Florida Office of Insurance Approves Removal of 45,500 Policies from Citizens

The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation has approved the removal of up to 45,000 personal residential policies and 500 commercial residential polices from Citizens Property Insurance Corp. by the following two companies:

• Heritage Property & Casualty Insurance Co. – approved to remove up to 20,000 personal residential policies (17,326 personal lines account and 2,674 coastal account; and up to 500 commercial residential policies (472 commercial lines account and 28 coastal account)
• Mount Beacon Insurance Co. – approved to remove up to 25,000 personal residential, all personal lines account policies

Citizen’s personal lines and commercial lines accounts are mostly non-coastal properties and the coastal account are coastal properties. The take-out periods are June 23, 2015 for personal residential impacting both the personal lines/coastal account policies and June 16, 2015 for commercial residential impacting both the coastal lines/coastal account policies.

This is part of the state’s ongoing depopulation effort to reduce the number of policies in the state-created Citizens and transfer them to the private insurance market.

The total number of policies approved for take-outs in 2015 is up to 582,236. By statute, policyholders may choose to remain covered by Citizens during take-out offers; however, they may be at risk of higher assessments. To date, 110,529 policies have been removed from Citizens this year.

Topics Florida