The Luxury Wildfire Insurance Scramble: What Peninsula Owners Are Actually Doing This Spring

Fire season starts in a few weeks. The grass on the ridges behind Portola Valley and Woodside is already drying out. And almost every owner I talk to in those neighborhoods is in some stage of an insurance headache.

The headache isn't theirs alone. In 2024, State Farm non-renewed roughly 72,000 California homeowner policies, with a heavy concentration in the same wildfire-exposed ZIP codes where I manage property. Allstate stopped writing new California homeowner policies back in 2022 and has only partially reversed course. Farmers capped its book. The admitted market pulled back from the hills, and the people most exposed are the ones with the most house to insure.

I'm not an insurance broker. I manage luxury rentals in Atherton, Palo Alto, Los Altos Hills, Woodside, Portola Valley, Hillsborough, and Menlo Park. But when a carrier drops a client three weeks before fire season, the call tends to come to me first, because I'm the one with keys and vendors and a plan. So I've watched a lot of owners work through this problem in real time over the last 24 months. A few patterns have held up.

Why the FAIR Plan alone doesn't work for an $8 million house

The California FAIR Plan raised its dwelling limit from $1.5 million to $3 million in 2023. That helped. It's still not enough for a custom home in Woodside that would cost $8 to $10 million to rebuild at current construction prices.

The other thing people miss about FAIR Plan: it's a dwelling-only product. No contents. No liability. No loss of use if your family has to live somewhere else for a year while the house is rebuilt. For a primary residence, that's a real gap. For a luxury rental, where the loss-of-use line covers rent I'd otherwise be collecting, it's a dealbreaker.

So the FAIR Plan on its own is almost never the answer at the price points I work with. What it is, usually, is half of a wrap.

The wrap: FAIR Plan plus a DIC policy

The structure most of my owners have landed on is a wrap. FAIR Plan covers the dwelling up to its $3 million cap, and a difference-in-conditions (DIC) policy from a surplus-lines carrier sits on top. The DIC handles everything FAIR Plan doesn't: the rebuild cost above $3 million, contents, liability, loss of use, water damage, theft.

The carriers writing those DIC policies are mostly the high-net-worth specialists. Chubb Masterpiece. Cincinnati. PURE. Berkshire Hathaway Guard. AIG Private Client. A handful of Lloyd's syndicates through a wholesale broker. These are non-admitted in California, which means they don't have to follow Department of Insurance rate filings, which is exactly why they will write in wildfire zones when admitted carriers won't.

The premiums aren't gentle. I have clients paying two to four times what they paid in 2021 for equivalent coverage. One owner in Portola Valley went from about $14,000 a year to $48,000 for a larger total insured value. That's the going rate. Arguing with it doesn't help.

Private fire crews are no longer exotic

Wildfire Defense Systems is the name that comes up most often. They contract with Chubb, USAA, PURE, Cincinnati, Berkshire Hathaway Guard, AIG Private Client, and American Modern, and during an evacuation they deploy crews to defend the specific homes their partner carriers insure. Gel coatings on the exterior. Ember patrols. Generators to keep sprinklers running when PG&E shuts off power. Mt. Adams Wildfire Defense runs a similar program.

Five years ago this felt like a luxury add-on. Today a few of the E&S carriers effectively require it as part of the underwriting package in the highest-risk ZIP codes, and if your carrier offers it and you haven't opted in, you're leaving money on the table. Enrollment is usually free to the homeowner because the carrier pays for it. The 2018 Camp Fire and the 2025 Eaton and Palisades fires changed the math for insurers on what it costs to send a private crew versus what it costs to rebuild a house.

Home hardening actually moves the premium now

The other thing that changed is that home hardening is no longer a soft recommendation. Under the Safer from Wildfires regulation the California Department of Insurance finalized in 2022 and implemented through 2024, carriers that want to sell here have to give premium credit for specific mitigation steps. Class A roof. Ember-resistant vents. A zero-to-five-foot noncombustible zone around the structure, which means no bark mulch against the house and no wood fencing attached to it. Defensible space cleared to 100 feet. Double-paned tempered windows.

I've seen individual owners cut their premiums 15 to 25 percent by working through that checklist in a single summer. The cheapest items on the list, vent retrofits and clearing combustible material in the first five feet, are often the ones with the biggest discount attached. A landscape crew can handle most of it in a long weekend. Replacing wood shake roofing is a different conversation, but if you're already due for a roof, don't put wood shake back up.

Where the admitted carriers actually are right now

Commissioner Lara's Sustainable Insurance Strategy, finalized in late 2024, gave insurers two things they had been asking for: the ability to use catastrophe modeling in rate filings, and the ability to pass through reinsurance costs. In exchange, carriers signing on committed to writing a minimum share of policies in distressed wildfire areas.

State Farm and Allstate both announced plans in late 2025 to start writing again in California. As of this week, what I'm seeing on the ground is cautious. State Farm is renewing some policies it previously non-renewed, and taking a trickle of new business in lower-risk parts of the Peninsula. Allstate is writing some new policies but hasn't come back to the hillside ZIPs in Woodside or Portola Valley in any real volume. If you were dropped in 2024, I wouldn't assume you can just walk back to your old carrier. Most of my clients who have tried have been quoted 40 to 60 percent above what they used to pay, when they get quoted at all.

A practical order of operations

If I were an owner sitting on a $5 to $15 million property in one of the wildfire-exposed Peninsula ZIPs this spring, this is roughly the sequence I'd run.

Get a current wildfire risk score. Your carrier likely uses either Zesty.ai's Z-FIRE model or a CoreLogic score under the hood. Ask for yours. A broker who works high-net-worth accounts can pull it. Knowing whether you're a 5 or a 9 on a 10-point scale changes which carriers will even quote you.

Walk the Safer from Wildfires checklist with your landscaper and your general contractor. The zero-to-five-foot zone is the one almost everyone fails on. Wood chip mulch against the foundation. A wood gate that touches the siding. A cedar deck with no ember skirt underneath. Fix those first.

If your carrier partners with Wildfire Defense Systems or a similar private suppression program, enroll. It's a checkbox, not a negotiation.

If you're on the FAIR Plan for dwelling, get a DIC quote from a wholesale broker who actually works the high-value market. Chubb, PURE, and Cincinnati are the names to ask about. A wrap is almost always better than trying to stretch a single admitted policy over the whole risk.

And if you rent the property out, make sure your lease, your loss-of-use coverage, and your management protocols all line up. A year ago I wrote about protecting a luxury property while renting it out, and insurance is the part of that protocol that owners most often get wrong. At these values, an uninsured gap in loss-of-use alone can run into six figures.

None of this is a crisis if you start now. In July, when the first red flag warning hits, the brokers get very hard to reach.

If you own a luxury property in a Peninsula wildfire zone and want a second set of eyes on your insurance setup before fire season, schedule a confidential consultation. I'll tell you what I'm seeing from other owners in your ZIP code and who is actually writing right now.

Sources

• Safer from Wildfires Regulation — California Department of Insurance
• Sustainable Insurance Strategy — California Department of Insurance
• California FAIR Plan Coverage and Limits — California FAIR Plan Association
• State Farm General Insurance Non-Renewal Announcement — State Farm
• Wildfire Defense Systems Partner Carriers — Wildfire Defense Systems
• California Insurers Pulling Back from Homeowners Market — Insurance Journal
• The California Insurance Crisis, Explained — KQED