New Insurer Enters Florida Market

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A new homeowner insurance company has been approved to offer coverage, and its CEO says that South Florida looks like “a very good place to write business.”

While St. Petersburg-based Patriot Select Property and Casualty has been organizing for a year and a half, it took until April 14 to show the Office of Insurance Regulation that it had raised the required $30 million capital investment, CEO John Rollins said in an interview.

“We couldn’t launch until we had money in the bank,” he said. “So now we’re facing kind of a huge fire drill to try to accelerate everything we were hoping to do.”

That includes spreading the word among insurance agents, purchasing reinsurance by the start of hurricane season, and participating in the depopulation program of state-owned Citizens Property Insurance Corp. by offering to take out 39,500 Citizens policies by June 17, Rollins said. Of those, the company expects to transfer 24,000 policies.

While the company expects most of its takeout requests to be concentrated in Pinellas, Hillsborough, Polk, Orange and Brevard counties, it also sees desirable policies in Palm Beach and Broward counties, as well as in the Panhandle area, he said.

Hundreds of thousands of South Florida homeowners are covered by Citizens, the so-called “insurer of last resort,” because they can’t find affordable insurance from any private-market carrier. Citizens’ depopulation program is intended to bring as many policies as possible back into the private market, Citizens officials have said.

Patriot Select also hopes to attract about 7,000 “voluntary” policies through insurance agents during 2025, Rollins said, adding some of those policies will be open to homeowners in the tri-county region as well.

South Florida policies have become more attractive to insurers because legal reforms enacted in 2022 and 2023 have reduced the number of insurance lawsuits filed in the region, he said.

Today, what Rollins calls the “litigation environment” in South Florida looks far different compared to the years between 2013 and 2019, when attorneys and plumbing contractors filed large numbers of lawsuits after convincing homeowners to sign over their claims benefits, he said. The reforms turned South Florida, once “a massively over-litigated part of the state,” into “more or less the mainstream of the other 49 states,” Rollins said.

“Now you’re taking a look at tri-county and you’re seeing mostly good risks, newer homes, homes that are maintained well by good people,” Rollins said. “And yet, the premiums are still pretty high because of the hurricane risk. And if you feel like you’re not going to be slammed with litigated claims in those areas, then it’s a very good place to write business.”

While the company is limiting its Citizens takeouts to homes no more than 45 years old that would require replacement coverage of $250,000 and above, Rollins said that in the open, voluntary market, “we would evaluate each application as it comes in.”

The insurance ratings firm Demotech has assigned Patriot Select a financial stability rating of A, Exceptional, affirming that the company is maintaining a surplus at an acceptable level.

Mark Friedlander, senior director of media relations for the industry funded Insurance Information Institute, said that Patriot Select’s entry into Florida’s insurance market — the 13th such entry by a new company since the reforms were enacted — “shows that carriers are confident they can write profitable business in Florida.”

“Patriot Select has a strong management team and is well capitalized (nearly $30 million in capital) to begin operations,” Friedlander said by email.

Rollins, with more than 30 years of Florida insurance experience, is best known as chief risk officer at Citizens Insurance before leaving the company in 2017. Prior to that, he was appointed to the company’s board of directors.

Kelly Booten worked at Citizens for nearly 20 years, starting as an IT manager and working her way up to chief operation officer before retiring to accept the same position at Patriot Select, Rollins said.

Jeff Brandes, a former state senator who was outspoken on insurance issues, is Patriot Select’s chairman.

Rollins said that Patriot Select plans to set itself apart from other insurers by responding quickly to claims and working with contractors to make repairs. “We want to turn around claims with a cycle time that significantly shorter than anything in the industry right now,” he said.

Rapid service will minimize the temptation of policyholders to bring “a middleman into the claims process,” he said.

After all, he added, “the oldest rule in actuarial science is a stale claim becomes an expensive claim.”

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