As Louisiana’s insurance crisis persists, hurricane season is far from over

NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) – Hurricane Idalia made landfall in Florida as a powerful Cat 3 in Florida, and there is still plenty of hurricane season to go. Still, Louisiana’s property insurance market remains in a crisis.

Homeowners are still paying much higher premiums after Hurricane Ida slammed Louisiana in 2021 and for many property owners, getting new policies that are affordable remains a serious challenge.

Dan Burghardt owns Dan Burghardt Insurance.

“It’s very shaky.” Said Burghardt. “Any time a hurricane hits any part of our Gulf Coast, we’re all going to be impacted. The reinsurance market covers the entire Gulf Coast.”

Ross Fayard owns Amstate Insurance in Slidell.

“The only thing I can say is be prepared; the prices, let’s just use St. Tammany, for example, let’s just use on average, the premiums were $2,000 , now a $250,000 house in St. Tammany Parish is roughly $6,000 to $7,000 for a premium, so people are in a panic, they really are,” said Fayard.

Earlier this year, the Louisiana state government provided millions in grants to insurers to incentivize them to write additional wind and hail policies after some insurers failed following Hurricanes Ida and others fled the state.

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However, residents and brokers are not seeing new policies being written at the level they expected, especially in Orleans, Jefferson and St. Tammany Parishes.

“Naturally these carriers that got incentives were looking at hurricane season because the timing of this was right before hurricane season,” said Burghardt. “Companies decided that they would take the highest risk areas and postpone underwriting suicide, so to speak. Why write in areas that are more riskier, so what they doing is just waiting until after hurricane season.”

Fayard says property owners flood his agency with questions about the lack of available coverage.

“We get phones all the time saying, we hard on the news or we hard on social media that all these companies are writing, they say they’re participating in an incentive program,” said Fayard. We’re in the same state that we were back then.”

Burghardt added, “Some companies have already reached capacity in Jefferson and Orleans, so the incentive money would give them the incentive to write a little bit more.”

Fayard says even before Idalia, Hurricane Ian slammed parts of Florida last year, impacting Louisiana’s insurance landscape.

“That was a severe storm, even though we weren’t impacted physically in Louisiana were impacted financially because that definitely put a big dent in reinsurance,” Fayard said.

And insurance brokers say companies that are writing new policies in south Louisiana are being more selective. They say they are more inclined to write coverage on properties that have new roofs.

“So, the better the condition, the more the updates probably the better chance we’ll be able to get them a decent rate right now. It’s not going to be, you know, as it used to be two, three years ago but it’s at least available,” said Burghardt.

The Louisiana Department of Insurance said through the end of May some 17,000 new policies had been written by insurers who received state grants. A spokesperson for the department said updated information is expected later this week.

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