If wind mitigation and stronger homes are the paths to reducing insurance claims and bringing down insurance premiums in hurricane-prone areas, as a grow
ing number of industry experts believe, then homeowners, builders and insurers may want to take a look at some homes rising in the Florida Panhandle.
They’re not the pricey, igloo-shaped “windproof” homes found in some beach areas, but are designed to be aff
ordable – with gables and a roomy front porch like most conventional homes. The houses hav
e been built with reinforced concrete walls, heavier roof decking, more fasteners per foot, impact-resistant windows and doors anchored directly to the concrete, as well as standing-seam metal roofs designed to withstand hurricane-force winds.
And the construction work is frequently and thoroughly inspected, more than what municipal building departments and state mitigation plans can offer, builders and inspectors say.
Fooladi
“I won’t say they’re hurricane-proof – but hurricane-resistant,” said Darius Grimes, president of Disaster-Sma
rt, a firm that audits and inspects homes built to the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety’s famously stout FORTIFIED building standard.
At one of the homes nearing completion in Pensacola, the exterior walls are thicker than most wood-frame structure walls. The construction is sort of the reverse of the better-known technique called insulated concrete forms, or ICF, which uses po
lystyrene foam blocks as forms for poured concrete. The new system, made by ConcreWallUSA, now k
nown as Fortified Structural Solutions and based nearby in Panama City, Florida, has a polystyrene core – with steel remesh and sprayed-on concrete on both sides.
The approach is so new that some insurance carriers are still scratching their heads on how to classify it.
Watch More Image Part 2 >>>
The home, with Concre Walls, under construction. (Amir Fooladi)
“Every carrier I talked to said to go ahead and write it as a masonry structure, and we may have to figure something out later,” said Suzanne Pollard Spann, CEO of Legacy Insurance Brokers in Pensacola.
Spann has obtained quotes from Olympus Insurance and others. And, despite some unfamiliarity with the new wall system, carriers do appear willing to p
rovide significant premium discounts for the property, she noted. The Spring Street home near downtown Pensacola is about 1,500 square feet and is valued at about $400,000. The average quoted annual premium is about $1,600, Spann said.
Comparable-sized homes in the neighborhood, built with conventional wood framing and shingle roofs, have seen HO premiums as high as $7,000 a year, Spann said.
Besides wind-resistance, the Concre wall system also offers excellent fire resistance, triggering further premium credits on homeowner policies, Grimes pointed out.
The idea of building rock-solid homes at an affordable price in a place that has seen its share of hurricanes is largely the brainchild of the Home Builders Association of West Florida. Spann served on the board in 2023 when the project began.
“This is my pet project because of what it can mean for our industry,” Spann said.
The home’s builder is Amir Fooladi, of ParsCo builders, who was president of the local HBA in 2023. It’s one of the first homes in Florida to be built with the ConcreWall system.