Allied/Nationwide

We are used to 10% in Florida. There is a property company paying as low as 7.5% right depending what part of the state the risk in.
 
If a carrier wants to reduce commission going forward because it will allow them to be more competitive and stable then fine. That's at least what I got from State Autos announcement. You then have a choice to write with them or not. However, reducing existing renewals is some bs.

I can't believe this is the first I've heard about State Auto! Just didn't pay that much attention and I'm logged in a lot. And there it is, the presidante's message, kind of buried, but there it is. New Platform sales comm's: Auto -14% new/10% renewal; supported ho - 18/12. Existing legacy book remains unchanged.

I don't know about your agency, but in AZ State Auto has increased auto by double digits, seeing some over 20%, homeowners not as bad. I have been rolling many of them. Now we will be rolling them over into the new product. The book that doesn't move from the old legacy policy will see increases and become a loss leader for them, if it hasn't already.

So a large Regional following step going down to 10% renewal. This sucks. :mad:
 
Farmers decreased home from 20/14 to 14/10. Entire industry is going this route. Going to weed out smaller agents who don't produce volume to grow. So Far Farmers is using bonuses to make up the lower commission nicely based on better underwriting and new business.
 
^when? Countrywide? How do the bonuses work? That's the biggest cut I've seen

At least the captives pay serious advertising.
 
Farmers decreased home from 20/14 to 14/10. Entire industry is going this route. Going to weed out smaller agents who don't produce volume to grow. So Far Farmers is using bonuses to make up the lower commission nicely based on better underwriting and new business.

Yup.

I was the regional marketing manager for Philadelphia for years and one of my initiatives was at the time we had 16k agents appointed in my territory (eastern sea board) ... I wanted it down to 6-7k and cut out ALL wholesalers/aggregators,etc.. Eventually home office agreed to keeping only 1 wholesaler and cutting agents to 8k.. And cutting commission for anyone with less than $50k with us


We were a niche underwriter ... All we needed was a handful of agents that understood and targeted that business...

Wholesalers were the worst... They just shot gunned every POS account to us and clogged the submission stream
 
^when? Countrywide? How do the bonuses work? That's the biggest cut I've seen

At least the captives pay serious advertising.

It started in Feb of this year nationwide with their new policy offering "Smart Plan home/auto".

They use an "Underwriting Quality Index" and then also look at the growth of the entire agency in multiple angles like retention, cross selling, line of business production, profitability and more. Bonus makes up the lost commission but can also get 2% more.

Next year there is talk of them increasing the bonus substantially and making the bonus harder to hit for small non producing agents and filtering the money to the higher volume agents. My office is ready for that lol. My software took my producers from 75k in premium last few months to 125k in premium this month. That's home/auto premium and not commercial.
 
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I've not been in the industry for 20+ years so maybe it's a perspective thing, but I don't see the logic in separating the "super regionals" from national carriers at this point. What does Auto Owners or State Auto, etc really do or have that the national guys don't at this point? When I think of a regional carrier with a competitive edge in their niche market, it's generally one that does business in somewhere from 2-12 states. These are the carriers I think IA's will need to partner with going forward, and I hope more continue to crop up.

Regarding captive commissions, the agency I left in the beginning of 2015 was getting 17/12 on auto and 14/10 on home. I think they were on some kind of enhanced commission program though, which probably would expire sooner rather than later anyway. So for them, it would be a slight pay cut.
 
At least it looks like our farm policies will still roll into our "commercial" book, and we'll keep our 15% renewal commissions on those. We are taking a sizable hit the way it is just on the home and auto renewals.
 
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