Comment by wonderwonder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wonderwonder | Hacker News Reader

What's interesting is the entire thing is a game. I live in Florida. Had a roofer come by a couple years ago saying that a storm had come through a few months ago and there had been hail. So if he goes up on my roof and is able to find proof of hail damage I get a new roof for free. I needed a new roof at the time so while I generally look poorly on solicitation, I told him go ahead. A month later I had a brand new roof that cost me $1,000 out of pocket instead of $25,000.

These guys must have done 10 roofs within a few streets of my house.

So while the 250k is not a lot for an insurance company to eat, I am sure when that is multiplied by 1000's over the state, it gets expensive.

With that said, I also had a flood (10 inches of standing water) during a storm and my flood insurance company denied my claim because my sunken living room was considered a basement (2 steps down from the main floor). Turned into an indoor pool. So that was a nice $50k I had to spend out of pocket. I even paid separately for flood insurance as my hoi does not cover flooding. So total waste of money on that.

The entire thing is a circle of people scamming each other.

The roof stuff drives up prices massively. The MGA stuff is just the tool/response for the insurer to manage the downside for things like the roof nonsense - if they can pocket the fee when they write the deal then if there’s a subsequent rush of claims (some roofer, in some area, following some storm, which inflates claim costs), then the loss is capped at the equity they have in the insurance carrier.

My thoughts exactly. I live in Florida, and have for 30 years. I’ve never personally used my insurance, and my parents had to use theirs once when the neighbor’s tree randomly fell in our yard, and they also had their insurance pay for most of their roof-a lot of people do. I paid for my own roof fully out of pocket.

If you are near water or below ground then there is a near certain risk of flood, and I realize I subsidize those areas while I chose to stay away from water. But the entire national conversation is focused on saying that climate change has doomed Florida

Your insurance company blindly cut a check and didn't send an adjuster out to see how old your roof was and deny the claim or pro-rate it to only pay 10% of the cost?

They sent a guy out. Hail damage was seen. A check was cut. The roof was indeed old though. There is some law that the roofers are able to take advantage of.

Between tariffs (nails) and a huge number of undocumented workers in the roofing industry[1], it’s all setup to fall apart pretty soon.

[1] https://www.roofingcontractor.com/articles/100311-reporting-...

For those of us who live here, it's frustrating. Tons of scams and bullshit.

But we can name 10 recent transplants who built new, very large homes at water level in the past 5 years (ever wonder why they tell you hurricanes are getting more expensive??)

Then these same transplants scream bloody murder if the water gets close to their house. It has dominated political discussion in areas where, imho, these homes shouldn't even exist and other, less wealthy residents are lacking proper infrastructure maintenance.

Many of those transplants lost their shit after the recent hurricanes, even though anyone who is native knows it's always a possibility when you live 25 feet from the water at water level.

Then these same transplants want the cities to work impossible magic and "fix it." These same city officials, from my experience, are almost certainly in the pocket of big real estate investors.

Anyway, I get it. It sucks to flood out. But many of of these rich transplants clearly do not have the SLIGHTEST idea how the physics of water works. They're lucky it recedes so fast in my metro too.

Well, this probably explains why those Koi pond entranceways fell out of fashion after the 80s

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