June 2025 | Mike Vogel
Smack in the middle of the extraordinary 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons that saw eight hurricanes hit Florida, Paul Adkins and his fellow investors founded a property insurance company in Boca Raton. Their Florida Peninsula Insurance and sister company Edison Insurance, which they founded later, now number 300,000 policy holders, $1.3 billion in annual premiums and 325 Florida employees. It’s gone so well that last year they founded a third, Ovation Home Insurance Exchange.
“It’s a very exciting time in Florida,” Adkins says.
Florida provided a different form of excitement early this decade. The industry blamed a toxic litigation environment for losing more than $1 billion in consecutive years. Homeowners bore the burden with premiums triple the national average. Then the state Legislature in 2022 and 2023 changed state tort law to curb litigation and make it harder for attorneys and contractors to profit on bringing claims. Between those legislative changes and the state’s population growth, “the market has just become much more attractive,” Adkins says.
Lawsuit Alley
Florida, it’s said, is a state of regions. In 2022, Hurricane Ian made landfall in Lee County in one of those regions — Southwest Florida. Ian killed more people in Florida than any hurricane since the 1935 Labor Day hurricane. In property damage, Ian became one of the costliest hurricanes on record.
It also demonstrated that Florida’s a state of regions when it comes to its “different cultures of litigation” — a phrase from Tim Cerio, CEO of subsidized Florida insurer Citizens Property Insurance. Citizens, the state’s insurer of last resort, saw more lawsuits pending over Ian in Miami-Dade County, where Ian didn’t land, than where it did in Southwest Florida’s Lee, Collier, Sarasota and Charlotte counties combined, Cerio told a House panel in February.
State Insurance Commissioner Mike Yaworsky said that in one year, 58% of claims in Miami-Dade wound up in litigation compared to a statewide average of 5.5%. “Consumers pay for that litigated claim,” he says.
Citizens’ “rate need” — how much it would require if it were charging homeowners actuarily sound rates — fell by $900 million in 2024 and $500 million in 2025 because of changes in property insurance tort law that the Legislature made in 2022 and 2023 and the resulting decrease in what it’s had to pay lawyers. “The litigation has decreased dramatically,” Cerio says. “We were hemorrhaging money on paying plaintiffs’ attorney fees as well as our defense costs.
Indeed, Adkins’ Ovation is one of 12 companies to enter Florida since the tort law changes, bringing new capital and competition in rates and services. “We are working hard every day to recruit more insurers to our state,” state insurance com- missioner Mike Yaworsky said in January. “Thanks to recent historic legislative reforms, Florida’s insurance market is stabilizing, and more companies are entering the market.”
Florida relies on newborn insurers like Ovation ever since the major national insurers cut their Florida risk after Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
Many of the Florida-born youngsters — though not Ovation — play an outsized role in taking policies from state-run Citizens Property Insurance, the backstop with subsidized rates for homeowners who can’t get coverage elsewhere. Reducing the number of Floridians insured by Citizens is important because it generally charges actuarially unsound rates. In the event of a catastrophe exceeding its means to pay claims, it makes up the difference first with an extra charge to its customers and then by dinging nearly every insurance customer in Florida, from policyholders with Allstate to Universal and from policies on houses to cars. Non-Citizens customers effectively subsidize Citizens customers’ below-market rates.
Citizens’ policy count is under 1 million this year, the first time in a couple years that’s happened as more insurers have become willing to take on policies. Citizens says more than 428,000 policies have moved off its books onto private carriers since January 2024. That cut Citizens’ exposure by $200 billion. Citizens’ share of the market remains 10% to 12%.
The $35 million in capital to start Ovation came from existing individual investors and private equity investors in Windward Risk Managers, the management company that provides sales, service and claims support for Florida Peninsula and Edison, says Adkins, who is Ovation’s chairman and CEO and holds the same titles at Florida Peninsula and Edison.
Ovation, like several of the newcomer insurers, is a reciprocal. A reciprocal is a form of insurer in which customers are members or subscribers who insure each other under the management of an “attorney- in-fact” — in this case, Adkins’ management company Windward. Premiums go to pay each other’s claims and grow the surplus used to pay claims. Reciprocals offer tax advantages that let them build the surplus faster, Adkins says. Members elect an advisory board but aren’t owners and receive no dividend.
Ovation issued its first policy in August and as of March was up to 22,000 policies and $70 million in premiums. The average replacement cost for structures covered by those policies is $500,000, Adkins says.
Adkins says Windward’s three insurers, Florida Peninsula, Edison and Ovation, are similar in that they specialize in Florida, underwrite carefully and focus on customer service and expense con- trol. Ovation has a particular focus on newer and well-built homes and homes with newer roofs, he says. Some of those, because they’re less of a risk, get a rate discounted by 22%. Which houses qualify for those rates is determined by home inspections.
Meanwhile, Florida Peninsula, Adkins says, is looking to lower rates 8% to 10%. “The reforms of late 2022 and ’23 have worked, and you can see capital flowing into the Florida market to set up new companies and improve the market,” Adkins says.
Ahead, Windward is looking at providing sup- port for insurance lines such as identity theft and flood, he says, and a fourth insurer might be started in five or so years. Meanwhile, he’s looking at offering insurance to small condo buildings and also expanding beyond Florida.
Scorn on a Shingle
The squabble over an inexpensive roof type elevates the difficulty in hardening homes against hurricanes.
An estimated 65% to 75% of Florida homes have asphalt shingle roofs. What should consumers be told about how long they last? That question has roiled the roofing industry in Florida this year.
“We know from years of research that 10 years is a break point for asphalt shingle roofs. And at different wind speeds, we can expect different likelihoods of damage,” says Michael Newman, general counsel for the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety research outfit, based in Richburg, S.C.
At 60 mph winds, there’s a one-in-12 chance of “visible damage” to the roof, IBHS says. The chance climbs to 100% at 100 mph.
That the lifespan of “30-year” shingles is shorter than that of the average car can surprise consumers. “The perception is, it’s going to last 30 years. It’s just not going to last that long. You can literally tear them in half. That’s how brittle they become. It will only last 12 to 13 years if you’re lucky,” says homebuilder and state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia (R-Spring Hill), chair of the Senate banking and insurance committee.
The 30-year verbiage, it turns out, applies to the manufacturers’ warranty against defect — not to longevity or wind survivability. “It’s like labeling a food healthy when it isn’t,” said state Sen. Jonathan Martin (R-Fort Myers), a member of the Senate banking and insurance committee, at a February committee session. In that session, Insurance Commissioner Mike Yaworsky raised the longevity issue, which led to questions in the media about whether Florida would ban asphalt shingles.
It set off a “firestorm,” wrote contractor and industry association technical director Mike Silvers of St. Petersburg-based Silvers Systems in a post for the Florida Roofing and Sheet Metal Contractors Association. “Many consumers are concerned that they may have bought an inferior roof covering that won’t provide protection during a hurricane. I can assure them that this is not the case and that there is no need to panic,” Silvers wrote.
Doing away with the most affordable roofing cover would impact housing affordability. But buyers stretching to afford an existing house might lack the money to re-roof soon after purchasing. Homeowner association design and appearance rules can make switching to a different roof covering type difficult to impossible.
The discussion raises a larger question about how to enable more Floridians financially to harden their homes. The state has devoted $576 million to the My Safe Florida Home program, which funded about 58,000 homeowners statewide to harden their roofs, windows and doors. The state also has started an Elevate Florida program to offer grants for people to make their homes more flood-resilient by elevating, hardening or even selling and tearing down their homes and turning the site over to local government as open space. My Safe Florida Home and similar programs in other states, while “powerful and meaningful,” are “scratching the surface of the need,” Newman says. “We can’t expect that the average American can just dip into their savings and pay $15,000 for a new roof every 10 or so years.”
Newman says discussions around the country are occurring on creating subsidized loan programs for people to upgrade their homes at affordable interest rates — akin to “green banks” and how rooftop solar has been incentivized. Such talks, he says, are at a “pretty nascent stage, to be candid. We’re not as far along as we need.”
Meanwhile, the roofing industry stands against shaming its shingles. Reed Hitchcock, executive vice president of the Asphalt Roofing Manufacturers Association in suburban D.C., says the study that Florida’s insurance regulation office used to challenge the longevity of asphalt shingles was based on older products, “not what’s on the market today.” Says Hitchcock, “It’s very much a misnomer to say shingles fail prematurely.” All roof materials have their fail point, he says. Certainly, plenty of homeowners in South Florida, where concrete tile is more common, have learned that their roof’s useful life is less than half the 50 years cited on contractor websites. (The tiles last, the underlayment doesn’t, and both end up being thrown away.)
Authorities differ on whether asphalt shingles perform any worse in Florida than elsewhere, with some saying the heat and sun shorten their useful life while others say their performance is similar in other states. Fortunately, Florida requires the roof deck under shingles, tiles, metal or other material to be sealed so that if the covering fails, water still faces a sealed barrier before ruining a home.
Hitchcock says the industry is always working on improving shingle performance. It’s proposing building code changes to install shingles in ways to enhance performance, he says. Metal roofs, which were favorably compared to asphalt for performance at the Senate committee session, actually had the worst performance at certain wind speeds in the study presented, he noted. And when metal roofs fail, they fail in a big way. Consumers, Hitchcock said, “should have the opportunity to buy the roof that best suits their needs.” Every home inspection for a home sale should include a roof inspection, he says.
One outcome of the debate is more transparency about asphalt shingle longevity that will allow consumers to balance useful life, insurance costs, performance and price, says Leslie Chapman-Henderson, CEO of home- hardening nonprofit Federal Alliance for Safe Homes in Tallahassee.
“Should we ban the use of shingles? I don’t think we’re ready for that yet, and we may not need to as the home construction and insurance marketplace are figuring it out and can drive the required change,” she says. “However, we need more transparent labeling of shingles that discloses the expected lifetime of use, not just warranty information. This will leave the most affordable option in place for those without the means to invest in an admittedly superior, stronger roof like metal.”
Says IBHS’ Newman, “There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with a roof that only lasts for 10 years, but consumers need to be aware, and they need to be planning so that as their roof reaches an age where it’s outlived its useful life, they are ready to replace it.”
The Newcomers
- Mangrove Property Insurance Co.
- ASI Select Insurance Corp.
- Trident Reciprocal Exchange
- Ovation Home Insurance Exchange
- Manatee Insurance Exchange
- Condo Owners Reciprocal Exchange
- Orange Insurance Exchange
- Orion180 Select Insurance Co.
- Orion180 Insurance Co.
- Mainsail Insurance Co.
- Tailrow Insurance Exchange
- Apex Star Reciprocal Exchange