If it feels like homeowners’ insurance premiums have gone through the roof, and in some cases look more like mortgage payments, it's probably not your imagination. Data obtained by NBC 5 Investigates reveals just how dramatically rates are rising across Texas and what homeowners might be able to do to lower their premiums.
Destructive weather is part of living in North Texas. Melinda Clifton has seen hail damage her roof three times in two decades. After each storm, homeowners' insurance paid her claims to replace it. But not long after her most recent claim, she received a bill that hit like a hurricane.
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Last year, Clifton said her annual homeowner's policy cost $2,600. The following year, she said the cost more than tripled to $8,800.
"It's an unimaginable number," Clifton said. "I don't understand it."
Clifton's policy is paid through her home escrow account, meaning the monthly insurance payments are added to her mortgage payment. Clifton said her payments went up by hundreds of dollars per month, and she questioned whether she could afford to stay in her home.
"I've thought, 'Am I going to have to sell my home? The home I raised my children in,'" Clifton said.
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Clifton is not the only homeowner stunned by sky-high rate increases. NBC 5 Investigates analyzed data from the Texas Department of Insurance (TDI) and discovered that insurance companies asked the state to approve double-digit rate increases more than 150 times in 2023. So far this year, they've asked for 74 more double-digit increases, with one company asking for an increase of 73%.
The data NBC 5 Investigates obtained also showed that the number of double-digit rate increases requested in Texas has increased by 560% since 2014.
Ware Wendell is the executive director of Texas Watch, a nonpartisan citizen-based advocacy organization that works to lower rates and ensure that insurance companies and other businesses operating in the state are accountable to customers.
Wendell said Texans can't continue to absorb double-digit increases in their premiums, and they're eventually going to hit the housing market.
"If these rates keep skyrocketing like this, we're going to see a big impact all across the housing market," Wendell said. "We are in the midst of an insurance crisis in the state of Texas. And actually, all across the country, insurance companies are jacking up rates through the roof."
Insurance companies insist the increases are necessary to survive in Texas, which has seen more billion-dollar weather disasters than any other state in recent decades. According to research from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, since 1980, there have been 179 climate-related disaster events in Texas, with losses totaling more than $1 billion.
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Even an afternoon hailstorm can cause $1 billion in insurance losses.
"It's reality. And it is the reality of the risk and loss," said Beaman Floyd, a lobbyist representing some of the state's biggest insurance companies and director of the Texas Coalition for Affordable Insurance Solutions (TCAIS), which advocates for state policy changes on behalf of a group of several large insurers.
Floyd said the recent increase in premiums is largely due largely to the massive losses companies have faced.
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