Before Louisiana Insurance Commissioner Tim Temple took office, he got on an airplane to London.
In December 2023, a month before he was sworn in, Temple met with underwriters at Lloyd’s of London, a global insurer that plays a vital role in Louisiana by paying a share of property claims after a major disaster. Temple then flew to Bermuda, another reinsurance capital, for similar meetings.
The meetings were transformative — for Temple and for Louisiana’s struggling property insurance market that’s still suffering from losses caused by major hurricanes in 2020 and 2021.
In the legislative session that ended in June, Louisiana lawmakers passed a half-dozen bills to address an issue that Lloyd’s and other reinsurance companies flagged for Temple: the quality of the roofs on homes and other buildings in the state. Strong roofs are vital to insurers because they are less likely to be damaged or destroyed by extreme winds and result in insurance claims.
Louisiana’s new policies expand tax incentives for storm-hardened roofs, increase roof inspections and establish a new, centralized database of roof data collected from around the state. The state insurance department says the roof registry is the first of its kind in the U.S.
“One of the things [the reinsurers] identified was having confidence in the housing stock,” Temple said in an interview. “In Louisiana, we don’t have a lot of data when it comes to roofs. … The more data they have, the less guessing they have to do, and the more accurate pricing they will get.”
As Louisiana’s property-insurance market reels, Temple has taken an industry-friendly approach that has drawn criticism from advocates who say he’s more focused on pleasing insurers than serving consumers.
“Commissioner Temple’s reforms have completely catered to the insurance industry, and done absolutely nothing to protect consumers or lower rates,” Ben Riggs, executive director for Real Reform Louisiana, an insurance-focused consumer group, wrote in an email.
Temple says primary insurers and reinsurers need to be courted like any other industry and that his changes are helping stabilize the Louisiana property insurance market to benefit both companies and policyholders. Primary insurers buy reinsurance to pay for claims after events that cause major damage.
In 2020 and 2021, four major hurricanes left Louisiana and neighboring states with $121.5 billion in damages, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. The state estimates about a dozen insurance companies folded. About 20 others have responded by declining to renew policies and hiking premiums.
Home-insurance premiums in Louisiana increased by an average of 34 percent from 2021 to 2024, according to an April study by the Consumer Federation of America. It said Louisiana’s average premium is second-highest in the country, after Florida.
Commissioners ‘travel and promote’ their states
One driver of the crisis: the rising cost of reinsurance, due to inflation and growing damage from natural disasters.
Rising interest rates made it slightly more attractive for reinsurance companies to invest in stocks and bonds rather than provide coverage in risky states like Louisiana, Temple’s predecessor, Jim Donelon, said in 2023.
As Gulf Coast and Atlantic Coast compete for scarce reinsurance dollars, a few state insurance officials are starting to visit reinsurance capitals to persuade companies they’re worth investing in, said Chuck Nyce, a professor of risk management and insurance at Florida State University.
“Individual states want to make sure the reinsurers are comfortable doing business in their state,” Nyce said in an interview. They “go out and travel and promote what they’re doing, with the hopes these companies will invest more.”
Since his initial travels in December 2023, Temple has returned to Bermuda twice and London twice, the Louisiana Department of Insurance said. Temple paid for the trips himself “so the state wouldn’t have to cover it,” a department spokesperson said.
Temple said he prefers to meet personally with reinsurers rather than call because it builds personal relationships and allows a more frank exchange of ideas about the strengths and weaknesses of Louisiana’s market.
“Louisiana is a very well known geographic location to the reinsurance markets around the world,” Temple said. “They look at the laws and regulations that we have. When a storm comes ashore, it’s tens if not hundreds of thousands of properties exposed to insurance and then reinsurance. They pay attention.”
Reinsurers’ first complaint, Temple said, was Louisiana’s so-called three-year rule. Established as a consumer protection after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the law said primary property insurers could not drop customers they had insured for three years or longer.
According to Temple, the reinsurers felt this was forcing primary insurance companies to keep risky properties they didn’t want to — making the Louisiana market less appealing to reinsurers.
After Temple campaigned to change the law, the Louisiana Legislature passed a law in 2024 that made it easier for insurers to drop risky customers.
Riggs of Real Reform Louisiana said the change will help insurance companies but worsen the state’s insurance crisis, driving more people to the state insurer of last resort and landing hardest on low-income households.
“The repeal of the three-year rule left Louisiana policyholders as vulnerable as they have ever been. [They are] incalculably more vulnerable than they were prior to Katrina, Laura or Ida,” Riggs said, referring to major hurricanes in 2020 and 2021. “Commissioner Temple is more worried about the risks that insurance companies face, not the risks that consumers face.”
Retrofitting roofs
More recently, the reinsurers have asked Temple about Louisiana’s roofs.
Insurance companies see roofs as a critical line of defense against storms. A stripped or damaged roof is both expensive to replace and exposes a building interior to rainfall that destroys property and can generate mold..
“That’s what turns a manageable repair or claim, from an insurance perspective, into an exceptional loss,” said Fred Malik, managing director of Fortified, a program created by the industry-funded Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety to make properties more resilient to natural disasters.
But data on roofs is sparse — and not just in Louisiana, said Julie Shiyou-Woodard, president and CEO of Smart Home America, which advocates for disaster-resilience policies in states and communities and is partly funded by the insurance industry.
Most local governments don’t regularly collect detailed roof data, Shiyou-Woodward said. Some keep paper records, making them difficult for insurers to access.
Lacking reliable data on roofs, insurance companies estimate.
Nyce of Florida State said when insurers set rates, they use computer models that predict property damage from weather events and that incorporate details such as location, topographic features, building size and construction year.
But models are only as accurate as the data, Nyce said. If a model doesn’t know that a property has an upgraded roof, the property could appear riskier than it actually is.
Reinsurers told Temple the lack of information on roofs in Louisiana made reinsurance more expensive in the state.
“When insurance companies don’t have accurate data but still want to try to give you some pricing, they have to fill in the unknown,” Temple said. “Normally, they go conservative.”
Temple’s office decided that the state could shed light on the unknown by creating a centralized database showing the age and construction type of individual roofs, as well as whether they are built to code.
Roofs degrade over time, and those built to newer building codes stand up better to extreme weather. Louisiana has regularly updated its building codes since Hurricane Katrina, but the lack of data makes it hard to know whether the new codes are well-enforced.
The Louisiana insurance department is developing software to receive data volunteered by property owners and local governments, with an aim to make the registry publicly available in early 2026. Temple said his department will verify the data.
The department also hopes to include information on its growing number of storm-hardened roofs. Louisiana is the fastest-growing U.S. market for the Fortified construction standard. According to the insurance institute, Fortified construction significantly reduces damage from winds up to 130 miles per hour.
Malik of the institute said Louisiana is on track to have 10,000 properties this year achieve Fortified certification, driven largely by customers who pay for upgrade themselves. Louisiana has a lottery-based grant program that pays up to $10,000 toward a Fortified roof upgrade.
The rigor of the Fortified process appeals to insurers, Shiyou-Woodard said.
“Those are properties they want to write,” she said. “The more Fortified designations there are in an area, the more attractive that area is to the private insurance market.”
Temple said the rapid growth of Fortified sends a signal to the insurance markets: “We’re aware of the risk, and we’re addressing it.”
