(02-06-2020 01:45 PM)BraveKnight Wrote: (02-06-2020 01:37 PM)oliveandblue Wrote: I love my private school. Let's see what happens with other Florida schools.
FAU was going to do a $5M deal with the same company for their basketball arena naming rights, and that was shut down too.
That company is making a lot of money by driving up the prices of homeowners insurance.
We believe the [one-way attorney fee statute] provides an extraordinary incentive for people to get into a dispute with the insurance company and inflate the claim so the company has to pay attorney fees,” said Florida Insurance Commissioner David Altmaier at the Feb. 7 Florida Cabinet meeting.
The industry hopes this will be the year that the Florida Legislature addresses the problem.
AOB is such a hot topic in Florida right now that it dominated discussions on almost every panel and between attendees of the Florida Chamber of Commerce’s Florida Insurance Summit held Feb. 1-3 in Miami. A glance at the numbers from various Florida sources tells the story of why:
Frequency of water claims rose 46 percent and severity increased 28 percent between 2010 and 2015 (OIR 2015 Data Call)
AOB property insurance claims totaled 28,000 in 2016, up from 843 in 2010 and 405 in 2006 (Florida CFO Jeff Atwater)
Florida’s Citizens saw a 30 percent increase in new lawsuits filed against the insurer between January and November 2016 (Citizens)
50 percent of Citizens’ water-related claims resulted in litigation in 2016, up from 15 percent in 2011 (Citizens)
As of October 2016, Citizens had 9,306 litigated claims pending and continues to receive an average of approximately 850 new claims per month (average of approximately 980 per month from August to October)
In South Florida, the average AOB claim costs more than $32,000, nearly triple the average of non-AOB claims (Florida Consumer Protection Coalition)
Non-cat water loss claims accompanied by an AOB are increasingly coming to insurance companies in the form of a lawsuit before the insurer has even seen the claim. Data from Citizens found that 76 percent of water loss claims in 2016 were submitted to the company in the form of a lawsuit, up from the 2.5 percent of litigated water claims in 2012.
Citizens CEO and Executive Director Barry Gilway said the average water damage claim is received by Citizens 50 days after the date of loss.
“We are not getting these lawsuits from the insured,” he said. “In many of those cases we have never even seen the claim, we’ve never had an opportunity to adjust it or received a statement of loss… it’s just ‘here is a lawsuit and a bill for $30,000.'”
National homeowners carriers have also seen a significant rise in the abuse in Florida.
“Assignment of benefits started out as a convenience for Florida residents, allowing them to sign over the benefits of their property insurance policy to a vendor to facilitate direct payment for repairs,” said State Farm Florida Spokesperson Michal Brower. “However, it has become a vehicle for fraud and claim build-up by some vendors escalating the scope and cost of remediation or repairs beyond actual damage to the home.”
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UCF’s $35M stadium naming rights deal shut down by legislature
