High-net-worth insurance is beginning to see pricing relief in parts of the homeowners market, but cybercrime, flood and wildfire are moving in the opposite direction as loss severity rises and exposures spread beyond historically high-risk locations.
Dave Logan (pictured), president of PURE Insurance, identified the three perils as the emerging risks most likely to reshape coverage needs, underwriting and capacity for affluent households.
The pressure comes as the broader market enters a transitional period. Homeowners pricing is flattening or falling in some states, including Florida, while California property and personal excess liability continue to require rate, he told Insurance Business.
Capacity is also returning selectively, but underwriting remains closely tied to property quality, geography and mitigation.
“Capacity, coverage and pricing are all evolving,” said Logan. “For this year, our total homeowners rate increase countrywide is in the low single digits, just to give you a sense of where we are. Not all companies are there yet. We have some competitors who are still climbing the hill, so to speak, and needing to take more rate.”
Personal cyber has become the most rapidly changing of the three risks, driven by account takeover, investment fraud, impersonation, data theft and increasingly convincing AI-enabled scams.
Logan said average cyber claim severity within PURE’s portfolio had quadrupled in roughly a decade. “Our average severity in 2015 and 2016 was just under $10,000 for a personal cyber loss,” he said. “In the last two years, it has been just over $40,000.”
Most customers still purchase a $100,000 limit, Logan added, but losses reach that full amount in approximately 20% of those cases – and that needs “people need to start buying more.”
The trend is reflected in the broader US threat environment. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded more than one million complaints and $20.88 billion in reported losses during 2025, a 26% increase from the previous year. The average reported loss was $20,699, while complaints involving people aged 60 and over produced $7.75 billion in losses.
The FBI also tagged 22,364 complaints as AI-related, representing approximately $893 million in reported losses. Those figures are not a measure of insured claims, but they illustrate how artificial intelligence is becoming embedded in fraud and social engineering.
In response to what it sees as growing gaps, PURE plans to enhance its personal cyber offering by adding coverage for automobiles and cyber bullying, as well as affirmative coverage for NFTs (non-fungible tokens).
Logan also affirmed that PURE’s cyber policies can respond if artificial intelligence is involved in cyberattacks.
“AI is certainly resulting in a lot of the deepfakes and losses that are currently triggered by our coverage,” Logan said. “There is coverage when AI is involved, and, yes, we’re seeing a rise in the frequency of that.
“What we are not doing is including a widespread-event exclusion. Other carriers are now doing that, and it is not good for the industry to have this exclusion. It’s not good for the consumer.”
Flood presents a different challenge: a large protection gap combined with an exposure that many property owners still associate primarily with coastlines and designated flood zones.
FEMA reported approximately 4.72 million National Flood Insurance Program policies in force, a small proportion of the country’s housing stock. The agency has also said about 40% of NFIP claims originate outside areas officially categorized as high-risk, highlighting the limitations of treating flood maps as a simple boundary between exposed and unexposed properties.
A 2026 Moody’s analysis estimated that a one-in-100-year US flood scenario could leave $375 billion of losses uninsured, equivalent to a nationwide protection gap of about 65%. The analysis projected that uninsured exposure could increase to approximately $472 billion by 2050.
Logan warned that for high-value homes, especially, the threats that come with inland flooding are compounded by expensive finishes, lower-level living areas, art and other collections, mechanical systems and substantial rebuilding costs.
“If you look at the decadal changes in precipitation in the US, you’ll see a very clear trend in how much more is coming,” said Logan. “Everyone should be thinking more about flood. If you’re inland, precipitation could create an inundation within your home, whether through the backup of sewers and drains or seepage through your foundation. You could also experience storm surge and flooding due to the ocean and rising sea levels.
Wildfire remains most closely associated with California, but recent events are reinforcing its potential to create concentrated losses nationwide.
Logan said wildfire had already produced 27% of his company’s catastrophe losses over the past decade. He warned it could account for a larger share of catastrophe losses unless the industry improves home hardening and prevention measures.
“(The Palisades and Eaton fires) certainly went into our reinsurance program. We took a full net retention plus some reinstatement premium. But our net combined ratio last year was just under 100,” Logan said. “That was a good result for an event that was the largest we’ve ever had in the history of our company.”
The Palisades and Eaton fires generated an estimated $41 billion of insured losses in 2025, according to Aon, making them the costliest wildfire event on record globally. The two fires alone represented roughly one-third of insured natural catastrophe losses worldwide that year.
Ultimately, for the HNW space, there’s a sense that risk becoming more unevenly distributed. Pricing and capacity may improve for well-protected homes in some regions, but cyber loss severity, inland flood exposure and wildfire accumulation are raising the stakes elsewhere.
As those threats evolve, Logan said underwriting is likely to place even greater weight on adequate limits, property-level mitigation and the ability of insurers to respond when increasingly complex losses occur.
