Florida Homeowners are Receiving the Shock of Their Lives!

Florida homeowners are receiving the shock of their lives here over the last two months for two different incidents. In today's video, folks, we're going to discuss this situation and how you can avoid these crazy financial disasters if you're thinking about moving here to the state of Florida, if you currently live here. What's happening, folks? My name is Brent. I've lived here in the state of Florida for 40 years now. Couldn't see myself living anywhere else, although the state of Florida, as I always say, is not without its problems, and that's what we do here on the channel. We are going to discuss these issues and how we can navigate these issues together to make your transition as smooth as possible. Look at this beautiful day right here in Pensacola. That is Pensacola Bay right there, folks. I'm on lunch break making a little video. I work right here in Pensacola on several businesses. I'm a real estate agent along the panhandle here, and I also own an outdoor company where I travel around the state of Florida doing some fishing and showcasing Florida in a positive light because I do think there are a lot of great things about Florida. Now, let's check out this first incident. Can you imagine this? You're living in Florida. You're diligently paying your premium every year, your insurance premium. You get hit with a major storm, and you're one of the lucky ones that actually get a check from that insurance company. You're all excited. We got this situation solved. We got this problem solved. You know, we had some storm damage, but we're okay now. You go to the bank, try to deposit that check, and this happens. I'm Katie Legron on St. Pete Beach where sand still covers a beachside road here, and now some property owners trying to rebuild after the storm are hitting an unusual roadblock. A bank that won't cash their insurance check. We have enough problems with insurance in the state to now have to deal with banks and all their crazy rules about depositing insurance checks. We need the funds to be able to complete our work. So you can imagine the relief when Reza Razavi filed a flood insurance claim, and his insurance company sent him a $20,000 check. For Rezavi, the first check from his insurance company is a giant step for him and his tenants who were forced to move out until the damage is repaired. I never thought I would sit across from you and say, wow, fantastic, god bless insurance companies, but thank you. You know, because it helps. It helps. Until you went to the bank to try to cash it. And then there you go. There's a roadblock. You would think during a crisis, a bank would understand, hey, there's a crisis. These people need this money to fix their homes. We're going to come up with a little different policy as to, you know, getting these checks cashed in a timely manner. That's right, though his insurance company sent him a $20,000 check to start rebuilding. Nearly two weeks later, TD Bank, which holds his mortgage, still won't let him cash it. By providing proof, even a notarized document detailing the need for the money and how it will be spent, Razavi says the bank isn't budging, asking instead for more documents, including a claim adjuster's report, which is backlogged at least a month. Razavi isn't alone. His neighbor also got this partial payment from his insurance company, $2,500, but TD Bank won't endorse this one either. I hate it for those people having to having to navigate the system like this. You know, that can just be a pain. And I'm sure after some time they will get these checks deposited. Unlike these next people that I'm going to talk about. Are we ever going to go back to like, you know, pre-2020 days with our insurance premiums or have we reached a new watermark here in Florida? It's very difficult to turn the clock back. Now this next one is a tough one. All right, I'm going to play you this news clipping and then we're going to break it down and I'm going to show you how to navigate some of this stuff and y'all stick around to the end. I'm going to go different things you can do to avoid some of these crazy things happening. It's a huge wake up call for thousands of Floridians whose homes and valuables were badly damaged during hurricane Debbie. New data shows citizens, Florida's insurer of last resort, denied 77% of homeowners claims. So the unfortunate truth about it, there's a lot of homeowners out there that have actually never even read their policy, don't know what their policy means, and they think that if they have damage, the insurance company is just going to cover it no matter what it is. And unfortunately, that's just not the case. Let's just keep watching. A spokesperson for Citizens tells News 4 Jax they aren't the only insurance companies denying the majority of claims from hurricane Debbie. Almost all of the homeowners who were denied have one thing in common. State-backed property insurance company Citizens confirms the News 4 Jax they denied 77% of the insurance claims that they received because those claims were for flood damage, something Citizens does not cover. Citizens is not the only insurance company that is denying these claims. A lot of them are. And the truth is a lot of this could be avoided if you had a really good insurance broker that cared about your well-being, explained all this stuff up front, as well as a good real estate agent that also did their due diligence with you prior to closing on a home. And what do I mean by due diligence? I mean, like, let's look at the past history of the home. Let's look at how they fared during hurricanes. Let's look at where you are geographically. Are you in a flood zone? Now, I know somebody's going to comment, so I'm going to go ahead and say it. Not all these homeowners that are putting in these claims are ignorant to what's going on or to what their policy covers. Some of them are putting in these claims because they get the process with FEMA started. Just watch this right FEMA requires a denial of coverage before offering assistance. In fact, we encouraged policyholders to file flood claims even if they knew they would be denied so they could get the ball rolling with FEMA. The problem with FEMA, folks, is FEMA is just going to throw a little cash in your pocket. It's not going to be a solution. It's usually not going to be. It's not going to be near what an insurance claim is. You're paying that insurance company for a reason like you expect when you have damage for them to pay. Don't assume FEMA is going to cover your loss. You could apply for a grant. You may get accepted for that. You may not, but a FEMA grant is not a replacement for insurance. There are a lot of claims being denied right now and they're legitimate claims. That's the biggest problem in Florida. You don't know if you're going to get your claim taken care of if you have an issue. Now, I just saw something where 55% of the Hurricane Milton claims that are now closed out received no payment. So, 55% of the people that put in claims received zero payment during Hurricane Milton. Now, here's one of the most stressful things about owning a home in Florida. I'm going to show you this right here because this to me as a homeowner is one of the most stressful. Living near world-famous beaches and amusement parks has its perks, but it certainly costs us. My first, I think insurance premium is like $600 a year and now I think we're up around $3,000 a year. Tom Flood has lived in his Orange County home for about 12 years and has seen his premium creep higher and higher. I don't see it slowing down whatsoever. The average Florida homeowner pays about $2,000 more than the national average just to insure our homes. That renewal folks is really stressful because you never know when you're going to get that letter in the mail saying, hey, we're raising your premium. You got to fix this on your house. We're dropping you and the list goes on. So, that is why that plan. I'm not saying this to discourage you. There are a lot of amazing things about Florida. I'm saying this to be real with you that we've got to navigate this hopefully together to try to make your transition as smooth as possible because insurance is the worst crisis in the state right now. You could argue that condos are as bad, but hey, the condos are getting ridiculously high premiums too and having insurance problems too. So, insurance in my opinion is the worst crisis in the state. Some of the reasons why we pay so much? Rising construction costs and natural disasters, but also lawsuits. Something that state lawmakers made changes to prevent during two special sessions in 2022. So, we desperately need more companies and more qualified companies that are not sinking ships because I'm assuming all these other companies that have been litigated to death and, you know, the cost to repair and we've just had hurricane after hurricane. I'm sure these companies are barely keeping their head out of the water. Eight companies are now approved to start doing business in Florida and state regulators say huge national companies like State Farm, AAA and Ken have committed as well. Also, more private companies are taking over hundreds of thousands of citizens policies. We desperately need lots of new companies. So, this could be good news if we're going to get that. So, fingers crossed folks that this starts to improve a little bit because the housing market itself, you take insurance out of it, the housing market itself is actually doing a little bit better. We had a better month in November. Sellers are starting to slash their prices, which we've greatly needed and buyers are having a little more confidence to jump back into that market. And so, you know, our November stats just came out and they were quite a bit better than October. So, I was happy to see that, but we need this insurance crisis to get under control. And here are a few tips. All right. If you're looking to buy a house, if you need to move here, I'm going to give you some tips. And I've talked a few, a little bit about this in this video already, but these tips right here, I wrote down. All right. Number one, and most importantly, make sure you're financially secure and have cash. All right. I would not, prior to 2020, prior to the pandemic, I used to sell homes to people that had very little cash, could not put down much of a down payment, like VA loans and stuff like that. And people would do a hundred percent financing. And you know what? It was okay. It was okay. Because cost of living was way different in the United States then. We weren't in an insurance crisis then. Everything was different. Now you have to protect yourself. All right. You can't be, you can't be stupid with it. Like, I hate, I don't know a better word to use. You can't be stupid with it. You have to have those cash reserves. You have to be financially secure in order to comfortably move to Florida. And I don't, I'm not saying you have to, you know, be a millionaire, but just make sure you're protected. All right. Be smart about it. Okay. Because there's so many people that, the days of moving here with zero cash are done. Let me see. What else did I have written down? Buying the suburbs. Okay. Unless you have so much money that you don't care. All right. But the suburbs are a lot more protected than the coast. All right. A lot of these neighborhoods here have great drainage systems in the suburbs, you know, 40 miles from the coast, something like that. I live in Pensacola. We have a lot of great suburbs like Milton, Pace, places like that. Living there is awesome. I grew up in Milton, Florida. Buy in the suburbs and you're going to be a lot better off than if you're going to buy right on the coast, unless you just don't care. You don't have to buy right on the coast. Another one is do a ton of research prior to buying your house. That's when you sit down with that agent and you just do a ton of research prior to buying that house. Okay. It's up to you and the agent to do y'all's own research and your own due diligence prior to purchasing that property. And that's really important. And that's where the agent earns their money. Good ones actually do a lot of work trying to protect the buyer because that is super important. You don't want to buy that house and then realize, oh man, there's a surprise around the corner that I didn't know of prior to purchasing that house. So there's a lot more to it than just unlocking the door, especially now with all the stuff here in Florida, we got to navigate. Make sure everything's up to date on the home. Folks, your roofs, your hot water heaters, everything that the insurance companies are going to have a conniption fit over. All right. You don't want, if you can, buy new. Buy new. You don't want to buy, if you buy a home with an older roof, you're going to have insurance problems and you're probably not going to be able to buy that home anyways without getting it, putting a new roof on it prior to purchase, which you can do and you can negotiate that with the seller. If you have a seller that has to sell, hey, maybe we can get a new roof put on prior to you moving in. So there are ways around it, but buying newer is the best way to go right now because you don't have to worry about it. Again, this is part of buying in the suburbs and stuff like that, but I will try to stay away from flood zones. For one, your premium is going to be a lot higher. You're going to have to be required to get that flood insurance. Also, you're going to have to deal with a headache if we do have a major hurricane, because if you're in a flood zone, there's a good chance that it might flood. There's a lot of ways we can be smart about this. A lot of ways. There are still a ton of great places in Florida, but we just have to be smart about where we're purchasing right now because of the current state of the world, of the economy of America. I don't think it's changing. We'll see what 2025 is like. Who knows? Maybe everything's going to change, but I don't know. All right, folks. Hey, if you do have any questions about the state of Florida, hit me up. All my information linked in the description below. Just shoot me an email. Shoot me a text message. It does not matter. We'll catch you next time.