State regulators say home and auto insurance rates in Florida should dip 1.5% in July, according to a report by MyFoxOrlando.com. Florida residents who pay a private insurance company for coverage on a car, motorcycle, boat or house will see savings of $15 per $1,000 of premium.
Thomas Cotton, owner of Hugh Cotton Insurance in Orlando, tells MyFoxOrlando.com that insurance companies will stop collecting a 1.5% emergency assessment on policies, allowing policy holders to catch a break this summer.
“We’ve been paying that add-on fee for the last several years to make sure Citizens Property Insurance does not go out of business,” explains Cotton. He says Citizens is doing much better now as private companies have been taking policies away from it over the last few years.
“(Citizens) has fewer policies than it had at inception, and now it has adequate layers of reinsurance—which it previously didn’t have,” Cotton tells MyFoxOrlando.com.
If Florida doesn’t experience a major storm this hurricane season, Citizens could drop the number of policies it holds from 600,000 to 450,000 this year, says MyFoxOrlando.com.