Same with Farmers, no significant rate premium increases in 5 years or more.
Mine went up right around 1400 this year. Very happy I didn’t get dropped though. My house is literally on the line between high and low risk severity. I was told that played a significant factor in a “small” rate jump and the reason we have not got dumped was because we have been with Farmers for close to 15 years residential and 20+ Auto/life.
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Another tactic, this almost happened to me with Farmers, received letterhead from them, that was very thin without the bold red marking as important documents always have. I waited to open it of course, for a few weeks…. Because of my nature.(My Fault!) If insurance needs money, it comes in Bold unmistakable letterhead! Haha, When I finally got around to opening it and they needed updated photos of my residence emailed to my agent. There was small writing at the bottom, informing me that I will be dropped for not submitting updated photos by the date, which was actually that week. I agree it seems there doing everything they can to cancel policies without acting like it’s their fault. Open your mail!
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Started out with Allstate for 24 years. A bundle package living in Twain Harte was 2500.00 there about. Sold our house in Twain Harte moved to Sonora and Allstate(Good Hands Folks) would not insurance us in Sonora. Now we have State Farm, first year was 5000.00 and the second year 7000.00. Fun times all around. I’m wonder if there will be a third year, price hike, or a cancel your policy letter!
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For your reading pleasure(Ludicrous).
https://www.mymotherlode.com/news/local/3328223/state-farm-declines-to-renew-72000-california-policies.html
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We’ve been Farm Bureau members forever and as such had CalFarm insurance home,auto and liability.
Farm Bureau sold to Nation Wide and now Farm Bureau has forgotten about us.
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We had a case here in Ventura Co where the homeowner was told to get the IBHS wildfire prepared home certification. They spent 8K doing work. Got approved then got their renewal : $8300. They were paying only 2300. Do the math. 300+% increase even with mitigation measure done.
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Things are going totally sideways in just about everything. It’s either going to have to give or brake!
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My grandparents had alstate for the cabin pre 2010, they got a letter saying their policy was canceled because of we failed a fire inspection with a list of days they were on the property in February…coincidentally I was there on those days and there was 2 feet of snow on the ground. There were no other tracks but mine and some wildlife including big cat.
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I think my dreams of a mountain small retreat are over. @Ehoss84 I was hoping for something in Mountain Center/GV…I dont think that is gonna happen.
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Sorry to hear that AJ. You can still do it, will just have to be outside of California.
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Yeah it just doesnt sound realistic with insurance premiums like this especially if they paint with such a broad stroke. You know that area well down in the valley with wide paved roads, hydrants, flat lots with plenty of set back and manicured properties but it sounds like none of that really matters to the insurance industry.
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I think once rates go high enough 
there will be an insurance company that will hire professional assessors to go actually look at properties, make Educated risk assessments.
Kinda like retired prevention officers work for the insurance industry for fraud investigation.
All about the risk pool.
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Don’t forget the seven figure price tags, high 6’s for sure. It was pretty when I lived there 30 years ago.
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Would be a great side job for a lot of retired CDF/Cal Fire employees. Most of us did tons of inspection in the field. Both on the A&B side.
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Absolutely
Anyone who has done a LE-100 inspection, issued a LE-38A or dealt with the new law requiring an inspection would be well training and experienced. Just a matter of an internal insurance carrier policies and procedures.
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My perception is that pretty much anyone with a bit of experience could develop more useful information than what the insurance companies are getting. Last spring, State Farm scheduled an inspection of our place in AEU (not our primary residence) at a time when we weren’t there. The inspector submitted a report and photos were only about our detached garage. Apparently, he never noticed the house, which is about 100 feet down a paved walkway, although the house is visible in the background of the garage photos.
How can they make an informed decision on the basis of that kind of information?
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LOL, they were either Lazy or Clueless if not both.
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“Well, actually, I’m not really from here.”
Insurance seems to be all about modelling risk, right? Anecdotal info, at best, maybe, but we should know by now that the ‘data-driven’ economy is full of arbitrary and often entirely theoretical data points and relationships between them (vertices and edges in the lingo of datagraphs) that try to measure real things, but not directly; because of privacy laws, and also things that are difficult to instrumentalize, and so the data-point in the graph is actually an attempt to measure the thing by its effect upon an effect, and it’s very easy to get it wrong, or fail to document and report just how sketchy the data point, and/or its relationship to other data points, is. It should not be surprising that the insurance industry suffers from this.
In plain language, data models, in general, often fail to live up to their hype, though we are repeatedly bombarded by their notable successes and the never-ending, ongoing, but inconclusive, “AI Conference”.
Why should one bother to hire actual people to do time-consuming, detailed and accurate inspection and slow, reasoned weighing of factors, when the datagraph can spit out an answer in seconds or minutes? Because of this. The algorithm is getting it wrong.
I agree that the modeling/science still just isn’t very reliable. I’ve been reviewing the performance of some of the newer flavors of spread models (which are still based on 1970s Rothermel equations…) during major fires since 2020 and the fires have regularly/dramatically exceeded the model projections. Even with good defensible space, we’ve seen catastrophic losses. Many of the homes lost in Paradise had great D-space. Coffee Park was a modern subdivision far from any major brush or forest vegetation.
One of the problems with our perception of how defensible space operates is we generally still assume that suppression resources will be on site. This hasn’t been the case during our worst WUI disasters. During the worst parts of both the Carr and Camp Fires, firefighters were focused on rescues and evacuations and very little firefighting got done. Many of the homes burned in Paradise were taken out by low-intensity pine needle and oak litter fires or ember cast into gutters, not by walls of flame from heavy brush. On a ‘normal day’ many could have been saved by a couple firefighters with a rake. When the system breaks down, ‘defensible’ really needs to mean ‘stand-alone’.
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