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Speaking before the U.S. Senate this month, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that a decade or more down the road, homeowners in some parts of the country wont be able to find home insurance.
Both banks and insurance companies are pulling out of coastal areas or areas where there are a lot of fires. So what that is going to mean is that if you fast-forward 10 or 15 years, there are going to be regions of the country where you cant get a mortgage,” Powell told Congress. “There wont be [mortgage] ATMs, there wont be banks [lending mortgages], so it’ll fall on homeowners and residents. But it’ll also fall on state and local governments. Which is what you see happening now, where they’re stepping in, in states where insurance is going away. You’re seeing states step in because they want those areas to remain prosperous.
Hearing that comment made by a professor or analyst is one thing. But hearing it come from the Fed Chair is a bit unnerving for the housing sector. It raises the question: Is there any data out there to suggest which housing markets could be at the highest risk of bank and home insurer pullbacks?
ResiClub did some digging and found a new proprietary analysis made by First Street, which forecastsbased on models estimating property-specific risk and expected climate riskhow much county-level home insurance premiums could shift between 2025 and 2055.
To see where homeowners and investors could be impacted the most, ResiClub visualized First Streets county-level home insurance forecasts. (Please note that forecasting in general isnt ever guaranteedlet alone when a firm is trying to project three whole decades into the future. If you went back and found 30-year forecasts for anything finance-related made in 1995, theyd likely be pretty far off from how things transpired by 2025.)
We asked First Street if their analysis accounted for future inflation as well. These [insurance] values are based on todays dollars with the only adjustment being related to the increase in climate exposure over time, but not to any expectations around inflation or market adjustments. . . . These values are not inflation adjusted in any way, First Street tells ResiClub.
Among the 500 most populous counties, these are the 20 where First Street expects the highest 30-year growth in home insurance premiums:
Orleans Parish, Louisiana: +634%
Miami-Dade County, Florida: +590%
Pinellas County, Florida: +451%
St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana: +351%
Duval County, Florida: +333%
El Dorado County, California: +291%
St. Johns County, Florida: +290%
Placer County, California: +256%
Galveston County, Texas: +251%
Manatee County, Florida: +242%
Volusia County, Florida: +242%
Clay County, Florida: +240%
Palm Beach County, Florida: +195%
Brevard County, Florida: +189%
Broward County, Florida: +182%
Coconino County, Arizona: +173%
Hillsborough County, Florida: +162%
Nueces County, Texas: +158%
Hernando County, Florida: +152%
Lafayette Parish, Louisiana: +149%
The heightened risk of flooding, hurricanes, and tropical storms is ultimately why the First Street model projects the greatest insurance hikes around the Gulf. In fact, 12 of the 20 major U.S. counties expected to see the biggest increase are in Florida.
As ResiClub has previously reported, homeowners in these areas are already experiencing elevated insurance hikes. While the median annual U.S. home insurance premium increased by 33% between the end of 2020 and the end of 2023, it surged more than 80% in many Florida counties.
