Transcript

Alyssa Burley: Welcome back, everyone. My guest is Drew Garcia, Vice President of the Landscape Group with Rancho Mesa. Today, we're going to set the stage for insurance expectations for 2022. Drew, thank you for joining us.

Drew Garcia: Alyssa, thanks for having me.

AB: Since you specialize in the landscape industry, what do you see for the insurance marketplace, for these companies as we move into 2022?

DG: Great question, and I think a lot of companies are always wondering this each year as they come up for renewal. So what I want to do is just, I'll give you a little insight to all the lines of insurance that most landscape companies are going to be renewing in 2022.

And this is basically what we do at a pre renewal, very low level. But I'll start with work comp, which has been a soft market now for four or five years where there's been pressure for rates to continue to go down as a group, as a whole.

And each company's obviously individually underwritten by a carrier, and they're looking at the losses for that particular company. But in general, the work comp market has been soft and that's led to, you know, general decreases for most businesses over the last four or five years.

We think that trend is going to continue in 2022, and we'll see if there's any change in 2023. But for the foreseeable future through this policy period, we do believe that the work comp market is going to stay relatively soft, and that just means rates are going to stay down as a whole.

Again, there could be some individual things that you're experiencing as a landscape business that's causing your pricing to increase, whether that's your ex mod or you've got claims in the current year that haven't gone into the mod calculation or you've changed operations, things like that could impact your own pricing.

But as a group, we feel like the market's going to stay relatively soft. And I'm going to share a little detail that we do individually, myself and Greg, who helps me here with the landscape group at Rancho Mesa. We track a lot of industry data and then we use that when we're having our conversations with our customers.

So one thing we like to pull is we measure every contractor that has a C-27 license in California. There's about 5,465 of those companies that have work comp policies, and that's businesses that are landscape companies that only carry that license. They don't also have other licenses so strictly landscape, which helps us keep our data clean when we're looking at it. So there's 5,465 of those companies, 125 carriers, insurance carriers for work comp, right? At least one policy for all of those companies.

So there's 125 insurance carriers writing at least one landscape policy. Now there's only 25 carriers that have more than 20 policies, so we really start to limit down, you see carriers become niche when trying to write a particular business, in this case, landscape. Of those 125, only 25 of them have more than 20 policies. So there's probably a little bit of an appetite there that's aligning for those carriers. And then when we really might it down, there's only ten carriers they have more than 150 policies, and those are the bulk of the businesses of the insurance carriers riding the business or writing work comp policies for landscape companies in California. The top five are going to be familiar names, Berkshire Hathaway, Insurance Company of the West, State Fund, Markel and then Am Trust.

Those are the top five carriers in terms of market share writing those 5,465 C-27 license landscape companies that have work comp policies. So a little bit of an insight into the market and what carriers are interested in writing business or work comp policies for landscape companies.

And then when we look at the numbers, we always like to watch the pure premium rate for the 0042 class code and just a quick refresher on pure premium. Every year the bureau, the rating bureau, will recommend a rate that the carriers should charge per $100 in payroll for every particular class code to strictly just cover claim costs. So, this rate doesn't include carrier overhead or expense. So, that number went from $4.93 last year to $4.57 this year, effective September the first of 2021. That's a 7% decrease, and when you're watching that recommendation come from the bureau to the insurance carriers, what happens next is insurance carrier’s base rates come down a little bit. Normally, the rates should come down a little bit on the base rate side, and last year, the average base rate for an insurance carrier, which is the rate that they're going to start at when they're going to underwrite a landscape business, and that rate is going to be different for every insurance carrier. The average rate that they started at was $9.92. That's down to $9.52 on average. So 4% down on the base rate for work comp carriers. Again, those are indicators to us that the market is still soft.

There's still plenty of carriers trying to write the business and that, we should see rates stay relatively down for 2022 as a whole. Again, we talked about the individual aspect of underwriting, but as a whole, those are good indicators that the market still is pretty soft.

And I'm going to share my screen really quick. This is a factor here that nobody really talks about. But California is so diverse with how work comps are handled throughout the state. So there's individual territory factors that most carriers apply when they're underwriting based on where you're doing your business and the reason why they use territory factors is because the claim outcomes, the claim activity can be higher in certain areas than in others. So the screen that you're looking at right now shows Berkshire Hathaway's territory factors based on 2021 and then 2022. And what I did is you can see, based by zip code, I've got different colors indicating the severity of territory factors that could be applied depending on where you're doing your business. So the lighter colors that you're seeing, the more yellow, lighter yellow that you see, those are the preferred areas and then the heavier, darker red that's going to be where maybe there's some territory debits that increase, and most carriers are using something like this when they're underwriting and looking at the business, but you can see some movement in some of the color from last year to this year. You can see San Diego's lightened up a little bit as a territory, so rates are probably a little bit more favorable in San Diego.

But there really is always been some heavy focus on L.A., Orange County, Riverside County, San Bernardino, where carriers really look at implying a debit on territories just because of claim outcomes and claim activity in those in those particular regions.

And then San Jose in Northern California, those have always been generally lighter intel. There's a less territory factor that that happens up there based on better claim activity and claim outcomes that are associated with the zip codes up in that area.

So I wanted to share that, I'll pull that screen down. And then now exiting work comp kind of just highlighting a couple of the other lines of insurance that we think are going to be impacted in 2022. And we've talked about it for many years with our customers, but the auto market is still very difficult.

And if you're a landscape maintenance company, you have a heavy fleet and a lot of vehicles. So it's really important for you to continue to monitor your cost per unit. And we wrote that article a few weeks back, measuring your cost per unit at each renewal so you can kind of see where your insurance has gone over the years. And so landscape companies really need to pay attention to their cost per unit because we do believe there's still more pressure on the auto market for rates to continue to increase. There's a lot of things that Rancho Mesa provides, and so many of our landscape companies are taking advantage of our Fleet Safety trainings that we have in the Risk Management Center and client services on our end has done a great job when we've had claimed activity with our customers to recommend certain driver trainings, you know, as a result of those claim outcomes - or those accidents that have occurred.

So, we've been happy with how we're helping our customers manage the auto side and then really everyone should watch out on the excess or the umbrella layer of their insurance that's really taking its toll and we've seen rate increases coming on that line in particular. A lot of carriers are limiting their capacity, so a lot of carriers usually go up to 10 million for that limit. But now it seems five is the most that any one carrier wants to go to.

So if you carry more than 5 million, you're probably going to need to stack that with multiple carriers to achieve that limit, which could be different than what you've seen in the past, and also watch out for wildfire exclusions. A lot of excess of reinsurance carriers are trying to apply a wildfire exclusion to landscape companies in California, which would be a detriment to your policy if you have it. So always pay attention for that. You can also look out for that wildfire exclusion on your general liability policy. Those are new things that are potentially coming to the liability side. There are still carriers out there that don't offer that exclusion, so you would want to make sure that you're aligned with a carrier that's doing that. But for the general liability property inland marine policies, we think rates are staying relatively flat.

So we don't see a lot of movement coming there. More of the pressures coming on the auto and excess lines. And I think we'll see that for the next couple of years, there should be should remain some pressure on those lines.

That basically wraps it all up for us, covers the basic lines that most companies are looking at. And again, kind of an overview, but hopefully it gives some insight to business as they're moving into 2022, what to expect and where to focus their attention when it comes to their renewal.

AB: Drew, if listeners have questions about their workers compensation insurance, what's the best way to get in touch with you?

DG: Email, they can email me at drewgarcia@ranchomesa.com, call my office (619) 937-0200, and then I'd also encourage them just to check out our website, we've got a ton of content that we've created, all designed for landscape companies to help them better manage their risk. And we have, you know, different tools that aren't really available online that we'd be happy to introduce to companies and let them use to better manage their risk.

AB: Drew, thank you so much for joining me in StudioOne™.

DG: Thanks for having me, Alyssa.