How to Find Home Insurance Companies You Can TrustThe best homeowners insurance companies will protect everything that makes your house a home. Your policy should cover it all – from your house itself and your personal belongings to your personal liability and more. But if you’ve shopped for home insurance before, you should know that not all insurance companies are equal.
This guide will help you learn what makes the best home insurance company. We’ll consider a few key factors, such as cost, customer reviews, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and NAIC complaint index to compare home insurance companies – Kin included.
We’ll also include some tips on how to compare home insurance companies so you can make informed choices and pick the best home insurance company to protect your home and your family.
Homeowners insurance costs vary drastically from state to state and even county to county. So while it helps to look at average premiums to get an idea of what you’ll pay for coverage, we’d be remiss if we didn’t remind you that samples are just that – samples.
That said, below is an apples-to-apples cost comparison based on filings with the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation. It will give you a solid idea of who has the best rates in Florida.
These are the average home insurance company rates for all Florida counties for a newly constructed home with $300,000 in dwelling coverage.
What we found wasn’t surprising to us at least: Kin came in with the lowest rates in Florida at $1,354 a year on average. We are 3 percent cheaper than the next cheapest option (Progressive Insurance at $1,399 a year) and 125 percent cheaper than the most expensive option (Security First Insurance at $3,052 a year).
In California, you can see that we are 9 percent cheaper than Allstate's yearly premiums.
While price is important, it’s not that only factor to consider when choosing a home insurance company. Customer reviews can tell you:
While it’s worthwhile to read a handful of reviews to learn about the individual customer experience, you can get an overall impression of customer satisfaction from review score averages. For all the homeowners insurance companies below, we took a look at online review sites (including Trustpilot, Google Reviews, and Clearsurance) that allow users to rank their experience on a scale of one to five. You can see the average scores below.
As you can see, Kin customers think highly of their experience – our average review score is 4.8, the highest of all Florida insurers. US Coastal’s service seems to leave a lot to be desired with an average score of 1.1. While some companies like Cypress (4.7), American Traditions (4.6), and Southern Oak Insurance (4.3) have favorable ratings, most of these Florida home insurance companies fall below even a mediocre customer experience.
In California, competitors like Allstate average 1.8 stars on Trustpilot and 1 star from Consumer Affairs. Travelers earns a mere 2.8 stars.
Many reviews for low-rated companies cited expensive premiums and a bad claims experience as the source of their dissatisfaction.
A Net Promoter Score indicates whether a customer is likely to recommend a company to a friend or family member. As you can imagine, that’s pretty valuable to an insurance company. A high score means a customer was so impressed with their experience, they’d trust that company to care for people they care about.
The NPS industry average for home insurance is 35 out of 100, a tragic score by any standard. That means in general, folks are not impressed with their home insurance companies.
We’re happy to say our NPS is 84 – more than double the industry average. The next national insurance company to come close to that score is USAA at 77. See the chart below to find out how other national carriers stack up.
We won’t mince words here: Florida homeowners are generally really unhappy with their home insurance options. Little wonder, too – the state has been besieged with hurricanes over the last decade, and many nationwide insurers responded by either dropping thousands of policyholders or withdrawing from Florida completely. Other insurers have raised premiums enough to price out the average homeowner.
That said, you can get another view of customer satisfaction with Florida insurance companies by looking at NAIC complaint scores. These show how a company’s performance compares to others in the home insurance industry.
FYI: The median national complaint score is always 1, which means a company with a complaint score of 2 is twice as high as expected in the market.
Of Florida’s home insurance companies, the average complaint score is about 4.3. As you can see, Kin’s complaint score is 0, below the national median score of 1, well below the average complaint score in Florida, and not even close to the most egregious case (Avatar) at 10.75.
This list is not exhaustive, but these are the home insurance companies that have the biggest presence in Florida:
There’s no formula for choosing the best home insurance, but these tips can make sure you’re taking the most important factors into account.
Protecting your home, your belongings, and your family is not a small undertaking. You need a policy that is up to the task. Make sure your policy includes the basics, like:
If you live in an area prone to natural disasters, it’s smart to look for an insurance company that offers essential protection like hurricane insurance and flood insurance. For example, we recently created a flood insurance endorsement that you can add to your homeowners insurance policy. You get more coverage than an NFIP policy, it’s effective immediately, and it’s super affordable, too.
Knowing what coverage you need puts you in a better position to compare apples to apples when you shop for insurance. It doesn’t make sense to pay less for a policy that leaves you underinsured.
But the importance of saving money on insurance can’t be overstated for many homeowners on a budget. That’s why we offer folks the ability to customize their coverage. You never pay for what you don’t need, you can choose deductibles that work for you, and you can take advantage of our many available discounts. That’s why the average customer saves $500 or more when they switch to Kin.
As we discussed above, reviews and complaints help you know what to expect from your insurance company’s customer service. Ideally, you’ll work with a company that takes this feedback – good or bad – to heart.
Read online reviews (via Trustpilot, Google Reviews, Clearsurance, etc.) to peek behind the curtains before you settle on a new provider. They can give you insight into how much money customers saved, how fast they got insured, and how knowledgeable the representatives are.
The NAIC can give you a sense of customer complaints. Again, in Florida, these tend to be high.
A home insurance company’s financial strength indicates its ability to pay for claims. There are several rating companies that rank financial strength of insurance companies, the most popular being:
Only work with an insurance company that has a strong financial stability rating. For example, our financial stability rating is A, Exceptional from Demotech, which means we have the financial backing to pay claims after a widespread disaster.
