Help

BI’s Article search uses Boolean search capabilities. If you are not familiar with these principles, here are some quick tips.

To search specifically for more than one word, put the search term in quotation marks. For example, “workers compensation”. This will limit your search to that combination of words.

To search for a combination of terms, use quotations and the & symbol. For example, “hurricane” & “loss”.

Login Register Subscribe

Property/casualty continues to firm in third quarter

Reprints

Prices in the commercial property/casualty market continued firming in the third quarter of 2012, albeit at a slightly slower pace than in prior quarters this year, according to the Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers.

The Washington-based council's quarterly Commercial P/C Market Index Survey, released Thursday, indicated that pricing across small, midsize and large commercial accounts rose by an average of 3.9% from July to September. The rate of growth was slightly lower than the 4.3% and 4.4% average increases recorded in the second and first quarters of the year, respectively, but still markedly ahead of the 0.9% average increase witnessed in the third quarter of 2011, the council's report said.

“We definitely saw an increase in most lines, but it was more of a creep than a leap,” Ken Crerar, the council’s president and CEO, said in a statement accompanying the report. “Carriers seemed more focused on tightening terms and conditions.”

In all regions of the country, the majority of insurance brokers surveyed for the report indicated that pricing had remained flat or increased by less than 10% across all P/C lines. However, significant percentages of brokers surveyed said they had seen pricing rise by as much as 20% for a handful of coverages, including commercial property, directors and officers liability, employment practices liability and workers compensation.

Pricing increases appeared to be sharpest in the Southwest region, which includes southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. In those areas, 23% of brokers indicated that average pricing across all coverages for midsize accounts increased between 10% and 20%, while 15% of brokers said the same of small and large accounts.

Less than 10% of brokers in all other regions of the country indicated that they had seen similar average increases in pricing across all account sizes.

Read Next