Travelers Introduces New Wind Credit for Fortified Homes in Texas

Travelers Insurance announced it is introducing a wind credit for fortified homes in Texas that meet established standards designed to resist the impacts of tropical storm and hurricane winds.

Travelers currently offers similar credits in Alabama and Mississippi.

“Homes built to meet these stringent standards are better able to withstand severe weather, saving lives and reducing property losses, and we want to promote and raise awareness of these smarter building practices,” said Greg Toczydlowski, president of Personal Insurance for Travelers. “We hope this initiative and meaningful wind credit will encourage homeowners, builders and building officials to adopt these disaster resistant standards.”

The announcement was made at a hurricane preparedness symposium sponsored by the Travelers Institute, the Insurance Institute for Building and Home Safety (IBHS) and Ceres, who joined to convene business, government and community leaders to identify solutions for protecting and insuring the increasingly densely populated regions along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

The Travelers Institute has released a report with key findings from its two year symposium series on the coastal insurance crisis. The report makes several recommendations, many of which reflect the principles within the Travelers Coastal Wind Zone Plan, the company’s proposal for a private, market-based solution without federal subsidies. They include:

• A stable and consistent regulatory environment, with a uniform set of rules applied to named storm wind coverage for coastal zones from Texas to Maine.
• Transparency in calculating insurance premiums, with risk-based, actuarially sound rates using approved standards and wind risk models, and a rating calculation mechanism to be applied if models and actual experience become misaligned over time.
• Federal reinsurance mechanism for extreme events (such as hurricanes causing losses several times greater than those arising out of Hurricane Katrina), with the reinsurance made available to insurers at cost so there would be no taxpayer subsidy, and the savings passed directly to customers.
• Encouraging stronger homes through federal guidelines for appropriate building codes and land use planning, with incentives for state and local adoption, plus enhanced construction technology and meaningful premium credits for customers who make their homes less vulnerable to wind damage.

The complete report, which includes the Travelers Coastal Wind Zone Plan, is available at www.travelersinstitute.org.

Source: Travelers

Topics Texas Homeowners Hurricane