After the Fall: Opportunities and Strategies for Real Estate Investing in the Coming Decade

CHAPTER NINE

HOMEOWNER INSURANCE AND PROPERTY TAXES

Homeowners asked to carry a greater load; No protection for coastal denizens

 

 

If you lived in Michigan for the last decade, as a homeowner, you faced a serious problem: The value of your home might be moving in the wrong direction. If you lived in Florida for the last decade, you also faced a serious problem. No, it wasn’t the value of your home, which was steeply and steadily rising until the subprime crisis hit in 2007. The problem in Florida was the expense of owning a home there with the higher embedded cost of homeowner’s insurance, if it could be gotten at all.

Over in Texas, where they often brag about having the biggest of everything, I’ve been told Texas homeowners pay the most in property taxes, at about an average rate of $1,250 to $1,300 annually per house, about twice the national average. However, Terry Butler, the insurance consumer advocate for the Florida Department of Financial Services, now tells me that Florida probably has passed Texas for that ignominious number one ranking.

Florida, Texas, and many areas along the Atlantic Coast and Gulf of Mexico have homeowner insurance problems: insurance costs increase, deductibles get bigger, and in some sections of the country with statistically high possibilities of severe weather damage difficulty in getting insurance at all.

For the rest of us, the cost of homeowner ...