Loftis, IIAT’s director of government affairs. “We have flourished in Texas. Everybody knows that until this year we’ve seen a substantial increase in the replacement cost of dwellings so therefore we’re going to have an” increase in the price of homeowners coverage.
Loftis said the group will use this information when the next session of the legislature comes around in 2011. During the 2009 legislative session it was often repeated that Texas has some of the highest premiums in the country and that they need to come down.
Mainstream media and lawmakers relied on data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners to reach that conclusion. It’s a faulty one however, Gavin says, because in fact the NAIC itself acknowledges the data for Texas is skewed.
“The reason for that is that in every other state the ISO HO-3 represents about 80 percent of the market for all homeowners,” Gavin said. “In Texas it only represents about 30 percent. … We have a lot of policies that are written on HO-A+ and other policy forms that don’t get lumped into those averages. So in another state you might be looking at a really representative number for a homeowners premium, it’s not necessarily representative for Texas.”
Paul Martin, IIAT’s director of education, says by the association’s calculations, homeowners rates on a cost per $1,000 of value basis have actually dropped more than 26 percent from 2002 through 2008.
“When you look at the premiums you see an escalation but there are various factors that are driving that,” such as the increased value of homes, Loftis said. Agents’ management systems will sort out the premium cost as percentage of home value, he said. “You can look at the amount of the dwelling and the total premium … it’s a good tool to use.”
Gavin, Martin and Loftis presented the results of their study during the IIAT’s Joe Vincent Management Conference on Jan. 31.
Topics Trends Texas Agencies Pricing Trends Homeowners
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