[iask]

I think the elephant in the room is fraudulent claims. Majority of the claims filed is related to over-priced contractors. Pick any city, pick any house - old, new, big, small, tiny - the average roof replacement is 4x-5x the cost!

I know of multiple cases where the adjusters send in claims that are 50% to 90% of the actual repair cost. This is the REAL problem. Not hurricanes. It’s the fucking fraud.

I think the only option to combat this is to give home owners the right to fix things like roof themselves…why do I need a city permit, why do I need a fraudulent contractor permitted ONLY by the city (I don’t want the city looking out for me…that’s always their BS argument…leave that to me). I should be able to shop the supplies myself.

Here’s another exercise - pick any city in FL - try to buy roofing materials yourself.

The point is - Fraud is the biggest problem with homeowners insurance in the state of FL.

[quickthrowman]

> why do I need a city permit, why do I need a fraudulent contractor permitted ONLY by the city (I don’t want the city looking out for me…that’s always their BS argument…leave that to me). I should be able to shop the supplies myself.

You are not the only person that will own the house you live in, that’s essentially what permits and regulations are for, to ensure the next owner isn’t saddled with a stupid decision made by the previous homeowner. Roof inspections are particularly important in places with snow load or hurricane force winds.

Roof claims are prorated, if your previous roof was rated for 30 years and installed 15 years ago, you get half of the replacement cost paid.

If you don’t like it you can pay off your house and self-insure your residence. If you don’t like cities, go buy land and build a house in an unincorporated area, there are places that completely lack any local building code enforcement.

[iask]

You are not the only person that will own the house you live in, that’s essentially what permits and regulations are for, to ensure the next owner isn’t saddled with a stupid decision made by the previous homeowner. Roof inspections are particularly important in places with snow load or hurricane force winds.

That’s what home inspectors are for at the time of purchase. And even if I choose to replace the roof myself - the city is free to inspect according to their ordinances. What I disagree with is that you MUST use their approved contractors.

And the prorated nonsense is simply mathematical fraud.

[quickthrowman]

> What I disagree with is that you MUST use their approved contractors.

Who is ‘they’, the city or the insurer? The state I live in does not have approved contractors by jurisdiction, if you have a state license and any city specific licensing, you can pull a permit in that jurisdiction. Perhaps Florida is different.

If the contractors are mandated by the insurer, the fault lies with state law. In my state, insurers must use OEM replacement parts for car insurance repairs if the customer wants them to, this is due to state law. Likewise, my car insurer has recommended repair facilities, but state law forces them to allow me to choose where I have my car repaired under an insurance claim.

It’s understandable why the insurer wants only approved contractors (helps control costs), but your state could force the insurer to allow any contractor to do a repair covered by insurance by passing legislation. Insurance rules are almost entirely state specific, so blame your state government if you’re unhappy with the terms of your insurance policies.

[SR2Z]

> The state I live in does not have approved contractors by jurisdiction, if you have a state license and any city specific licensing

Unless I'm having a stroke, aren't counties/cities specific jurisdictions within a state?

Licensing IS a set of approved contractors, and we would be lying to each other if we pretended that state licensing requirements are always entirely aboveboard. Where I live, the city is notorious for being captured by local unions and setting (ludicrously high) minimum wages for tradesmen to guarantee they remain competitive.

[quickthrowman]

> Licensing IS a set of approved contractors, and we would be lying to each other if we pretended that state licensing requirements are always entirely aboveboard.

My employer holds contractor licenses in all 50 states. Please be specific about which things are not above board with regards to contractor licensing instead of allusion.

> Where I live, the city is notorious for being captured by local unions and setting (ludicrously high) minimum wages for tradesmen to guarantee they remain competitive.

Nobody is forcing you to live where you do. Major cities (sometimes states) do sometimes have rules about prevailing wages on publicly funded projects or city owned properties but I’ve never heard of forcing prevailing wages on private projects. If you have an example, I’d like to see.

Certain trade unions have been better about preventing non-union competition than others, pipefitters and sheet metal workers in particular, but I’m not aware of a jurisdiction that forces the use of union labor. If there is, I’d be curious to know what it is. Electricians are almost all union labor in Chicago due to the city’s electrical code requiring conduit and banning romex in residential construction.

By the way, I’m a construction project manager and deal with these things every single day.

[SR2Z]

> My employer holds contractor licenses in all 50 states. Please be specific about which things are not above board with regards to contractor licensing instead of allusion.

I live in SF. Prevailing wage laws and political opposition by unions to non-union projects are massive problems here, both for public and private projects. Our building codes are so crufty that it is expected that you will fork out for a private "permitting consultant" who's well-connected and if you don't your project will not be approved.

Yes, you are correct that it can strictly only be forced on public projects! When the city requires as much political bullshit as SF does, union support tends to be required for private projects to get approval. If you'd like, I can find some specific examples - they're not uncommon.

Building codes also frequently require "traditional" windows, ban modular construction, and I'm sure other things that make very little sense to anyone but the workers getting paid.

> Electricians are almost all union labor in Chicago due to the city’s electrical code requiring conduit and banning romex in residential construction.

This is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about: when a jurisdiction enforces significantly stricter laws than are used in other places. Wiring a single family house is not more dangerous in Chicago than anywhere else, and you've already told me that this requirement tends to favor union labor.

Sure, there is an actual safety case here - but I am confident that this question of who this policy benefits was definitely considered before enacting it.

> Nobody is forcing you to live where you do.

This is a crazy take. Should I move because local construction workers are politically well-connected?

> By the way, I’m a construction project manager and deal with these things every single day.

I am not surprised! You clearly know a lot more than me on the issue, but to some extent this is like a banker swearing to me that monthly account fees are necessary.

[jfengel]

That seems impossible. I have been assured that only government pays fraudulent claims. The invisible hand ensures that corporations will root out fraud.

[loeg]

Florida significantly reformed insurance/claims in 2023 to reduce fraud. Senate bill 2A prevents assigning insurance claim benefits to 3rd parties, which was a significant source of insurance fraud.

[cudgy]

Are you saying that the insurance companies are paying 4 to 5 times cost to repair roof, but then at the same time saying that adjusters are only paying out 50 to 90% of the actual cost?

That doesn’t make sense. The former which you were claiming is fraud seems unlikely to be approved by an insurance company. The cost to replace roofs is well known. Why would they pay 4 to 5 times the amount? The latter point regarding adjusters only paying 50-90% of the actual cost sounds more like the real insurance companies that I’ve ever dealt with.

Furthermore, building permits and requiring licensed contractors to repair the roof and replace the roof are not only to protect you, but to protect any poor person that comes to buy your home from having to deal with shoddy repairs from well-meaning homeowners.

[mlinhares]

The elephant in the room is that hurricane insurance shouldn’t be a for profit business because no business can survive multiple cities being destroyed by a hurricane, this money should have been driven to a state fund that pays out when disaster strikes and the private insurance business should insure only the usual stuff.

[1123581321]

Public home insurance with unlimited risk appetite would create a hazard as too many people would move and build carelessly. For public health and financial reasons, the state of Florida shouldn’t encourage this.

Reinsurance already covers excess claims before an insurer exits the market. There is no systemic risk from an insurance confidence crisis as there was in banking pre-FDIC.

Any suggestion to compensate with additional burden on homeowners (“just charge them more”, “require stricter building codes”) can be handled by existing insurance regulation.

[mlinhares]

Oh yeah, because the "collect hurricane insurance, spend all the money, go bankrupt" pipeline has worked wonders in Florida.

The government already foots the bill when insurance doesn't cover the costs (which is every single time here in Florida) and when there is no insurer anymore Citizens Insurance (the government plan) also covers it.

Homeowners insurance wasn't made for natural disasters and the fact we continue to make it so only fills the purses of the fraudsters running the scams. The moment there is no more free money for these insurers in Florida the market will change overnight.

[1123581321]

Your tone suggests strong disagreement but I’m not seeing much other than what is the difference between a one-time backstop by public money prior to an insurer exiting the market, and an ongoing public insurer with unlimited obligations.

The question, as you put it, is how and where Floridians should be encouraged to build since home insurance doesn’t work in major disasters.

[mlinhares]

The issue is that if it becomes a government fund the insurers can't spend the money in the year when we didn't have destructive hurricanes, which is what they usually do.

The government would keep the money in the fund indefinitely until it was needed and would't be spending it.

[1123581321]

That is not something that's happening; surplus is tightly regulated now in Florida. Plus, reinsurers will not let insurers steal money that's meant to cover losses. It's cheaper for Florida to tweak the dials of surplus regulation than to become an insurance company because it would encourage loss-making behavior.

[JumpCrisscross]

> no business can survive multiple cities being destroyed by a hurricane

Then stop letting multiple cities be destroyed by a hurricane. We know how to engineer hurricane defences and build hurricane-proof structures [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane-proof_building

[whimsicalism]

democracies generally will not be able to insure at a sufficient level. i'm opposed to having the government force me to subsidize others poor choice of environ. if someone wants to live in a fire-prone or hurricane-prone area, that is their choice and they should be exposed to the true cost of insuring themselves and hopefully this will cause people to move somewhere safer instead or make changes (like a sturdier home, clearing brush, etc.) that reduce their rates.

[jghn]

It's not an elephant in the room. The fact that half of the populace is too brainwashed and/or stupid to understand truths like this is the elephant in the room.