Allstate to slash homeowner insurance rates 28.5%

The rate reduction, to be announced Thursday morning in Los Angeles by Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, marks the end of a more than two-year battle between state regulators and Allstate. The company covers about 1 in 7 homes, condominiums and rental units insured in California.

Poizner's legal order, signed Tuesday, rejects Allstate's request for a 9.3% increase in its homeowners insurance rates, and, instead, instructs the company to reduce its existing premiums by 28.5%.

"In today's sputtering economic environment, people need all the help they can get just to pay the bills," Poizner said. "That's why I'm pleased to order this tremendous rate cut."

According to the Department of Insurance, the reduction should drop average Allstate premiums to around $600 a year. The new rates will take effect July 28.

Allstate will comply with the commissioner's order, Allstate spokesman Peter DeMarco said. "We are reviewing the order in detail and communicating with the department about the process for adjusting the rates of our 850,000 homeowner's policyholders in the state."

In May 2007, Northbrook, Ill.-based Allstate announced that it would no longer issue new homeowners insurance policies in California. The company contended that it needed to better manage the risk of potential losses related to wildfires and blazes caused by earthquakes.

Allstate had stopped writing new policies in all or parts of 15 hurricane-prone states, covering most of the Gulf and Atlantic coasts.

Poizner's order reducing Allstate's homeowner rates is the insurer's second setback in recent months with California regulators. In March, Poizner told Allstate to cut automobile insurance rates by 15.9%, saving policyholders an average of $124 per car. Allstate appealed the decision in superior court but, later, dropped its pleading.

The push to lower Allstate's homeowner premiums began in mid-2006 when then-Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi ordered Allstate and several other companies to show that their rates were not excessive.

Proposition 103, an initiative approved by voters in 1988, gives the state's elected insurance commissioner broad powers to set companies' rates, ensuring that they are not "excessive, inadequate or unfairly discriminatory."