DAVIE, Fla. – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced on Monday that Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the state-backed insurer of last resort, will give policyholders a rate reduction.
DeSantis made the announcement during a news conference in Davie, where he said that policyholders across all 67 counties can expect to see rate reductions. However, he said policyholders in South Florida will see the highest reductions, with an average rate reduction of 13.4%.
He said the statewide average rate reduction will be 8.7%.
“I think we have the right to insist that Citizens is doing all it can to bring relief to its customers. They weren’t in a position to do that, admittedly, a couple of years ago. We were in a much more difficult environment, but since these reforms have really stabilized things, man, pass on the savings to these folks,” DeSantis said.
RELATED | Citizens Insurance proposes first rate cut in a decade as Florida insurance market stabilizes
In mid-December, Citizens proposed a 2.6% statewide average rate decrease, which experts said signaled growing stability after years of soaring costs.
But DeSantis called the proposal “milquetoast,” saying the decrease was very “modest.”
“[The proposal] didn’t fully capitalize on the momentum in order to deliver wins for policyholders, and that’s really what is all about,” DeSantis said. “So what Mike and his agency did... they have not approved that request the way it was done, and instead, they basically tweaked it to be able to produce historic rate decreases for Citizens Insurance customers in the state of Florida.”
MORE | Citizens Insurance no longer Florida’s largest property insurer after major policy drop
In November, the state-backed insurer said it had shed more than 900,000 policies after peaking at 1.4 million just two years ago, and attributed the drop to an aggressive depopulation program that transfers homeowners from the state-run insurer back into the private market.