Hurricane season officially begins in June, and industry experts are expecting only a modest change in primary insurance pricing despite the devastating events of 2017.

While loss-hit accounts and properties in exposed areas have seen increases since last fall, future increases will likely be limited because of an abundance of capacity and the shifting of substantial catastrophe risk to the insurance-linked securities markets as well as more accurate modeling of risk aggregations by insurers, experts say.

In April, a Swiss Re Institute sigma report found that global insured losses from disaster events last year totaled $144 billion — the highest ever recorded in a single year, according to Swiss Re Ltd.

The highest losses came from hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, which struck the U.S. and the Caribbean in quick succession and resulted in combined insured losses of $92 billion, equal to 0.5% of U.S. gross domestic product, according to the Swiss Re report. The hurricanes made 2017 the second-costliest North Atlantic hurricane season since 2005.

“There was an awful lot of speculation going on, but I think it was, in our opinion, if not the worst year for insured cat losses, it was very close to it,” said Mike Van Slooten, head of market analysis for Aon Benfield International. “And it was heavily driven by the three hurricanes obviously, and also by the California wildfires and some other lower-level activity around the world as well.”

However, in spite of last year’s disasters, experts do not expect a steep increase in pricing for this hurricane season.

“Insurance has done a really good job of mapping the high-risk areas that they have to deal with,” said Ed Chanda, Columbus, Ohio-based national section leader for KPMG L.L.P. “They’ve taken action to sometimes exit geography where they’re not comfortable or to make sure the pricing in those exposure areas are correct for those locations.”

Mr. Chanda said that “where you do see noise in the system is where they get surprised,” as was the case for last year’s California wildfires, which happened “where they weren’t supposed to happen.”

“They had detailed mapping of where fires have occurred on the West Coast in the past and have a pretty good feel for where those places are to try to manage themselves out of those areas or price themselves correctly in those areas,” he said. “The difference in 2017 was the high winds that blew those fires into areas where they historically have not been.”

Joseph Peiser, Willis Tower Watson P.L.C.’s New York-based head of North America broking, said based on the Jan. 1 and April 1 renewals, clients that have no natural catastrophe exposure will see renewal rates flat to up 5%.

“For those who have catastrophe exposures but haven’t had losses, we’re expecting up to 10% rate increases,” he said. “And those who have catastrophe exposures and have had losses will see 10% to 20%.” Mr. Peiser said some clients who have experienced severe losses will see increases “north of 20%.”

“We’ve seen the events of 2017 put pressure on rates in terms of conditions, but it’s inconsistent at best in terms of the marketplace,” said Jill Knecht, Chicago-based vice president and regional head of property for North America with Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty S.E. “This stems from a couple of things: first, an abundance of capacity in the marketplace, and secondly, our clients advocating that their accounts be underwritten on their own merits, versus being lumped into a market swing resulting from the events of last year.”

Ms. Knecht said that “until some meaningful capacity exits the sector, we do not envision widespread rate increases that fail to take an individual account view.”

“(Policyholders) do not want to be put in a bucket with the insureds who may have had losses when they didn’t experience losses or when they had certain controls in place to minimize losses, whether it’s a (catastrophe) or otherwise,” she said.

Duncan Ellis, New York-based U.S. property practice leader for Marsh L.L.C., said that “2017 is probably going to be the worst year on record.”

“Many of those claims are still being worked through, especially the monster claims — those north of $100-200-300 million, of which we have quite a few,” he said. “U.S. property prices across our entire book increased 3.6% in the fourth quarter 2017 and 2.9% in first quarter of 2018, largely driven by natural disasters in the second half of 2017.”

One of the reasons traditional insurers were resilient to last year’s losses was because they were successful in laying off quite a lot of risk into the capital markets, allowing the losses to be spread further, Mr. Van Slooten said.

“And what we saw in the last few months of 2017 and also in the first two months of 2018 have been a significant reload of alternative capital,” he said. “There’s still an awful lot of capital in the market — that’s what’s underpinning everything.” If the recent level of loss had occurred 20 years ago, Mr. Van Slooten said, “you’d see a very different environment.”

“There was some fear that once (ILS investors) have losses they would abandon the reinsurance market, but they didn’t,” Mr. Peiser said. “In fact, they arguably double downed, because more came in than existed before. Now they’re actually a bigger part of our market, and that is what has changed the game for our industry.”