Citizens Property Insurance passes important milestone in depopulation program

Reporter: Camila Pereira Writer: Carolina Guzman
Published: Updated:

This is a sign our insurance crisis in Florida is recovering. Citizens Property Insurance, designed to be Floridians’ last-resort insurer, is shrinking.

This comes after Citizens Property Insurance took action and started shifting policies to private insurers.

Homeowners could save a whole lot of money because if Citizens Property Insurance didn’t somehow get the money to pay for all those claims, policyholders throughout the state could have had to pay what are known as “assessments” to cover the costs.

So now that they’ve met their goal, the number of Floridians now insured by Citizens Property Insurance is below a million as of November and is expected to keep dropping to 907,000 by the end of the year.

It will lower taxpayer exposure from any major or multiple hurricanes that hit our area like we saw this year with hurricanes Helene and Milton.

The president of Citizens Property Insurance, Tim Cerio, spoke before the state-backed insurer’s board of directors on Wednesday.

He told them this would help strengthen the private insurance market.

“The primary reason that we protect our surplus is so that we can pay out our policyholders’ claims when disaster strikes. That is what we are doing, and that is what we are supposed to do. We also work to maximize surplus so that Floridians who are not Citizens customers will not face an assessment from Citizens because we are unable to pay our claims,” said Cerio, President of Citizens Property Insurance.

As we see policies being shifted out of Citizens to private insurers, we may start to see more private insurance companies, like Progressive, Farmers and AAA, come back to our market; many of those left the market, dropped customers or stopped writing new policies.

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