©2023 The News Service of Florida
After seeing a large decrease earlier in the month, the state’s Citizens Property Insurance Corp. added more than 5,000 policies during the final week of November.
Citizens had 1,260,777 policies as of Friday, up from 1,255,381 a week earlier, according to numbers on its website.
Citizens has seen massive growth during the past three years as private insurers have dropped customers and raised rates because of financial problems.
But Citizens is using what is known as a “depopulation” program to try to move policies into the private market. Earlier in November, that program led to seven private insurers assuming a total of 92,886 policies from Citizens, which had reached as many as 1.412 million policies this fall.
Many state leaders have long sought to move customers out of Citizens into the private market, at least in part because of the risk that policyholders across the state — including people who do not have Citizens policies — could be forced to help pay claims after a major hurricane or multiple hurricanes.
