High Prices Meet High Demand In Houston, ‘The Most Interesting Condo Market...

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by VivaLFuego

Have you looked at Expected Annual Loss ratings for different areas?
https://hazards.fema.gov/nri/map

To take a quick example, the expect annual loss due to natural hazards in Albany Co, NY is $1 per $7,200 of building value.
In Harris Co, TX the expected annual loss is $1 per $421.55 of building value.

If your insurance is 10 times more than your brothers' in upstate NY, you might still be getting a decent deal, and you're disappointed that you're no longer getting a great deal.

Alternatively, if the risk models aren't sufficiently taking into account highly local factors around the drainage sheds, it sounds like a business opportunity for insurers to target the allegedly low-risk Houston properties with competitive rates to the extent permitted by law. Of course, this will result in adverse selection of any remaining risk pools, making the other properties even less insurable.

This is great, I just mapped out the census block data for the 11 biggest CSA's in terms of expected annual building loss rate (I think... I'm plotting 1/ALR_VALB from the shapefiles). Not sure why there's such county variation (is there an assumption that e.g. DC is better protected by policy? Maybe something weird about how building value is computed in DC...).