Nobody selling property in this market wants this conversation. The insurance market is having it regardless, and it is having it in numbers.
This page covers the cost consequence. Building-specific figures come from the desk. Contact the desk at Miami Dossier for the current position on any building we cover.
We are not climate scientists and we will not forecast sea level, storm frequency or what South Florida looks like in fifty years. Anyone in this market who tells you they know is selling something.
What we can tell you is that the insurance market has already repriced, and that repricing is the mechanism by which physical risk reaches you. Not as a prediction. As a line in your monthly statement.
The practical question is not whether the risk is real. It is how much it costs to hold this asset over your holding period, and that number has been moving in one direction.
Florida property insurance repriced sharply as carriers reassessed exposure and reinsurance costs rose. Some carriers withdrew from the state, and the state-backed insurer absorbed policies before subsequent efforts to move them back to private carriers.
Coastal association master policies were hit hardest, and those costs pass to owners through the monthly fee.
This has already occurred. It is not a forecast and it does not require agreeing about anything. It is in adopted budgets you can read.
Insurance is priced annually. It responds to loss experience and reinsurance conditions with a short horizon.
Property is bought on a horizon of decades. So a buyer is taking a long position on an asset whose largest variable cost is repriced every year by a market with a one-year view.
What is not currently well priced is longer-horizon risk: sea level, groundwater, saltwater intrusion, drainage capacity, and what municipal adaptation costs. Those do not appear in an annual premium and they may appear later in property taxes, assessments and infrastructure levies.
The mispricing may run in either direction, and anyone claiming to know which is guessing.
Elevation. Finished floor elevation relative to base flood elevation is the single most useful physical fact about a building, and it is documented.
Construction age and standard. Post-2002 Florida building code, impact glass, and elevated critical systems all matter and all are verifiable.
The insurance history, not the current figure. Ask for three years of master policy premiums. The direction tells you more than the level.
The reserve position. A building that funds properly can absorb a bad year. One that does not will assess you for it.
Then underwrite your holding cost with the insurance line rising. If the position only works at today’s number, it is thinner than it looks.
The direction is the information. Ask the desk at Miami Dossier and we will get the insurance history and the reserve position for the building.
We hold no inventory of our own and we are not the developer. Ask the desk at Miami Dossier and we will tell you what applies to your situation, what does not, and where we would not proceed. Here that starts with elevation and three years of premium history. Where the question is legal, tax or immigration, we will introduce you to advisers who handle that properly rather than answering it ourselves.