Built to Last: Buyer Beware

Funding for Built to Last: Buyer Beware is provided by The Florida Association of Public Insurance Adjusters.

Dedicated to protecting policyholders and facilitating damage recovery after disasters.

Online at getreadyflorida.com And by overcoming obstacles, helping children learn how to communicate well, set meaningful goals and make good decisions.

Information for educators available at oolifeskills.org.

And by Packets of Hope, a memoir of resilience and purpose about finding hope even in life's most difficult moments.

Available at packetsofhope.com.

You know, I'd say first off, you have to understand you're buying a home, you're playing roulette to a degree.

I bought insurance.

I thought I was protected, but no one knows what they truly buy.

There's a lot of studies out there that show how people's behavior changes when you just tell them the facts.

People like us, we know all this stuff, but the general public doesn't know that.

I want my money.

Where's my money?

Why is no one speaking out on behalf of the homeowner?

No one.

We take all kinds of chances in life.

How many times are you willing to bet everything?

Imagine taking all your money and going to a casino.

You are going to risk everything on one spin of the roulette wheel.

But as the wheel starts spinning, you look closer and realize the odds aren't in your favor.

The chances of losing are far greater than winning.

And yet, you've staked everything on this one spin.

Believe it or not, this is the risk most of us take when we invest in a home without considering the possibility of disasters.

And all too often, Mother Nature's spin doesn't land where we hope.

And people lose everything.

It is not just life-threatening.

It is not survivable.

I think the worst thing that I've ever experienced in my life.

I was there 16 months and got wiped out in a flood.

Now it's, it's a nightmare.

Resilience is something that people need to be far more aware of than they are currently.

And unfortunately, we make it very hard for people to even be informed.

We hide a lot of information from people that they really need to have in front of them.

Not only at the time that they're making a choice about where to live, but also the choices they make after they decide to live there.

Our story is set in Florida, but it could happen anywhere.

Building codes and disclosure rules vary from place to place.

No matter where you are, people often make home purchase decisions without enough information.

Interestingly, 11 states don't enforce building codes.

And overall, just 32 percent of local areas actually have and enforce these codes.

Most of these are in California and Florida.

And some will argue that many of the codes in those states still aren't strong enough.

While many products are subject to strict oversight, there's no government guarantee that our homes, often our most significant investments, are built to last.

We've been trained in this system that it's okay not to build homes to withstand natural disasters because we're doing it in the name of price.

Because we want to make it affordable.

But if you're buying a home and you're living in an area that's prone to natural disasters and we're not building the home to withstand the natural disasters, and then we're putting in place a false promise with an insurance company that, oh, if you're not so well built home gets damaged, we'll be there to protect you.

So in my experience, the beneficiaries of having lower standards are usually those people who are looking at the cost today, not the cost tomorrow.

What's scary to me is there is no definite plan to fix it.

And the real problem, you can't fix it.

The real problem is Florida.

It's where we're at.

The Chamber of Commerce and all these other people over the years have touted Florida, come to Florida.

The developers loved it here.

They dug up islands in the canals over here.

You can't fix that.

So when researching a property before doing an inspection, we do look up what, what we know what current code is and that we need to understand what code was at the time that the house was built.

And wind resistance is something that hasn't been talked about outside of Florida and other coastal areas.

Why have we allowed so much development in flood prone areas?

It's a nasty habit, I think we have in the United States and really worldwide.

This isn't like something that's unique to any area.

People like to live near the water, right?

It's beautiful.

It's a place we like to go to enjoy ourselves, to relax, to recreate.

In areas vulnerable to floods, weak government rules boost development, but also increase risk, exposing more lives and investments to potential flood damage.

It's a strategy that could lead to severe consequences for communities and economies.

Well, I think especially living in a community like Naples, Florida, it's paradise.

Everybody wants to live in paradise and local government officials have a hard time saying no.

I cannot find anywhere where we've told people you can't build here or you can't live here because of a hurricane, a flood, a wildfire.

We've always had that approach that it's your choice.

You have freedom to live there, but you have to pay the consequences when they occur.

It's discouraging for people who already live here to see more and more density pop up.

And I think our government needs to kind of pull back on what we're allowing when it comes to density population, especially on the coastline.

It's becoming increasingly precarious for us to do that.

In the face of climate change and particularly sea level rise, this is an area that 30, 40, 50 years from now may not even be here where we're standing today.

Tonight, entire buildings swept away, families trapped by floodwaters, monstrous Hurricane Ian now lashing the Florida Peninsula as a strong category four with winds of 150 miles per hour.

You know, the water came up so quickly.

My friend, my friend had called me and she's like, you need to get out.

I'm like, Gary wants to stay and it's not going to be that bad.

And she's like, get an axe.

I'm like, what are you talking about get an axe?

And she says, if it floods, you're going to have to break through that ceiling.

And... we didn't get an axe, but we ended up when we left, the water was already waist deep by the time we got into the car.

It was pretty crazy.

It started off as like a low pitch whistle.

We could hear a whistle and we weren't too sure what it was and we didn't really get up to inspect it.

We were all downstairs, huddled, huddled in a little room with no windows, you know, just kind of praying for the best.

And then we hear a big boom.

So we get up and I'm like, holy crap, the roof is gone.

And there's nothing here besides the trusses that hold the roof up and the ceiling fans that were here at the time.

So the average elevation here on Sanibel Island is about four to four and a half feet.

When Hurricane Ian came through, we had a storm surge of over 11 feet.

We have one way on and one way off the island through the Sanibel Causeway.

My house was up on stilts, up on concrete pilings and the second floor, 18 feet up in the air with gutted, 18 feet up in there gutted on the second floor, just right through, 18 feet.

This was our dining room.

And... on the other side of this wall was our kitchen.

It changes everything about the way you look at life, everything.

I mean, nothing matters and everything matters, right?

I mean, like if you have a car, drive your car, if you have shoes where your shoes don't save anything because you wake up the next day, you have nothing, literally nothing.

I fear that if we come back to this home, especially without a second level or raising it, we're just gonna be doing this all over again.

And... I don't wanna do that again.

I don't wanna put my son through that again.

I'm trying to work with the insurance company and band-aid it back together.

I need a place to live.

I've been unable to live here for 14 months now and I'm still paying my mortgage and insurance for what?

I don't know, but I'm having to make payments on a house that I can't live in.

Like the Bataris, most families never truly think about the cost of a disaster until it happens.

If you live in a house with a homeowners association or you live in a condo, disasters can still impact you.

About 27% of homeowners, which is 74 million Americans, live in a condo or HOA property.

In this situation, you have little control over disaster recovery and you could end up displaced from your home for years.

The The Punta Rasa condo complex in Fort Myers is a prime example of this.

Residents haven't been able to move back in since Hurricane Ian in September of 2022.

In condominium associations, that's a whole other problem that's going on in the state of Florida.

They don't have proper reserves.

Unfortunately, we're seeing buildings in this state decay in an advanced state.

And a lot of that's occurring because they're not built appropriate.

What happens when they don't have that money to put aside?

Submit to you, they're gonna lose their home.

The same way a homeowner that can't put a roof on their house or can't afford to put AC in it, they're either gonna go without or they're just gonna have to sell it.

I would advise to a prospective condo buyer that you make sure that you're buying into a condominium association that is adequately funding their reserves.

I would want to know when the last time they did major renovations were, how much money they have on hand to make future payments.

Have they done their milestone inspections?

Do they have their structural integrity reserve study?

And I would recommend that you take that information and have a professional review it to make sure that it's adequate before purchasing into a condominium association.

The fear is that you could purchase into a condominium association and then are two or three years from now there's a major problem and you have a special assessment which could be equal to the amount of money that you're paying for the condo itself.

It's not always just big hurricanes that can wipe you out.

On January 9th of 2024, Panama City Florida was hit by an EF3 tornado.

This house on the beach tipped over for the second time and several older homes and apartments were destroyed.

Disasters can happen in any part of the country and when they strike they profoundly change the lives of those affected.

We went through what we call the storm after the storm.

Fighting with our insurance company, fighting with the federal government for aid packages, fighting with the state, with our town, even for building.

And these are mostly conflicts that the average American is not in any position to stand up to a billion dollar insurance company.

It's a fight against FEMA, it's a fight against their state or their town.

And those are people on their best day.

You have to understand that this is a population that is compromised because of disaster trauma.

These are people that have been through a major disaster.

These are people that have actually lost everything they own.

In many cases all their paperwork is gone.

They might be living in a motel and driving their kids an hour to school every day.

I personally lived in my car for 30 days with my... excuse me.

Surprisingly, 65% of the people in this country are not fully aware of what their home insurance policy covers.

If you're counting on homeowners insurance as your backup plan after a disaster, it's important to realize that securing the coverage you paid for can be a lengthy and complex ordeal.

The best insurance is a house that can survive.

There's only two times anybody ever reads an insurance policy.

When they first buy it and they rarely read it then or when they've had a loss and then now they want to see if it's covered.

And those are the only two times and people don't understand the product and what it's designed to do.

And because of that people don't consider it in their decision making, but they need to.

You are paying a policy premium for a promise from your insurance company that if you have property damage that they'll protect you and they'll take care of you.

And all too often what happens is when you have that policy and you need to activate that protection, the insurance company abandons you or they delay you or they stonewall you or you go through this process that makes you want to give up and just accept whatever it is and try to get back to living life.

There is a very high confidence that an insurance company will pay you something that doesn't mean they're going to pay you what you want or what you deserve to get.

There's a disconnect there.

I would argue most homeowners in the state don't realize that if they have a large deductible for a hurricane, most standard policy is 2 percent and it's not 2 percent of the loss, it's 2 percent of the insured value of the home.

So if you have a $500,000 home, the first $10,000 is yours.

You pay the first $10,000 in damage.

Most homeowners in the state of Florida do not have $10,000 in cash sitting around in case a hurricane occurs.

The big print give-ith, the little print take-ith away.

They look at the big print which is the number.

My house is insured for $100,000.

I want $100,000.

Wait a minute.

You didn't read the fine print here.

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

And there you are.

I remember the old commercials with Allstate, right?

You're in good hands.

You're in good hands with Allstate.

That's true.

You don't see those anymore because those hands have opened up and you have fallen through and the people don't have that confidence anymore.

I remember years and years ago growing up, everybody had confidence in their insurance company.

You felt good to have Allstate or State Farm.

Denied?

You're denying my claim?

I don't understand.

I have full coverage.

I'm sorry Mrs.

Hogenson, but our liability is spelled out in paragraph 17.

States clearly.

I can't pay for this.

Any insurance company can take your money, but the part we care most about is getting money back when we file a claim.

This baffles me to no end and it's a shame.

You know when you buy insurance you feel as though it got something there to protect you.

When you buy auto insurance, you buy homeowners insurance, you buy medical insurance, you're doing it for a reason.

And then you find out when it's time they're not there to help you.

I can't watch a YouTube video without Flo and the the gecko coming on and that is the narrative that they tell.

Unfortunately, that's not the experience for everyone.

People overlook the importance of taking time when they buy an insurance product and they don't truly understand what they're buying.

And when you don't understand what you're buying, you don't really know what you're getting.

And the only time that you truly understand what you're getting is when you need to activate that service because you've had a claim.

And then and only then do you find out really what your benefits are under the policy of insurance.

And then all too often you find out those policy benefits aren't what you thought you were getting or your deductible was so much or that you didn't have full replacement cost value or you didn't have ordinance and law coverage.

And then you discover I'm not going to have enough money to rebuild my home.

But hey, I bought insurance.

I thought I was protected, but no one knows what they truly buy.

Insurance works very well for things like auto accidents where there's a few accidents that happen.

There's only a small number of people involved.

Insurance doesn't work as well when you have these highly correlated losses where a hurricane comes in and hits 10,000 homes.

Insurance doesn't work as well there.

We need to do a better job of having the insurance industry give premium discounts for people who responsibly mitigate and pay clean claims for people who suffer losses.

Insurance has been a struggle.

You call them and you don't know what's covered.

Unfortunately, I didn't have content insurance.

And when they send out an estimator to review the damage, it was several days after the hurricane.

They didn't even know what this house should look like.

We had obviously a pool cage and another enclosure that came out a ways from the house.

It was all just piled up.

And they really had no way of telling the extent or the amount of damage or what was here.

We had insurance and I said my dad had dementia and I was doing everything.

And then after he died, when I went to go file insurance claims, they're like you don't have any insurance.

You have no hurricane insurance.

Your dad canceled it.

So my experience having the maximum legal amount of insurance available for my home was it took me seven years to rebuild my home and get back home.

That experience was more horrible than I can even describe.

And we see that far too often with survivors.

We evacuated so we don't know how much the water came in with the tide and then came back out.

But the moisture level was approximately that box height.

I would say most of those stories that I heard as well were typically with home insurance companies.

I think the positive experience that I have gone through in this is with flood specifically.

And we ended up suffering some catastrophic structural failure.

And the biggest thing that happened to us was the roof about 30 percent of our roof structure got torn off the home.

So during the middle of the storm, essentially the inside of my house became open to the storm.

The insurance process, claim process for me, actually was not terrible.

Now I know there are plenty of stories out there with people that had to go to war and fight with their insurance companies.

I feel like in retrospect that we were pretty fortunate with that.

The biggest problem we had early on was just communication because obviously they were deluged with thousands of claims.

And so the entire process for me was about one year.

My position always was from the advocacy standpoint is you can't just look at the consumer's behavior.

You also have to look at what's bringing them to the courthouse.

And that means you have to be willing to look at the insurance company side of this coin.

How are they participating in this process?

What are they doing?

What behaviors have changed that have resulted in consumers being forced to go to the courthouse more often than they say than say 10 years ago?

I submit to you because the people that are supposed to enforce the regulations are taking money from the people who the regulations are supposed to be enforced against.

It's the fox watching the house.

It won't change until there's real insurance reform and getting rid of lawyers and consumer protection.

That's not a real answer.

That only hurts the consumer.

The insurance industry, just like every other industry, does spend a lot on lobbying.

They are trying to get the legislature to support them in a way that benefits their industry.

And if you look over the last three years, many of the laws that have been passed by the legislature have been pro-insurance industry.

If you need an attorney to litigate against your insurance company in Florida and you win, think you'll get your attorney's fees back?

Not so fast.

Florida has this new rule, SB2A.

It's about what happens if your house gets messed up and the insurance won't pay to fix it.

If you tell a judge and the judge says, "Yeah, you're right, the insurance has to pay you.

You have to pay for a lawyer all by yourself."

That means there won't be enough money left to fix your house.

It doesn't seem fair that you paid them to protect you, and now you will have enough money to fix your house.

Money talks in Tallahassee, but it talks in Washington too.

I'm sure it talks in every other state capital in the United States as well.

I mean, it has to, because common sense should prevail, and it doesn't.

How can you pass a bill that takes away the rights of the homeowners when their insurance company doesn't pay them sufficient dollars to fix the problem that was insured and created by a storm?

There were parts of that law that gave the Office of Insurance Regulation additional powers to oversee insurance companies, including their claims practices.

So the Office of Insurance Regulation has additional teeth to go after insurance companies if they're doing something wrong.

I just laugh when I hear the billboard lawyers, as the governor called them, say, "This is taking away the rights of consumers."

If you look at the statistics of the amount of lawsuits that were filed after that bill, thousands of lawsuits have been filed after that bill, as well as before that bill got signed.

You can still call a lawyer.

You can still sue an insurance company.

You just have to pay your own fees.

I think on some level there's been a bill of goods sold, so to speak, right?

You've got these insurance lobbyists that are coming in and placing the focus on one problem in the industry, and for years that's been litigation was the problem.

They didn't necessarily have the data to back it up, but we now see what happens after we fix litigation.

Nothing has changed.

Premiums continue to increase.

The cost of insurance continues to rise, and that's because there are so many other more complicated pieces of this puzzle that had we looked at.

We maybe wouldn't have had to take away so many consumer protections that were solely the focus of a previous insurance commissioner and the governor.

And even worse is that the lawyers who take these cases refuse to acknowledge that there's a free service at the Department of Financial Services that do an awesome job, at helping consumers open a dialogue with their insurance companies.

A lot of times we don't need the litigation.

We simply need communication.

This last storm we had, the big one in Fort Myers, they were touting the 800 number, call us, call us.

Well, that thing was shut off in early afternoon.

So my answer to that is no, you're not going to get much help.

Who's going to do that?

How many employees do they have up there to do it and how much, how well are they trained?

Insurance in many states has become expensive and is hard to get.

Florida homeowners now pay the highest rates in the country.

As a result, many without mortgages are choosing not to buy insurance.

That is taking a huge risk.

Even when you are fully insured, one of the biggest problems after a disaster is which of your policies covers the damage, wind or flood.

And then you have the argument over was it flood or was it homeowners?

And then they get in that argument so it can take years just to get paid.

And if you don't have the money to replace your stuff, then you just got to figure it out, I guess.

Did the wind happen first or did the flood happen first?

And they think an engineer is going to be able to have this answer and say, I know exactly what happened.

Everyone has opinions, but when you're trying to pass along the responsibility to the other party, the person that suffers the most is the consumer.

Very rarely post-storm for a homeowner that has flood insurance and wind insurance do those adjusters show up at the same time.

The homeowner can demand that.

She can say to the wind adjuster, you're not coming until the flood adjuster comes.

So the two of them with the homeowner there, perhaps someone, particularly if the homeowner's elderly or not schooled or feels uncomfortable, have somebody with her that can listen to the two of them talk and take notes and watch the dynamic between the two, you'd be amazed at what would happen if we could just do that one simple thing.

The flood adjuster shows up, the wind adjuster shows up, and they work together.

That is That is absolutely ridiculous.

As a consumer, you can't even get a phone call back from your insurance adjuster.

That's not a solution.

If you can't get one adjuster on the phone, how are you going to get two adjusters at your house and have a conversation?

And they're still going to point the finger at one another.

You know, you take a senior citizen who never had to deal with this before.

Now their roof is torn away from a storm.

They need somebody to represent them.

I assure you that insurance company is not going to represent them.

Insurance company is going to do whatever they can to get that roof fixed for as least amount of money as possible.

And that's if they take care of the claim.

And the claim might not be taken care of for six months down the road.

Maybe now Mary Jones or Fred Smith is now living in a home with a blue roof at the top, not just for months, but for years.

Let me give you some statistics.

96% of all claims are resolved amicably.

Insurance commission will tell you that.

4% go off in another direction.

It's those 4% of claims that make the headlines.

I tell insurance companies all the time, you're only as good as your worst claim.

Totally not true.

Amicably at what point?

That would be a better question.

Five years after the loss when they beat them down?

No, I don't agree with that at all.

Does she tell you how many of them were reopened?

No, you'll never get that figure.

I was completely flabbergasted by what I saw.

I mean, the road was washed out.

Half of Highway 98 was gone.

You would have thought Third World Country where somebody had come in and bombed the place.

After a major disaster, the community faces a crucial choice on rebuilding.

How much to strengthen building codes and whether to enforce these updated standards?

Developers and builders have a big influence on these codes.

We don't allow private industry, who is profit driven, to dictate the safety of my home and the safety of my family.

We should not allow private industry and their profit motors to dictate what building codes are.

I think that one of the problems that we are faced with is that our building codes and our building standards are based off of historical models of what's happened in the past.

We are better prepared than some other areas, I would say, but there's still room for improvement.

We definitely are well practiced in how to evacuate, but as far as the mitigation before the storm, how we build effectively where we build, we could definitely use improvement there.

How do we make sure that when the next storm comes that we're safer?

And it doesn't have to be a Michael.

We're on the second floor of this house, the water was almost four feet deep here.

There was salt water in the bowls in the kitchen cabinets on the second floor, silt in the bowls in the kitchen cabinet.

And so after Hurricane Michael, the city of Mexico Beach did a really good thing.

They realized we don't know what to do.

We've never had this happen before.

Let's pause.

So they put a 90-day moratorium on permits.

Nobody's getting permits till we figure out how do we do this well.

And the FEMA maps were from 2009.

They had draft maps coming out.

So they said, we're going to adopt the draft maps, enforce those.

So the FEMA standard is the 100-year flood.

The Florida Building Code standard is a foot above that.

If you're in that flood zone.

Well, Mexico Beach said, well, let's go to the 500-year flood elevation plus a foot and a half above that, which was still only four feet deep outside.

Michael was 14 feet deep.

So it's still not even, it's 10 feet lower than Michael, but it was a higher standard.

So they enforced that.

And there was a lot of grumbling, you know, rebuilding to a higher standard.

But then it is costly to put piles and rebuild.

So over time, there was a lot of political pressure to drop those standards.

And so in 2020, Mexico Beach rescinded those regulations.

And if you look at the name of the ordinance, the ordinance is actually named Eliminate Elevation Requirements.

That was their name, not mine.

The file name is actually Eliminate Elevation Requirements.

One of the biggest problems a homeowner will have is when water gets into their house.

Flooding can happen anywhere it happens in all 50 states.

Water is the enemy of all homes and all structures, all home ownership.

And so that is the biggest thing.

If you can just manage that, see where it's going, you can handle a lot of other issues.

I was out at a conference in Destin in October, and I literally stood there and watched them building a home, beach front.

It was literally on the sand, and it was a cement slab home with wood frame construction.

And I was like, we're never getting out of this.

We're building these homes that will be destroyed in the storms.

Most of what we see is wood, wood frame construction.

We look at a house behind us, and you see tons and a variety of connectors.

And outside of the wood that makes you feel that everything is weaker, but you have contemporary materials, contemporary connectors.

I'm sure there is a design behind it.

I'm sure there is a design based on reality.

That's the building code.

The problem with that frame construction, although it may be designed to resist, say a category four or category five hurricane, is in reality it's not going to perform the same way as a masonry structure designed to a similar standard would.

It's just simply not going to be as strong.

There's not enough safety in that building for it to be as strong as what the masonry construction is.

In addition to that, you historically have building envelope problems with wood frame structures in which moisture gets in through the cladding of the building and into the structure of itself, and that wood dryrots and degrades.

As it dryrots and degrades, it becomes less effective at resisting high wind forces.

Mexico Beach is not rebuilding back resilient now.

They were to a degree when we had higher standards.

It wasn't nothing.

It was something.

Now it's nothing.

When the next storm hits Mexico Beach, not if, but when, the houses that are built after Mexico Beach dropped their higher standards again, those houses are going to be gone again.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that a six-foot wave coming through and hitting a one-story house is going to take that house away.

Recently, there's been a noticeable increase in wooden apartment construction across Florida.

Do the people living in these buildings understand the risk?

I would not choose to live in a building that was constructed of wood, be it an apartment building, be it a single-family residence or any other type of structure.

To watch these apartment complexes being built, and they're all being built of wood.

When you see these people building all these apartments five years from now, there'll be major substantial structural impairment of those buildings.

Now there is a way to prevent that, and that is properly maintain your buildings.

But people are building these mass buildings, apartments.

They're not going to do it.

Probably five or 10 years, they're going to flip them back into condos.

Then five or 10 years, they're going to flip them back from condos to apartments.

Renters are at a huge risk because you haven't made that choice to buy a home or you don't have the financial resources to do it.

Everything you have is in this rented space.

If you don't know the flood risk and you don't have flood insurance, renters insurance, when the flood comes, you're going to lose it all.

There's only a handful of states that require that renters be given similar information.

Given that the majority of Americans actually rent their homes, they don't own their homes, that's really important.

We tend to think of renters as, "Well, they're only there for a year.

They can just up and move."

But a lot can happen in that year, and a lot of people rent a home for longer than a year.

So it's really important that we are straight with them about the risks that come along with the home they've chosen to live in so they can make an informed choice.

And once they've chosen to live there, that enables them to decide, "Should I buy insurance?

Should I buy flood insurance?"

It just allows them to do a lot more things than they would otherwise.

A lot of our residents are not able to pay for insurance, and that's a real issue.

And one of the things I think that has to happen in this community, we have to figure out a way for our residents to have their own insurance.

A lot of them don't.

As the president and CEO of the Tampa Housing Authority, Jerome Ryan's is aware of the financial means of the people he works with.

He also recognizes that this segment of the population faces challenges with insurance in the wake of a disaster.

I hear people talking all the time about insurance companies and what they're doing and that kind of thing.

So yeah, I think there's a lot of truth in that, but I also think too it's a challenge for everybody too.

You know, not just people that live in our units, but people that live in units throughout the city.

And it's going to continue to be a challenge until the state legislature or the governor decides to address the issue.

Meanwhile, his objective is to construct housing capable of withstanding disasters.

And he rejects the cost-cutting tactics often employed by major developers who build large wood-based units.

I think it's hogwash that pays for itself in the long run.

I think it's just hogwash.

I mean, I just don't buy into that.

If your goal is safety and security for the people that you're here to serve, then you have to consider that and you have to make that a part of your overall cost.

Considering all of Florida is at risk for powerful hurricanes, it's surprising that only South Florida mandates concrete construction in their codes.

The wood industry lobby is a major player in building standards.

One of the biggest things that harms homeowners is not getting enough information about what they are buying.

The Florida legislature just passed a law requiring sellers to disclose past flooding and water damage to a house.

There are still 17 states that don't require disclosure.

My entire neighborhood flooded.

Over 800 people are displaced on what FEMA classified as minor damage, but they're out of their houses.

They're still out of their houses months later.

Barry Capps is a home builder.

He understood the flood risk of buying in this St.

Pete neighborhood, so he built his house two feet above the floodplain.

One of his neighbors, who didn't want to be interviewed, told us when she recently bought her house, she had no idea it had flooded before.

It's now flooded twice since she bought it.

That new disclosure law could have made a major difference for her.

So programs like the National Flood Insurance Program really should be helping us break that cycle of flood rebuild repeat.

But unfortunately, until very recently, the flood insurance program probably played a bigger role in perpetuating those in various ways.

By putting out flood maps that didn't always accurately portray the flood risk today, and said absolutely nothing about the flood risk in the future, by having development standards that have not been updated since the 1970s.

I had a resident ask a city commissioner at one commission meeting I was watching.

He said, "Why are you trying to protect us from Michael?

Michael's gone."

And this was somebody whose house had been completely washed away by the waves.

He was demanding that Mexico Beach let him rebuild to the FEMA minimum, which was Slab-on-Great Home, in an area that had a nine-foot wave come through it.

That resident had lost everything, and he was demanding to rebuild so he could do it again.

The resiliency conversation is really getting watered down, no pun intended.

Assume if it rains where you live, you can experience flooding.

But there are things that can be done to protect your house.

Imagine if builders insisted on only building safe houses, not just a code, but exceeding the code.

And I would definitely say buyer beware.

Avoid buying a ground level home in an area that's been flooded in the past, because it will be flooded again in the future.

When purchasing a new house, it's essential to push for additional measures so both your family and your house survive.

This is especially important since 80 percent of houses are built on speculation, often meeting only the minimum required standards.

The best way to do it is to get the home above where the flood's going to be and then have that as your garage, have that as a crawl space, have it as storage space, have those flood openings there so that water gets in and out so it doesn't damage the foundation walls.

If you really want to increase your safety, look for communities that insist on higher standards.

Babcock Ranch was hit by Hurricane Ian, but they had a plan for it and the plan worked.

We actually started the process in 2005 and I said we're going to create the most sustainable new town that's ever been built.

I expected to walk out and have a lot of damage from roofs coming off, trees, and I mean there was damage, there was definitely damage, but it wasn't anything that wasn't fixable pretty quickly.

I mean within a week you couldn't even tell a hurricane had gone through this town.

The big myth is that you can't afford to do it the right way, that you can't build a home that is resilient, you can't build a community, a new town that is resilient.

That's a myth.

If you do it right from the beginning, you don't have those legacy issues.

From day one you plan it the right way, you do it the right way, it is affordable.

Babcock Ranch's location helps.

They are inland, 17 miles from the nearest coast.

The elevation is 30 feet above sea level.

They have built in natural waterways to help with drainage and they have a strict building code for builders to follow.

If a home is not built in a resilient manner and you have a storm that we're seeing so often today, the return on that initial investment is extremely valuable because to have to rebuild something that wasn't built the right way is very, very costly.

I've received phone calls from all over the country, all over the world, people saying, "Hey, do you mind if we take your playbook and use that playbook?"

And I go, "Absolutely."

It is the greatest compliment to have somebody come in and say, "Hey, I want to do this the way you guys are doing it."

My only request is that not only do you do what we're doing, but do it better.

The average house that is constructed to the minimum standards of the building code is likely under-designed and under-constructed to resist the full forces of a Cat 5 hurricane like Hurricane Ian.

The Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council did a mock projection of what a Category 5 hurricane would do to this area and the numbers are staggering.

The downtown area could get up to 26 feet of water, half a million buildings destroyed, over 840,000 households displaced, and 2,000 people killed.

If a hurricane like Ian were to have a direct hit on Tampa Bay, Tampa Bay would act as a funnel in order to take all that storm surge and it would push it up inland into the peninsula of South Tampa and to downtown Tampa and to other areas of Hillsborough County.

And you would see hundreds of thousands of structures damaged, probably a million people displaced, and damage that would be on the avenue of billions of dollars.

While many communities aim to improve infrastructure or install systems to prevent flood damage from storms, frequently these measures are not adequately practiced or deployed.

As a result, when a storm hits, they are unprepared, endangering both property and personal safety.

The fact is that maybe it doesn't flood somewhere for five years.

They had to buy these flood mitigation products.

Flood comes, nobody remembers they have these flood protection products that are awesome flood protection products, by the way.

If you deploy these things, you're not going to get any water in the building, right?

The problem is they don't know where they are.

They have never practiced actually deploying them and that's a big issue we're seeing in the industry.

The bottom line wherever you live is you need to have a good understanding that you might be buying or living in a house that won't survive wind, water, or fire.

And if you are betting everything on that happily ever after spin of the wheel, you are taking a big chance if you don't do your research.

I'll give you this.

If you want a friend in a transaction, in a process of a transaction, real estate or otherwise, get a dog.

There's no friends when you're buying something.

You've got to do it yourself.

And if you're buying in a certain location, again, like I encourage your viewers to understand their insurance policy, know what you're buying.

I've dealt with tens of thousands of victims from natural disasters.

Nobody thinks it's going to happen to them even when they're watching it happen all over their state.

Even when they see it happen, people sort of live in this denial.

So the home that you thought was really nice when it was new, was built affordable, that you thought you had insurance for, it actually becomes a drain on you.

It becomes a problem, not an opportunity.

It's not the American dream anymore.

It's the American system that banks and insurance companies have trained us to believe in and to be a part of.

That's a scary thing.

If you have a high income earner earning $350,000 a year, a husband and wife, and they have a roof claim and they have to pay $25,000 out of their pocket for a hurricane deductible to replace their roof, they'll find a way to make it happen.

But the single mother that's working at the retail store, barely clearing $38,000 a year, where is she going to come up with $10,000 or $15,000 for a deductible?

They're the ones that suffer the most.

People of means will find a way to get through it, but the people that don't have means, they'll suffer the most.

They'll get hurt the most.

Raising the bar for home building is a critical step toward fostering social equity.

So, what steps can each of us take right now to have control of our destiny?

People that come down from other parts of the United States, they typically want to be on the coast.

They want to be as close to the water as they can.

But the reality is that when you're close to the coast and you're close to the water, that means that you're putting yourself in harm's way.

The goal of my efforts is that to have consumers become their own detectives, their own advocates, understand how houses work and be able to take responsibility for understanding each house as they look at it, because they do have to investigate.

Well, I think for a coastal property owner, I think my first advice is rent, don't buy.

The coastline has always been somewhat perilous to live on.

What causes a disaster isn't the hurricane.

It isn't the fact that sea levels are arising.

It's the fact that we've decided to place permanent buildings on a place that was never intended to be permanent.

If it's a coastal environment, a coastal market that you're looking at, you should absolutely do your research and ask your realtor, "What do you know about flooding in this area?"

Because an experienced one is going to be honest with you and tell you where to look for, where to not, and it should be on everybody's mind.

It seems like the wake-up call lasts for a day.

Then we forget.

If I had to look at it from a conservation standpoint, I would say no, it's not worth the risk.

Anybody that lives on these islands is putting themselves in harm's way every day.

Those that make the choice to live here, they need to make sure that whatever home they live in, that it's built as resilient as possible.

But if they really want to protect themselves, they should live elsewhere.

You need to understand the potential hazards that your area may experience, whether that's seismic activity out west, wildfires out west, or anywhere else, or tropical weather.

You need to understand what those hazards are.

If you're looking at a specific home, does it have a history of flooding?

What building code was it built to?

Understanding those hazards beforehand and what you can do to mitigate a home if you were to purchase one, you need to do your homework beforehand as much as possible.

There's a lot of studies out there that show how people's behavior changes when you just tell them the facts.

And guess what they found?

They found that when people are told that this area is really high risk and this area is a little low risk, is lower risk, they actually stop looking in at homes in the high risk areas and they start looking at homes in the lower risk areas.

It's a miracle, right?

Like, wow, we told people the truth and they did the right, they made the right choice with it.

If somebody gives you an opportunity or the education or a state program in order to harden your home so that when a disaster hits, not if when the disaster hits, you do not get hit as badly, your life is not impacted as badly, your family's lives aren't in jeopardy, and you don't have to go through that storm after the storm nightmare, you need to get on top of it.

The decision rests with you.

The actions you take or fail to take can significantly shape what happens to your family and your home.

Intelligent planning, resilient building, and personal mitigation is everything.

It is way easier to not get wiped out by the storm than it is to talk about, hey, what can we do to recover after the disaster happens?

Funding for Built to Last: Buyer Beware was made possible by The Florida Association of Public Insurance Adjusters.

Advocating for policyholders and resilient communities.

Online at getreadyflorida.com And by overcoming obstacles, helping children learn how to communicate well, set meaningful goals and make good decisions.

Information for educators available at oolifeskills.org.

And by Packets of Hope, a memoir of resilience and purpose about finding hope even in life's most difficult moments.

Available at packetsofhope.com.