Washington Homeowners Insurance Is QUIETLY Canceling Policies Like Yours (Nobody's Telling You Why.

Imagine paying your homeowner's insurance on time every single year for over a decade, no lapses, nothing, and then an envelope shows up and it says, guess what? You're not renewed. All right, so it's not because maybe you missed a payment, and it's not because maybe the roof's gone bad, and it's not even because there has been a fire somewhere near your home. Because of a a score you've never seen by a company you've probably never even heard of about a property that they've never even walked. This has already happened to more than 12,000 Washington homeowners in the last five years, and guess what? They're not even given an explanation why. I'm going to show you exactly how that score works, and then how a fire that's maybe 300 miles away on the dry side of the state can still get you canceled here on this side of the state, and the tax bill piece nobody talked to you about before closing, and the fix that we had for that tax bill that was sitting right in Olympia this year that never happened. Buckle up, because guess what? That one's going to make you mad. Okay, so here's my one sentence version. This was actually never about flames reaching your property. It's about a score, and Washington had two separate chances this year to force insurance companies to show you that score, and to protect you from what it's going to do to that policy, and guess what? Both died in the same house committee, in the same session, and that was just a few months ago. That's what I'm going to walk you through today, so you fully understand what's going on here. All right, so let me give you a quick context who this is for. If you happen to own property here in western Washington, and I'm talking Pierce, Kitsap, King, wherever you're at, or if you're relocating here, and you're picturing yourself as safety, out of fire country, guess what? This is going to apply to you, especially if you're on land, acreage, or you're thinking about building maybe a DADU. This will affect your plans. Okay, so let's talk about common belief. Wildfire risk is a dry side issue, right? Spokane, the Tri-Cities, maybe the southern Oregon, California area, not gate carbon, not Tacoma, and not anywhere in the sound, and on pure fire probability, that's probably basically true, but guess what? Western Washington's own wildfire exposure is generally low compared to, let's say, the other side of the Cascades. Here's the contrast. Your exposure isn't only about whether a fire reaches your lot, it's about how insurance companies are looking at statewide risk, and how the state funds fire responses statewide, and both of those systems don't just stop at the mountain areas. A fire in Spokane County changes what your carrier assumes about Washington as a state, as a whole. Now, that's not my opinion here. That's how reinsurance and rate filings actually work, and I'm going to show you the numbers here. Okay, so here's the plan. I am going to show you what's actually driving these non-renewals right now, how a fire that's hundreds of miles away is moving your premium, and that tax assessment already sitting on some of your property tax bills that nobody explained to you at closing, and the two consumer protection bills that almost passed this year, but guess what? They didn't, and exactly what to do about all of this, whether you're buying, selling, or already owning. Stay tuned through this last point because it's the part that's going to protect your wallet. Let's start with the number that should stop you because it's already happened. It's statewide, and most homeowners find out only when the cancellation letter is showing up at your door. So, according to Washington's Office of the Insurance Commissioner, guess what? The number of homeowners experiencing policy cancellations or non-renewals has doubled since 2021 from 11,763 to 24,106. Some of that is explicitly tied to, of course, the wildfire risk scoring, right? And here's the part that matters most. These are third-party scores built by outside data companies based on your zip code. Vegetation maybe that's nearby, might be because of the slope, and the regional weather modeling that they've kind of put together. Not an inspector who's walked your property and can say, this is a risk. All right, so our insurance commissioner, Patty, she put it pretty darn simply. She said, here, people deserve to know more about this score and the options they have for doing something about it, right? That way they're not canceled, and here's why it matters in praxis because there's a documented case right now in a rural area in Spokane. His name is Marvin Lindbergh, and he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on mitigation work, right? He worked around his property. He did a defensible space. He did fire resistance materials everywhere. The whole freaking playbook he put into action, and guess what? His policy got canceled anyways, and it was based purely on his zip code, on that score, his risk score I'm telling you about. The mitigation didn't matter to the algorithm that they had in play. So if you own acreage, forested land maybe, or anything adjacent to a greenbelt anywhere in western Washington, this is going to be the mechanism that can hit you. So not because a fire got close to that area, but because there's a data model right now that's decided your area looks risky on paper. Here's why I'm opening with this instead of maybe something a bit softer, sorry, because this is happening right now, and it honestly is infuriating me. It's already doubled in five years, and it's completely disconnected from whether you're you're actually even near a wildfire area. If you think I'm fine, and I'm not near a fire county, well you're answering the wrong question, because guess what? The right question to ask is, what does the algorithm think about my zip code? And honestly, do you even know your score number for your area right now? On August 1st, I'm sure a lot of you guys remember this, there were three fires that we had going on here. We had the Autumn Lane, Fairview, and the Old Trails, right? And together we called this that Spokane Complex. It was all over the news for a bit, and it tore through Spokane County. It roughly destroyed about 700 structures, and more than about 65,000 people were evacuated. Spokane's mayor called this the worst natural disaster her region has ever faced, so it was definitely a big deal. Statewide, more than two million acres have burned across Washington and Oregon this year alone. So here's the mechanism. Insurance companies are not pricing Washington county by county in isolation. They price it through what insurance markets and statewide exposure models are showing them. So Washington's home insurance rates already rose about 55 percent from 2020 through 2025. That is the 14th highest increase in the country. Even though our average premium is around, let's say, $1,500, it's still running below the roughly 2,900 national average. Okay, so claims cost statewide have jumped from $941 million in 2018 to $2.2 billion in 2024. So let's talk about going into this year. Filed rate requests have actually kind of dipped slightly down about, I don't know, half a percent. So before the August fires, of course, just happened, but industry analysts are sitting here watching to see whether this event is going to reset those trends upward and maybe have these counties that didn't even see smoke affected, right? So here's the number that should concern anyone counting on a backstop. Washington's Fair Plan. That's the insurer of the last resort for homes that just can't get coverage anywhere else. They're currently covering around, I don't know, 400 policies right now. Now, California has an equivalent panic. Guess what? They're covering about 700,000 plans. So if carriers pull back harder here, we're going to see our safety net is not built, honestly, for this kind of volume like California. Zoom out, and this is a real lesson. Your personal risk did not change on August 1st, but guess what? The model your insurance companies running on Washington as a whole did, or it is about to. That's how a fire that's hundreds of miles away from Gig Harbor can still show up on your renewal notice here in Gig Harbor coming up. This is exactly the kind of thing I do for my buyers currently, my sellers, or those that are property owners that I've helped in the past. I have a relocation guide. Feel free to grab it. It has some of that information on there, or I have my email in the link below. Feel free to send me the property address that you own or that maybe you're thinking about buying, and I can help you with where that zone is. I can also help you with some of the insurance companies I would suggest that are a little bit easier right now to work with because some of the numbers that I've seen are ungodly. Grab it now, or after the video, feel free to DM me. Okay, let's talk about the piece that's not a future risk. It's already on some of you right now, or maybe on some of your neighbor's tax bill. So Washington has had a fire protection assessment on the books for decades. If you own private land or there's some forested area or unimproved area, in whole or even in part, you are actually paying an annual per acre, and that's a fee that funds the state's wildfire suppression system. It's not billed separately. It's going to be built in. It's folded. It's directly into your county property tax bill there, and it's administered by the county assessor. So you might want to start looking at this a bit closer, and yes, this applies to people that live in Pierce, that live in Kitsap County, that live in King County. It's not just out there in Western Washington. It's not just what's east of the mountains. It's written directly in the county-specific regulations for both Pierce and King County. Here's where this actually bites people right now. If you're buying acreage right now, or raw land, let's say you're thinking about building or anything with forested or unimproved portions on it, which describes probably most of my relocators right now, or somebody that's looking maybe to build that DADU, this assessment is often the line item nobody's walking you through before closing. So buyers are looking at it, and they're showing me their property tax as one number, and they don't realize actually a chunk of this is that fire protection fee, and it's tied in the land itself. It's not separated from your home's assessed value. Okay, so on the flip side, if your property is ever actually damaged by wildfire, the Department of Revenue does offer relief. So you can file a destroyed property form with the county assessor, and qualified owners get their 2026, and potentially maybe 2027 property taxes reduced based on the value that was actually lost. So that relief does exist there. It's just reactive. It's not preventative action here that we're doing. All right, so here's the bigger picture at this point, right? Washington already taxes people on forested and unimproved land to pay for fighting the fires that the insurance have created this more expensive amount for, right? And that fee has already been sitting there quietly for years on your tax bills. It's been sitting there the whole time. So if you're buying anything right now that has acreage in this state, guess what? This is a line item you're going to want to ask about before writing an offer. Not afterwards when you get that first bill, and you're going, why is it so expensive? Okay, so here's the part that's genuinely frustrating, and guess what? The fix for all of this has been sitting right here the whole time, and guess what? It didn't happen. Two bills moved through Olympia this year. One of them was Senate Bill 5928, and this would have required the insurance company to have to disclose that number that I'm talking about, your risk or factor, and explain the factors behind why they're giving you that factor. And they'd also have to allow for a real appeal process if you had done mitigation work, or the data maybe was wrong. Directly addressing kind of what happened to that Spokane homeowner, right? That's why that bill was happened earlier. And then there's another one. So we have the Senate Bill 6079. Now the Strengthen Washington's Home Program, right, would have created this grant program to help homeowners retrofit, to be able to reorganize wildfire standards, to help them be able to work critically with their lands, so that they can protect the participants from cancellation versus just canceling them right off the bat. So both bills passed the Senate by huge margins. Listen to this. So 5928, the vote was 48 to 1. 6079 was 37 to 11. Now that's as close to a bipartisan consensus as Olympia actually gets. Now both died in the House Commissioner Protection and Business Committee, and never even reached a floor vote. Meanwhile, the legislator did restore about 60 million dollars in wildfire suppression funding. So that's money to fight the fires after an earlier 65 million dollar cut. So that's real. That matters. But fighting fires and protecting your insurance policy are two different budgets, right? And only one of them got funded this year. Zoom out and here's what this means for you right now. As of today from this video, you do not have a legal right to see your wildfire risk score. And guess what? Doing mitigation every step in the book does not protect you from getting canceled. The state is spending more to fight fires. It is not doing anything right now to protect your policy from getting canceled. So that gap is exactly why my next point, what you actually do about this, matters as much as it does. Here's the point that actually protects you, because everything else right now has been about the problem. This is the plan. Okay, so you can't fix Olympia's committee calendar, right? And you can't out-negotiate some of these algorithms of their reinsurance models. But what you can do is you can control what you know before you're locked into a new purchase or maybe when a new renewal is coming up. And that's where the leverage is actually at. Okay, there's five moves and I want you to do them in this order. Number one, before you write an offer on anything with acreage or anything that has forested land or a wooded lot, ask your agent or your lender to pull the wildfire risk score for that specific parcel. Okay, not the neighborhood average. I want you to try to get that parcel. And number two, get quotes from at least two or three carriers before you put that offer in. Not one, because different companies, they have different licenses, different risk score models, and a property that gets flagged by one can actually come back clean by another one. Number three, ask the title company or seller directly for their current forest fire protection assessment amount on their forested area or unimproved parcel area. You want to know these numbers so it's not a surprise afterwards or in your first tax bill. Okay, and number four, really, really important, build renewal risk into your ongoing housing costs. Make sure you're thinking about this, not just your purchase math. Make sure you're thinking, what is that renewal cost? Treat it as maybe a possible premium jump. That way you don't treat this rate adjustment like an arm or something. Number five, I want you to know that Washington's fare plan does exist. It's a probably true last resort at this point, but it's covering about 400 policies, so it is there. It's not a real backstop the way it might be in California, but it does exist. Don't structure your risk or tolerance around it being there for you though. Here's the real story on wildfire, insurance, and taxes here in western Washington. You now know this is never really about the flames reach in your property. It's about a third-party score that's already doubled non-renewal statewide since 2021, right? And you know that a fire that's maybe 300 miles away in Spokane can still show up on your renewal notice, so you make sure to check for that. And because carriers are pricing this statewide, not by county by county, so you know there's also this line in some of your tax bills that's been there for decades, like in Pierce, in Kitsap, in King County, that have forecasted this unimproved land bill, right? So and that there's relief there, so I let you know there is a relief system. I wouldn't count on it too much, but it's there after the damage is done. But hey, we have it. You know the two bills that have probably could have protected us that passed by Senate, and guess what? They died in the House. And you know the five moves that put you back in control before you buy, sell, or renew. That's really beating expectations here. So you came in thinking this was somebody else's problem, 200 miles east of here maybe, and guess what? You're leaving knowing exactly how it's going to reach your mailbox, and exactly what to do about it before maybe it does. All right, so if you're buying, selling, or maybe you already own here in western Washington, don't wait for that renewal notice to find out whether you stand in this predicament or this predicament. Get your risk score right off the bat from your insurance company, right? Call them, and then get multiple quotes. Know what your tax line says on your statement. Don't let it become a surprise for you. I have again in my description that relocation guide. There's a section on there that's about insurance. I can also help you out with this. If you want to personally send me a note, feel free. We can pull up the numbers together on that specific property of yours, or maybe one that you're looking at. I'm Leigh Ann Hall with Paramount Real Estate Group. If you're one that loves to have a conversation versus texting and emailing, my phone number is in the bio here. Reach out to me. Send me maybe the property address you have concerns with, and we can jump on a call and go through what your taxes are going to look like, what your insurance model might look at. Thanks again for staying with me. If you liked this video, hit that subscribe button. Check out maybe some of my other videos on surprises you might find out on building here in Washington. Have a good one. See you in our next video.