Florida’s home-hardening grant program is lowering insurance premiums for some, but not all homeowners. Here’s why.

A home-hardening initiative Florida lawmakers resurrected last year to improve property wind resistance and insurance premiums is rolling ahead, with nearly 10% of the program’s grant pot already distributed to residents who upgraded their houses.

So far, fewer than half have reported lower insurance costs.

Steven Fielder, chief business officer at the Department of Financial Services (DFS), gave lawmakers an update on the My Safe Florida Home program, which received its first grant application Nov. 18, 2022.

Since then, the state has completed more than 92,600 house inspections, 22,240 grant applications and reimbursed homeowners who installed impact windows and doors or replaced their roofs with a combined $38.5 million.

With a total of 22,240 grant applications approved to date, more projects and grants are running out the door daily, according to Fielder.

“I just did another approval for $1.9 million this morning,” he told members of the House State Administration and Technology Appropriations Subcommittee Tuesday.

Of the 4,198 homeowners who were approved for grants, secured a contractor, paid for home upgrades and received reimbursements from the state, 2,050 saw their insurance premium decrease, Fielder said.

About a third (1,044) did not see their premiums go down and about 1 in 7 (625) actually saw their premiums rise.

The remainder could not provide information on the matter.

Fielder said there are two main reasons why some homeowners aren’t getting premium discounts. One is because they only replaced some, but not all, of their windows.

The My Safe Florida Home policy, he said, is to approve grants for eligible projects if it leads to a property being in better shape than before, even if it’s not completely protected.

“The homeowner may have to go back next year and buy another window, and the year after that they might need to buy another window (using) their own dollars. But at least we’re moving the needle,” he said. “That being said, I have personally seen in correspondence with insurance agents that they will not give the premium discount until all of the windows are done.”

Another way a policyholder may not get a better premium is if the repaired or replaced aspect of the home was previously in such disrepair that they were at risk of losing coverage. In that case, Fielder said, the improvement kept the homeowner on their insurance policy, but it didn’t reduce its cost.

“We allowed that person to get their roof done,” he said. “They were allowed to remain insured as opposed to being uninsured, and that is a net benefit to the state.”

Lawmakers revived the 17-year-old program in May 2022 to help thousands of homeowners access free home inspections and money to replace the entryways and tops of their properties. The program was originally conceived in 2006, when the Legislature assigned $250 million to the program, enough to cover some 400,000 inspections and 32,000 home upgrades.

But the program was slow to get going and plagued with scandals during the two years it existed through 2008, prompting lawmakers to defund it and fire the company the state hired to conduct inspections after myriad homeowners who signed up were placed on a long waitlist and some were shortchanged on their bills.

Asked by Hudson Rep. Kevin Steele if DFS is aware of any issues with fraud through the My Safe Florida Home program now, Fielder said there have been some complaints about contractors.

“In the grand total, it’s a small percentage,” he said. “But it’s significant enough (that) it has definitely piqued our interest.”

Fielder added that DFS has contacted state agencies outside of Florida with jurisdiction over the contractors in question — whose names he did not offer — to deal with the issues.

Steele said he wanted to provide Fielder with the contact information of a woman “who is in her 80s, high 80s, who was taken advantage of, and maybe you guys can follow up.”

Fielder said DFS would “absolutely” do that.

Later, CFO Jimmy Patronis said that any program like My Safe Florida Home is bound to attract scammers, but the good has thus far outweighed the bad considerably.

“Whenever you have a program where people are eligible for dollars, there’s going to be an opportunity to find vulnerabilities and take advantage of them,” he said. “But talking to our window dealers, our window manufacturers … they’ve gotten excited about these programs (and) it’s created an awareness campaign (and) I don’t know if we can put a dollar amount on what’s happened organically just through the market.”

The new iteration OK’d in May 2022 included a $150 million nonrecurring earmark from the General Revenue Fund last year: $115 million for hurricane mitigation grants, $25 million for inspections, $5 for administrative costs, $4 million for education and consumer awareness, and $1 million for public outreach to contractors, real estate brokers and associates.

In April, the Senate and House agreed to set aside another $100 million in fiscal 2024 and passed a measure doubling the maximum grant from $5,000 to $10,000 and raising the eligibility cap to include homes with insured values of up to $700,000, up from $500,000.

Townhomes were also added to the program, though the state did not start accepting applications for them until July 1, just over two months before the grant application portal closed.

Another bill (HB 1C) Gov. Ron DeSantis signed in November following the Panhandle destruction of Hurricane Idalia infused the program with even more funds, bringing the total for existing grant applicants to $391.1 million.