Why won't my insurance company renew my policy?
There are a variety of factors that goes into an insurance company's decision not to renew, and people should understand it's not necessarily that they did anything wrong. There are situations where people have repeated losses, whether there's been a number of fires on their property, whether there's been a number of people who have been injured. So if you have a bad loss history and a lot of claims, there's a chance the insurer may say, well, I can't charge enough to make a profit on this policy, and I'm going to walk away. However there are situations, for instance, what's going on now on Long Island, in New York, where certain insurers are overexposed. They have too much market share on the island and there's a lot of talk these days about hurricanes becoming more frequent and more severe, and about how Long Island is due for another monster hurricane at some point. So the insurers, in that case, are concerned that if a major catastrophe hits, I've insured too many homes in that exposed area, so I'm going to cut back by not renewing a certain percentage of the homes. So in that case they may not renew you. It has nothing to do with you doing anything wrong or being a bad risk. It's just that I insure forty percent of this market, and I've got to reduce this to thirty percent. That means I've got to not renew two hundred homes.
