AUSTIN - In 2017, Texas homeowners suffered significant losses as Hurricane Harvey, severe hailstorms and tornadoes ravaged the state.
But despite another year of bad weather, data from the Texas Department of Insurance shows that justified consumer complaints continued to be low. Out of 6.7 million policies, and an estimated 700,000 homeowner claims, the agency recorded just 351 justified complaints.
“Insurance companies dealt with hundreds of thousands of homeowner claims in Texas last year and a fraction of 1 percent resulted in a justified complaint,” said Mark Hanna, a spokesperson for the Insurance Council of Texas.
“Insurance companies did their best throughout the year to respond to the various weather catastrophes and in the vast majority of cases, provided a prompt and fair response to every claim.”
Hanna said last year’s hailstorm in Odessa was a good example of how insurance companies took care of their homeowners who were hit.
Insurance catastrophe teams were quickly mobilized and adjusters were able to pinpoint where the most severe damage occurred.
“On June 14, the city of Odessa was struck with a hailstorm that ICT estimated at $400 million in insured losses,” said Hanna. “There was not one complaint filed with TDI from homeowners in Odessa and Ector County from this storm.”
Another significant comparison is the number of complaints following Hurricane Harvey compared to Hurricane Ike.
The number of complaints to TDI coming from Hurricane Harvey are only a quarter of the number of complaints that Hurricane Ike had generated at this time.
Since a high of 1,702 complaints in 2009, justified homeowner complaints have continued to drop in the succeeding years. In 2016, justified homeowner complaints declined to only 270 complaints in a year in which there was more than $4 billion in homeowner losses from the state’s record hailstorms.
According to TDI, the top three reasons for the small number of justified homeowner complaints last year were delays, customer service and unsatisfactory settlements.
ICT is the largest state insurance trade association in the country consisting of approximately 500 property and casualty insurers writing business in Texas.