One year in, growing St. Pete insurer posts $2M profit

St. Petersburg-based Patriot Select Property and Casualty Insurance Co., which officially launched last June, saw a new underwriting profit of $2 million its first year in business.

The company, in a statement, credited the success, in part, on assuming 26,000 policies from the state-run Citizen Property Insurance Corp. as was well adding more than 1,600 open market policies through early March. It also cited a “lean, effective operational model and disciplined risk management.”

In all, Patriot says its total statutory surplus increased from $29.5 million at launch to $31.3 million at the end of the year. Its risk-based capital ratio was over 14 times required levels. (Risk-based capital ratio, according to S&P Global Ratings, “is a regulatory framework used in the insurance industry to ensure that companies maintain sufficient capital to support their business operations and protect policyholders.)

The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation approved the St. Petersburg firm April 14, 2025, allowing it to enter the market to sell homeowners insurance policy. In June Patriot announced that it started selling policies through agents in the state and received an A for Financial Stability Rating from Demotech, a leading national property insurance rating agency.

Patriot CFO Marcia Lamb says in the statement that achieving profitability in its first year “validates our approach and reinforces our ability to deliver the capital strength and long-term rate predictability Florida homeowners deserve.”

Given its success, Patriot expects to announce soon lower rates for most policyholders.

The company, founded by several insurance veterans, won approval to sell in the state at a time when OIR was looking to expand the number of carriers operating in Florida and as it looked to shift policies from Citizens to the private sector.

Both happened as the office tries to reform Florida’s still-challenged — though improved — property insurance marketplace. One of the biggest challenges just a couple of years ago was not having enough carriers writing policies, helping to swell the number of policies written by Citizens, which was created to be the insurer of last resort.

On May 31, 2025, just days before Patriot was officially approved, Citizens had 841,470 policies in force. (There were 1.19 million a year earlier.) The latest tally shows that as of Feb. 28, Citizens has 336,393 policies in force.