[bigh110]

Originally Posted by Spring Hillian

If you have to pay $10k a year for flood insurance it would probably be very cost effective.

when you have to pay $50 to 100,000 to raise a 10 plus year old CBS 1000sq ft house worth $75 to 180000 it is much more cost effective (if not required) to tear down and rebuild up to current code. That is what the county and insurance companies want to see happen. Raising an older house also does nothing to reduce the existing high cost of "mortgage required" windstorm insurance. Building a new structure/home would be the way to reduce those costs. Not sure about where you are located but in the keys (monroe county) if the required costs to remodel/raise the house exceeds 50% of the market value you have to by county law tear down and rebuild the house. Rebuilding required could be from hurricane damage or your desire to add an addition or even jack your house up 2 or 3 feet. They will compute the costs unless you have contract from a state licensed and insured home-building contractor.
If you were used to paying $1500 per year for flood insurance and now all of a sudden you had to pay 10k a year in flood insurance I would suspect that the average American homeowner would not have the money to raise the house or pay for the super high cost of flood insurance. Anyone retired disabled or just living on a fixed income would be S.O.L.
If they did have the money I would think they would pay off the house and drop the insurance and save to self insure their home.
In reality what would happen is they would see their home lost to foreclosure. It's not because they couldn't afford the mortgage payment. It's because they didn't pay the flood/windstorm insurance as required by their mortgage agreement.
The homeowner would not be able to sell the home because no one would want to pay 10k for insurance or $50,000 plus to raise the home. One more family left homeless and unable to live in the home and place of their choosing.

Now you have one more property ripe for a deep pocketed developer to tear down rebuild and make a bundle of money for his company. the county and local taxing authority sees an increase in taxable value and thus increases their revenue. Plus its a win win for the insurance company now as the house would be built to much stricter standards. The windstorm insurance company would receive only slightly less premiums because on the cost to rebuild the new home has doubled versus the one that was torn down. The insurance company also has a severely reduced risk of ever having to pay a claim on the new house because it is built to withstand a category 3 storm. FEMA wins because the chance of a flood ever causing damage is reduced to almost nothing.
The only loser is the original homeowner stuck with a foreclosure judgement against them and no place to call home! Purely speculative but also maybe the sucker that bought the new high dollar house will become a loser when the next super storm comes through 5,10 or 20 years down the road. That is when I expect FEMA to redraw their flood maps and insurance companies to reassess their risk and raise their rates to such exorbitant levels that the whole scenario happens all over again

[Travelassie]

Originally Posted by Spring Hillian

Flood insurance is a federal government program. The flood maps are federal government.

Citizens has not been a problem with me, maybe because I've had no claims for the 7 years Ive been with them. If you have an insurance agent who is willing to work, you can save a lot of $ on your HOI. I have it down to just under $1,000 a year, replacement value on my stuff, 2 pct hurricane deductible, fire, theft, liability. If you dont want to pay high flood insurance bills, dont buy a house in a flood zone.
If you have and old roof on your house, replace it. if you have old single pane windows, replace them.
if your house was built before the building codes changed have your roof reinforced with hurricane straps. People have to take some responsibility for their property instead of hoping the insurance company is going to take care of it all in the event of a disaster. With improvements you get peace of mind as well as an abode that will hold up better in a hurricane, wind storm, etc.

Your experience with Citizen's likely has a lot to do with your location. And if you have a newer house ( built after 2008), it's likely to be looked at more kindly by not only Citizens, but any other insurance company that takes a subsidized (by Citizens) gander at providing homeowner's insurance in this state. My experience (and that of many of my neighbors and friends) has been that one can update their windows, doors, shutters on their old houses to the current codes, add extra straps to the trusses and even provide extra bracing to those trusses, Citizens (and other insurances) looks at the year the house was built, and calculates its rates from that. You may get some mitigation credits for those improvements, but it's also been my experience that Citizens is working just as hard to disappear those credits so they can charge full rates. Our last experience- also reported by many of our neighbors, and even the news media- was the Citizens' sponsored home inspections, where the inspector reported lack of mitigation factors that were actually there. In our case the guy refused to look at the paperwork for our new roof, didn't go up to even look at our roof bracing or truss straps, so I really can't see where he got the information for his report that we had a roof that wasn't built to code of undetermined age, ( he'd have seen the permits, inspection approval, and material details had he looked at the paperwork my husband tried to give him), hurricane straps missing, and no bracing. We filed a complaint and submitted pictures and documents to our homeowner's insurance ( State Farm, sans windstorm) and turns out Citizens only raised the rates for our windstorm policy $1000 instead of the $5000 they said they planned to after they erased all the mitigation from the policy. We had shutters, extra bracing, extra hurricane straps, and a new roof, rebuilt the house after Andrew with reinforced CBS according to code, yet they looked at the house as a 1958 build, assuming pre-Andrew building codes. And we had neighbors with similar stories.

With the location, Citizens and other insurance companies calculate their rates for individual homeowners' policies on the density of the population in the area, assuming that their "exposure" will be much greater in a heavily populated are where there is more infrastructure and more claims, so they charge much more for a given insurance policy in those areas than they would say, in Spring Hill where the population and infrastructure is more sparse. That and some mystery computer model ( according to the Miami Herald, Citizens would never give any details about that model) which states that the southeast Florida coast is likely to be hit with more and stronger storms as time went on, hence justifying exponential rises in their rates. So for a Citizens' windstorm only policy for our house in Miami, with a few mitigation factors, we paid close to $4000 annually, and they added another $1000 to that for 2012- this doesn't count either homeowner's or flood insurance, and we had both. We looked around to see if we could find a policy with another company, but no takers, especially given that we were in an area which was located east of US1 there- not any more vulnerable to either flood or wind than anyone else in Miami.

We built a house on the SW coast- finished it in 2008, and it's got all the mitigation factors, ie, hip roof, bracing, hurricane impact windows, and the fact that it's a new house makes the insurance companies assume it's more hurricane resistant than our house in Miami. That and the fact that it's in an area much less dense than Miami make the rates a lot lower. We had a Citizens homeowner's policy ( coveredwindstorm and homeowners) for two years, and paid approximately $1400 annually for that. We switched to one of the other insurance companies last year, and are paying about $1300 now- an equivalent Citizens' policy would have run us a little over $1500. Even still, a lot less than in Miami.

[Spring Hillian]

I agree, just tear it down and rebuild to code.

Originally Posted by bigh110

when you have to pay $50 to 100,000 to raise a 10 plus year old CBS 1000sq ft house worth $75 to 180000 it is much more cost effective (if not required) to tear down and rebuild up to current code. That is what the county and insurance companies want to see happen. Raising an older house also does nothing to reduce the existing high cost of "mortgage required" windstorm insurance. Building a new structure/home would be the way to reduce those costs. Not sure about where you are located but in the keys (monroe county) if the required costs to remodel/raise the house exceeds 50% of the market value you have to by county law tear down and rebuild the house. Rebuilding required could be from hurricane damage or your desire to add an addition or even jack your house up 2 or 3 feet. They will compute the costs unless you have contract from a state licensed and insured home-building contractor.
If you were used to paying $1500 per year for flood insurance and now all of a sudden you had to pay 10k a year in flood insurance I would suspect that the average American homeowner would not have the money to raise the house or pay for the super high cost of flood insurance. Anyone retired disabled or just living on a fixed income would be S.O.L.
If they did have the money I would think they would pay off the house and drop the insurance and save to self insure their home.
In reality what would happen is they would see their home lost to foreclosure. It's not because they couldn't afford the mortgage payment. It's because they didn't pay the flood/windstorm insurance as required by their mortgage agreement.
The homeowner would not be able to sell the home because no one would want to pay 10k for insurance or $50,000 plus to raise the home. One more family left homeless and unable to live in the home and place of their choosing.

Now you have one more property ripe for a deep pocketed developer to tear down rebuild and make a bundle of money for his company. the county and local taxing authority sees an increase in taxable value and thus increases their revenue. Plus its a win win for the insurance company now as the house would be built to much stricter standards. The windstorm insurance company would receive only slightly less premiums because on the cost to rebuild the new home has doubled versus the one that was torn down. The insurance company also has a severely reduced risk of ever having to pay a claim on the new house because it is built to withstand a category 3 storm. FEMA wins because the chance of a flood ever causing damage is reduced to almost nothing.
The only loser is the original homeowner stuck with a foreclosure judgement against them and no place to call home! Purely speculative but also maybe the sucker that bought the new high dollar house will become a loser when the next super storm comes through 5,10 or 20 years down the road. That is when I expect FEMA to redraw their flood maps and insurance companies to reassess their risk and raise their rates to such exorbitant levels that the whole scenario happens all over again