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Article · Oct 1, 2026 · 8 min read
Multifamily Property Insurance: Same Building, 2x the Price
Two multifamily buildings matched on county, size, rebuild cost, age, and policy structure price within about 3% of each other when they land with the same carrier, and about two times apart when they land with different carriers. On this solo episode of The Advocate Insurance Desk, Katie Dowson tests whether that property insurance spread tracks risk. The data says it does not. Across four progressively tighter matching steps, the same-carrier gap held near 1x while the cross-carrier gap never narrowed. The analysis covers trailing 12 months of multifamily property placements in the Advocate app, measured by three-digit ZIP territory, and the widest pricing dispersion in the country sits more than 200 miles from the coast.
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Article · Sep 17, 2026 · 10 min read
Commercial Property Insurance Rates Fell 31% Through a $35 Billion Storm Year. Texas Fell Fastest.
US commercial property insurance rate on line fell roughly 31 percent over the trailing twelve months, from near $0.50 to about $0.33 per $100 of coverage, in the same year that US severe convective storms produced more than $35 billion of insured loss. Those two facts sit badly together, and on The Advocate Insurance Desk, hosts Katie Dowson and Grace Schmidt took the position that neither one is wrong. The hypothesis under test was that the softening reflects a market that has stopped pricing storm risk. That hypothesis failed. If carriers were indiscriminately ignoring convective storm exposure, rate would fall at a similar pace everywhere. It did not. The market with the heaviest exposure to the peril generating the losses is the market that repriced downward the hardest. The method was a three state comparison built on Advocate placement data, filtered by peril exposure rather than by geography alone. Texas properties sitting well above the US average for wind, hail, and tornado exposure formed the high exposure group. California and Washington properties, both well below that average, served as controls. Rate on line throughout is premium per $100 of coverage. A second pass tested the same book by building vintage to rule out changes in the composition of the portfolio. Three results followed. Rate fell in all three markets, but Texas fell at roughly twice the pace of either control. The decline survived two separate mix tests, meaning the same buildings are being written at lower prices rather than the average being dragged down by newer risks entering the book. And the loss total, large as it is, never reached the layer of capital that actually sets price, which is the mechanism that reconciles the whole picture.
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Article · Sep 3, 2026 · 11 min read
Florida Multifamily Liability: The Coverage Gaps Sitting Above the Primary Layer
Coverage gaps in Florida habitational programs are concentrated in the layer that owners benchmark least. On this week's Data Pulse, Katie Dowson and Grace Schmidt took Advocate placement data into the Florida multifamily liability market and found that the state's pricing differential against the rest of the country sits almost entirely above the primary layer, and that close to half the market is written outside the admitted system. The method was a layer by layer comparison of Florida against national placements, measured in rate on line, defined as premium per $100 of coverage. That unit allows large and small policies to be compared directly. The results ran in three parts: property and casualty pricing in Florida have moved in opposite directions for four consecutive years, the Florida premium is an excess layer phenomenon rather than a primary one, and carrier level rate comparisons are unreliable without layer mix alongside them. The framing number was not a Florida number. Commercial premiums rose for 33 consecutive quarters before the run ended in the first quarter of 2026. Eight years and change of rates moving in one direction, and then a turn. That turn is the story most trade coverage has run this year. Taken into Florida multifamily, the data shows that half of the coverage never received the decrease, and it is the half owners spend the least time on.
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