Florida Insurance Claims DENIED | Flooded Homes FLOOD THE MARKET

Well, guys, I'm down here on Palm Street in Punta Gorda, and it looks like the listing of these properties has begun. This house right behind me here just went up for sale, as is. I'll pull up a Zillow listing and kind of show you what's going on there. They're disclosing pretty much what happened, but this is like four blocks from the water, guys. And you can see behind me, I mean, it's still got back this far. And so you can see here, guys, this house is currently listed for $175,000. You can tell just by the exterior picture, there's some issues. There's been some flooding. They're pretty much being upfront about it. There's no interior photos. I understand that, why that would be. You know, you kind of want people to come and take a look and see approach. You know, maybe it's not as bad as people think it is. I've not been in there. But yeah, this is starting to crop up all up and down the coast. These are coming a lot sooner than I thought they would be. And it looks like even though these people bought this in 2018, unfortunately, they picked it up for $225,000. It is now listed at $175,000. So they're taking a loss on this because of the damage. Obviously, six years later, I don't know what it was used for, if it was personal or if it was income. But, you know, market value on something like this, I wonder if they do they have a Zestimate on it? No, but it would be quite a bit higher than the $220,000 that they had purchased it for. Probably somewhere in the fours, to be honest with you. So this is a big loss. So my last video was about potentially seeing a lot of listings a lot earlier than I anticipated. I mean, I thought this was going to take months, but now to see these hitting the market already is stunning to me. And you can see why all this debris behind me, it's just it's just crazy. And that's not the only one, guys. There's four or five that I've seen that are basically selling as is already from water damage. That one's not on the water pretty far back. There are some on the water. And then there's a few that have, you know, a subscriber sent in a couple that just had mysterious price drops. One was on the water up in the Comis, dropped $250,000. No mention of any flooding, but, you know, it didn't look like it was affected. And we're going to see more and more of these properties come on the market as Newsweek's reporting that Florida's largest insurer is denying hurricane claims and it's sparking alarms. Now, we all know the largest insurer is Citizens Property Insurance, which is basically the state backed insurer of last resort. But with so many companies pulling out of the state in recent years, they now have more than one point two million active policies. As of this October, they have been trying to depopulate that as quickly as possible, and it has not been working. Newsweek is reporting that Florida's top insurer reportedly did not make payments on more than three quarters of the claims from Hurricane Debbie. Now, Hurricane Debbie, guys, happened back in August. So this was before Helene and before Milton. So now they've got people wondering, could the damage caused by Milton and Helene be denied as well? Citizens received the majority of all Debbie claims from Tampa and surrounding markets. And no surprise, Citizens is the only one who will insure some of these places. Now, the really alarming part is that Citizens Property Insurance has denied 77% of the insurance claims relating to Hurricane Debbie. Newsweek goes on to state that these claims being closed without payment following Hurricane Debbie are primarily flood claims that were submitted to a property insurer. So most likely they did not have flood insurance on their policy, in which case they will turn it over to FEMA. And they have to show that they submitted a flood damage claim and their property insurer has to show that it was denied to qualify for FEMA assistance. And obviously, guys, the concern is they're going to do the same thing on Hurricanes Helene and Milton, leaving FEMA to pick up the tab, who previously before these two hurricanes said they didn't have the money to do it. So it's going to be a real mess, which is going to lead to properties such as this one having a $450,000 price cuts because this house down in Inglewood got absolutely destroyed in the storm. All the listing photos are from the pre pre-storm listing. So obviously I'm not going to go through them. But let's take a look. It was it's that's kind of strange. Does Zillow know that it was flooded? And now that's the Zestimate. See, this is a trick Zillow likes to play. I keep telling people, like, if you list your house at $850, your Zestimate is going to be around $825, and that's right there. So what was the Zestimate previously? Like, how does Zillow know the house flooded? Like, look at this. I had a Zillow know that the value went like that, unless it's just going based off of what you input the listing price as. And it comes a little under. That's what I think is happening, because the price history, it was up for $1.3 million and it got removed. And now it's back up damaged for $850 because most likely the people did not get flood insurance and they can't qualify for claims. And even if they can qualify for a claim, it might not be enough to repair the damage here. So another property here in Englewood, these were sent in by a subscriber. David, appreciate you shooting these over to me, sir. Send them to my email. You can see these are pre-damaged photos. You know, they don't have an update after the flooding. At least it doesn't look that way. It looks like it's fine. And they're basically selling it for the land value like the previous one. You know, the first line of the listing agreement offering is for land only and remains of home, garage and pool pictures are from prior to hurricane damage. Home needs demo. Pool and garage could remain. But the whole house has to come down $850 for this piece of land right here. And what was it initially listed for before the damage? See, look at Zillow doing this again. It's just you have you have his estimate, Zillow. Look at that. $828,600. And it's listed at $850 exactly like the previous one. A little strange. What was it originally listed for? I don't even know if that's the original listing. So, yeah, one one million four hundred fifty thousand now taking a $600,000 clip and offering for the land only. And we're going to see more of this, guys. This is just getting started. It's just a lot faster than I thought it would be. I thought this would take some time. But I guess, you know, if you know you're done, you're done. What's the sense in dragging it out? It's time to move on and get it on the market and get things going. And like I said, there's a lot more coming, but not even really two full weeks removed here. And it's already happening. Scott, I've never seen anything like it. Don't know if I will again. You know, you talk to people around here that have been here since the 70s. You know, like I've been here 40, 50 years. Never seen this happen. And I don't know if I ever will again. I hope we don't. I really hope that we don't. But we may kind of nuts guys, just to see two sides of the street look completely different. Same block. How nuts is that? It's the same side of the same street. And it just depends on what's built up and what's not. Another one here. And again, guys, I want you to spot these elevation differences behind me. As you can see, that house is up. Some palms in the street. This house is up some palms in the street, but this house not up. And that is what happens, unfortunately. What's up? I'm not looking for anything. Oh, I didn't do the property. No, no, I'm just walking around the neighborhood kind of shooting. Yeah, no, I'm filming me. Do you own it? Oh, OK. No, I'm not interested. I'm just looking around. Thanks, though. Gilchrist Park, you guys know that is the area where all the boats were. They were in the tennis courts, things like that. There's still 10 boats down there. I don't think they're going to get them out of there anytime soon. They've shut down the whole park and the entire harbor walk now, unfortunately, because it's attracting, you know, it's almost becoming like a tourist. What do they call disaster tourism type of thing now? There's too many people playing on the boats, you know, moving in and out of these giant boats, climbing on them. So the whole park, unfortunately, is shut down. And that's another that's just another blow to the historic district here, which, you know, when you're coming down here now, all the restaurants are gone. The parks are even closed. It's just a sad situation, especially coming into the holidays. So we've wondered who's going to buy these properties. And I don't even know if it makes sense as an investment. If you can get some of them really cheap, there's money to be made. You know, pre-storm comps in these areas, there's still money to be made. But who wants to take on that risk as far as a rental goes or an Airbnb goes? I don't think so. I don't think anybody wants to take that on right now because I've actually seen the rental supply increase here since the two hurricanes, which I thought was going to contract substantially. But it's actually increased because so many absentee owners have seen this as basically an opportunity to do a seasonal rental for people who are going to want, you know, to stay somewhere while their house gets fixed. But I guess they didn't count on how many of them aren't planning on staying anywhere while their house gets fixed. They're just going to sell and leave. So we actually are just under 1900 rentals in Charlotte County right now, all combined. And a few months ago, we were at 16. A year ago, we were at four hundred ninety five. So I don't know if anything for rental income is a great idea right now. So you have to bank on people coming back and the appreciation being there after you put the work in and not getting hit by another flood. It's a tough ask for people right now. Now, keep in mind, we've had two 100 year floods in two weeks. If it's truly a one hundred once in a 100 year outcome, then I can see you maybe taking the risk. And over time, the you know, the view on the area changes and people come back and they buy again. But right now it's just it's just mind blowing to me. One strange outcome here. Maybe a good news for condo owners is, as I think this may actually end up increasing our condo demand a little bit. People who want to get out of houses and away from water, they don't have a lot of options if they're going to stay in the state other than to go very far inland and get another house or do the condo thing. And I've had a lot of people talking about that lately. So they're looking to probably do the condo thing as long as the first floor is just parking. Obviously, they don't want to be on the ground floor near water, things like that. So might have the potential to actually see a little increase in demand in condos who you guys know are getting absolutely crushed here lately. They sure could use it. It's. It's such a wild, wild market right now with on top of everything else we have going on in the economy. It's this might be once in a lifetime for me. You guys can see the debris just all headed towards the drainage system, which I'm sure exacerbated the problem down here. You know, the drainage here isn't great to begin with, but I doubt that made it any better when everything started flying around. And if it's not cleared out and all this stuff isn't cleared out by the time, if this happens again, we could, you know, could be the same scenario. Everything's just going to get clogged up. And that's an I mean, man, look at look at this, guys. It just looks like a war zone down here. So really shocked how fast this is all progressing much faster than I thought it was going to. Just wanted to give you guys a quick update. Brief one here today. Again, as always, I'll keep you posted and I'll catch you on the next one.