Okay, welcome everyone, and thanks for joining us today at the Sidoti Year-End Conference. My name is Brennan McCarthy. I'm an analyst with Sidoti, and I'm very pleased to welcome American Coastal Insurance Corporation, the ticker is ACIC. Joining us from the company are President and CEO Brad Martz, as well as CFO Lana Castle. And before I hand it over, a quick reminder that the Q&A tab is located at the bottom of your screen. Feel free to type in any questions throughout the presentation, and we can save time for Q&A at the end. But with that said, I'll hand it over to Lana.
Thanks, Brennan. I think I'll start today. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Brad Martz, President and CEO. With me is our Chief Financial Officer, Lana Castle. We've got a great story to tell and excited to share it with you today. American Coastal is a specialty insurer focused on commercial residential property insurance in Florida today. We expect to change that over time by introducing new products and commercial property insurance outside of Florida. That is the real growth catalyst we're super excited about for our organization. But today, we do enjoy a number one market share, insuring roughly 4,300 of the roughly 17,000 or so condominium associations in the state of Florida. Over the last 18 years, we've managed to earn an underwriting profit every year since our inception in 2007, and we've seen almost every condominium association in the market and had a chance to underwrite it.
So we feel like we've got a good feel on the market. We've got the best of the best. It's a very sticky business, and we feel like it's a screaming buy as the perceived volatility is actually far greater than the actual volatility in our business. So this is really a capital-light model with consistent, reliable earnings and a very low PE multiple. So we went through a strategic transformation a few years back to exit personal loans. We used to have a very large $1 billion-plus homeowners business in 13 states. Starting in July 2020, Dan Peed, who's the founder of the company and also the founder of AmRisc, our underwriting partner, came in as CEO, appointed me President. We embarked upon this transformation to reduce our exposure to personal loans, homeowners, and grow our commercial business.
Ultimately, in 2022, we decided that was no longer feasible, and we voluntarily submitted plans of runoff for the homeowners business in the three remaining states we had not yet sold and divested ourselves off. Ultimately, by the beginning of 2023, we had successfully divested of all our personal lines exposures. For the last three years now, this will mark the third year in a row where we have been 100% focused on commercial residential insurance business in Florida. The investment thesis for our company is pretty simple. This is a highly specialized line of business. Unlike homeowners or auto or life health, other commodity-type businesses that lend themselves to size and scale and market share, this business obviously can be very profitable, but it's technically far more challenging both to underwrite and to administer after a major disaster from a claims perspective.
So we're focused on risks with above-average risk characteristics. What that means is low-rise, garden-style commercial residential buildings. So think three stories or less, further inland away from the coast, multiple smaller buildings around a lake or a golf course in Florida. That's our market. Not the high-value oceanfront high-rises. Those are risks that are typically going to be underwritten in the excess and surplus lines or E&S market nationwide. We write our average total insured value is about $16 million, and we focus on properties between $5 million-$60 million. That's our sweet spot of insured value. I already mentioned we've been consistently profitable even in the bad years. Our mantra is that we want to remain profitable even after a major hurricane event in Florida in any one quarter, and we want to remain profitable for a full calendar year even after three major hurricane events in Florida.
And we've been able to achieve that throughout our history, and 18 years is certainly no accident. We have this exclusive underwriting arrangement with AmRisc, which is unique. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. AmRisc was a company founded by Dan Peed back in 2000, was part of the Truist Insurance Holdings while owned by Truist Financial Corporation, and ultimately was sold to Stone Point for about $15 billion a few years back, and we still maintain a strong relationship with them. But we spun out of that Truist Insurance Holdings as American Coastal used to be affiliated with AmRisc, but no longer is. We utilize tremendous amounts of reinsurance. I'll turn it over to Lana here in a minute to talk about the ways we protect capital and earnings by transferring the vast majority of all the risk we write.
We want to take a very small slice of the risk and leverage third-party capital to manage and transfer the risk around the world, and the growth opportunity via Skyway is really what we're excited about. We've got a mature, stable business in Florida that's been around since 2007, but we've formed our own MGA internally and built a team of underwriters, systems, some proprietary technology we're super excited about. We launched a new product this year in apartments, followed by assisted living and independent living facilities that mirror the risk characteristics of our condo book underwritten by AmRisc, so now we can access the same distribution channels that we've had success with on the condo side through other forms of commercial property, underwriting that directly ourselves through Skyway.
We will still partner with AmRisc, and we're not trying to necessarily compete with AmRisc on stuff outside of Condos, but our relationship with them is only exclusive to Florida and Condos, so any other product and state, we have the ability to compete and do it directly. Here is an example of some of the historical underwriting profitability that was masked or buried within the larger insurance group when we had the personal lines business, so we've kind of recast the numbers here to show what that commercial segment looked like on a standalone underwriting basis, and the results are pretty significantly transformed post-personal lines in 2003 due to a variety of factors, but most notably, improving market conditions helped that as well, including some of the insurance reforms that were implemented in the state of Florida.
So with that, I won't rehash what we've talked about with AmRisc other than that our contract is a five-year deal. That's the maximum term the state of Florida allows us to enter into any agreement with a managing general agency for. So our historical pattern has been to get to about the mid-year point, get to year two or three, and then renegotiate a max extension. We just did that last year. So this current agreement will take us through 2029. And because it's so mutually beneficial and because AmRisc doesn't. They're a fee-for-service operator. They don't want to take the catastrophe risk. They love the capital and the capacity we bring to the table, and it's a partnership that's just worked phenomenally well for a long, long time. And so no expected changes to that in the foreseeable future.
From an underwriting strategy standpoint, I think I talked a little bit about some of these things, but underwriting profit is job one. We are an underwriting risk-focused carrier. Dan Peed, our founder, is a loss prevention engineer. He comes out of that world from his days at Factory Mutual or today FM Global and the reinsurance space and translated that into a successful formula that turned AmRisc into one of the country's largest commercial property MGAs and has made American Coastal so successful. We set the strategy for underwriting at AmRisc, meaning we set the underwriting guidelines and communicate those to AmRisc on a monthly basis as we review results and the changes in the risk portfolio, and then they're the execution. They set the strategy and how to work with the brokers to negotiate terms and conditions to win new business and renewal business.
And they do a masterful job of working with the probable maximum loss P&L capacity that we provide to them to load our portfolio with the best risks at the right price. But we just write property only, no casualty business, so no liability exposure. It's short-tail property only, no contents or flood either. And one of the key secrets to our success is by focusing on commercial risks in Florida that are at least $5 million of insured value, we are not beholden to follow our filed rates with the state of Florida. So we've got freedom of rate and price our business just like it's priced in the E&S market. Yet as an admitted carrier, we get access to the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund and are backed by the Florida Insurance Guarantee Association, which is great. So for habitational property, that is true.
And for non-habitational property, the pricing flexibility will also be true, but you wouldn't have access to the subsidized reinsurance of the CAT Fund. So that's why we're so heavily concentrated today on the commercial residential market. Underwriting discipline can be seen in our results over time. This chart doesn't do the best job of doing it, but I can tell you back in 2012, 2013, we were bigger than we were in 2014 and 2015. That was the last time we entered a real softening cycle, and you can see the market. Our premiums bottomed in 2017 right before Hurricane Irma ushered in kind of the modern hard market cycle. And today, we're starting to enter into a new softening cycle where pricing is coming down because expected loss costs are coming down and reinsurance costs are coming down.
So it doesn't necessarily mean margins are being negatively impacted, although our expectation for a combined ratio is always going to be somewhere between 65% and 75%. That's the range we believe it's been in throughout the company's 18-year history and will continue to be in on the higher side in a softening part of the cycle and on the lower side in a hard part of the cycle. But we feel very good about still being in a risk-on, high return on capital underwriting environment despite some of the softening and coming off of peak pricing we saw in 2023 and 2024. Valuation is also a super important part of what we do. This is in relation to inflation. So think about total insured value and us keeping up because we sell a replacement cost policy.
It's super important for us to understand what's changing with labor and material costs as we think about having to replace a property that was damaged by an event. So we're keeping tabs on a regular basis each and every month using pretty sophisticated tools to estimate and increase insured values to fight inflation, which does help drive premiums even in the face of rate decreases. Okay. That was a lot. Lana.
Thank you, Brad.
Our insurance. Thank you.
As Brad mentioned, I'm going to cover reinsurance and some of our key financial results. Risk transfer is key to our business. As a result, we purchase very robust reinsurance to make sure that we are protected from the volatility in the market. The perception is that reinsurance in Florida has a lot of volatility due to unpredictable catastrophe patterns, but we feel with the program we have in place, we are very well protected, and our results can actually be very accurately predicted. Our main reinsurance program is our catastrophe reinsurance, which is for either named or numbered hurricane events or tropical storms. Our retention is $30 million on the first event and about $19 million on the second event, with our total overall being $1.3 billion. So we feel with this program in place, we are very well protected for the catastrophe season, and I'll now share additional reinsurance we have in place to protect us from other events.
To further strengthen our catastrophe reinsurance, new in 2025, we've introduced our aggregate CAT reinsurance program, which is a protection from aggregate catastrophe in excess of $40 million with an occurrence cap of $20 million. So in a year where we'll have high severity, high frequency type of catastrophe events, this is a really good, robust coverage to have in place. And the important part about this reinsurance is that it covers all perils. In addition to the named and numbered catastrophe reinsurance, we also purchase what's called AOP or all other perils. Look at it as other weather type of events that did not meet the definition of a named hurricane. It could be windstorms such as hailstorms, tornadoes, or some other severe convective storms. Our coverage is up to $100 million with a retention of $10 million.
Looking at our results historically, we've never come any close to the $100 million in losses, but nevertheless, we do feel we want to have that protection in place just for the years where we potentially will experience some very high frequency events with this particular type of weather situations. Excess per risk, and I think I saw a question in our Q&A queue to discuss why or how we purchase this coverage. This is the coverage of up to $60 million with a limit of $4 million per event. And the events covered here are. They're not limited to, but mostly it's your water damage, but not flood. We don't cover the flood damage, fire, sinkhauls, and let's say events something like a building collapse on a policy basis.
So if we do have, our attritional loss ratio has been historically very low, but in the event we have an unusual amount of fires, given that we have some high-value properties in place, we do think it's important to have this coverage. Brad started covering overall our product mix distribution channels and our relationship with AmRisc. In 2025, we've launched the new program through our own MGA Skyway to underwrite apartments. The reason we picked apartments is because it is very similar in risk characteristics to the condo book of business that we've been writing successfully for many years. The only difference is the occupancy. You will have tenant occupancy versus the owner occupancy that comes with condos.
And to further accelerate the growth of our own MGA, just in the last month, we've introduced the assisted living facility as a product because it met our risk appetite really well, given that, again, the property risk is very similar, but given that usually those properties are very well maintained and they usually have attendants 24/7, the attritional loss ratio should be very low, and the catastrophe losses will be similar to their apartments and the condos that we've been writing. So our internal MGA currently is one of our growth plans in the years to come. I will briefly cover our consolidated financial results. You all, of course, can view the detail in our Q&A filings, but year to date in 2025, as of September, our gross premium earned was a little bit short of $500 million, and net premium earned is $228 million.
I think it's important to mention that on a net basis, our net premium earned has grown substantially because we can manage it through our insurance program. We have the quota share in place. Given how profitable our book has been, we've reduced quota share coverage in the second half of 2024, and we've enjoyed the full benefit of that in 2025. So the net premium has grown substantially, about 15%. Our core return on equity is 37.9%, a very strong result, and current book value per share is $671. The final financial slide here, prior to going into liquidity, just shows selected balance sheet data, o ur stockholders' equity is $1.2 million as of September 2025, and our total cash and cash equivalents have grown to $270 million from $137 million as of December 31st, 2024.
As a result, given our strong capitalization, this is our growth opportunity, and given our strong cash result and liquidity, we feel we have enough means to support growth without having to go into the market and potentially raise debt. The next slide just shows the historical trend of the growth in liquidity and shareholders' value. You can see the results here going all the way back to the first quarter of 2023, and you can see, with the exception of some quarters, overall, we have experienced growth every single quarter. Finally, I'd like to cover our capital allocation thesis and methodology. Long term, our plan is to have the leverage ratio of less than 25%. We do have some debt maturing in 2027.
At that time, we plan to reduce it and maybe finance the other portion, but not fully eliminate it for as long as, again, we stay under 25% as our long-term capital. On the equity piece, we do have a lot of questions about our capital allocation, our dividends, and buybacks. Currently, we feel that special dividends will create the best shareholders' value long term, given that we are in a catastrophe business. It provides us with the flexibility of declaring dividends at the end of the year. The slide here shows the dividends that were declared in 2024 and paid in 2025. We did issue the press release the other week that the dividends that were $0.50 per share in 2024 are now $0.75 per share with their payment as of January 9th, 2026.
Overall, we have been also considering their buybacks, but it's going to be ultimately the board decision. We'll closely monitor the price. If the price drops below the level that's currently set for us, we will consider buybacks as a strategy as well. But again, currently, as I just mentioned, special dividends is our plan. This concludes our prepared presentation, and we're happy to take questions at this point.
Thank you.
One question, Brandon, if I may, that wasn't addressed in the chat. And I think it's a good one that we should talk about. The question was, why is the focus on reducing earnings volatility through reinsurance rather than maximizing average earnings over a long haul? And I would state that the last three years, it was super important for us to rebuild the capital base of the company and get ourselves into an excess capital position before we take more risk. We had just undergone a pretty painful strategic transformation, and to say we were a little gun-shy was probably an understatement.
So I think the conservative, right approach was to lean on third-party capital a bit more, rebuild those relationships as well, which were damaged by the personal lines challenges we had in the previous five years. So I'm not saying it'll be that way forever. I do think there is a, and I believe I can prove there is a high correlation to market cap and valuation as it relates to earnings volatility. That being said, yeah, our job is to maximize earnings over the long term.
And I do think taking an appropriate amount of risk relative to the capital we have. And you got to remember, three years ago, our captive, for example, had very little in the way of capital to deploy. Today, it's got close to $60 million of excess capital to deploy and to help fill in spots where the expected return on capital is very high. We'll gladly take those lines and co-participate in layers of our reinsurance program with our own balance sheet where it makes sense, and we can earn outsized returns for shareholders. So you'll see more of that over time.
Great. Thanks for that detail, Brad. And we can turn to a couple of questions here from the attendees. The first one is on the non-hurricane coverage, such as the AOP program that you talked about. We have a question here that says, “Can you expand on these non-hurricane programs, why they're needed or why they're important, and how it fits into your strategy, and what percentage of the overall book of business does it comprise?”
Well, nobody likes surprises, right? So I think it would be disingenuous to say we don't need any of this protection and just take all the exposure net. Because we write high-value stuff, there's no question we have some exposure. We have less exposure to severe convective storm than other carriers do nationwide. Because most of our businesses in the southeast and southwest parts of Florida, we don't see a lot of tornado and hailstorm events. Those are the leading causes of damage that would be covered under the non-hurricane CAT reinsurance program, and Lana mentioned it.
We've had five events in our 18-year history that have been over $5 million. Most of them are all within our retention, but the largest event we had was a $24 million hailstorm loss in Brevard County, Florida, back in 2019. So it's those type of freak events that we don't want earnings surprises from. So it probably, not probably, it definitely makes sense to us not necessarily to expose any more capital than we have to to these types of events. Obviously, we expect them to all be earnings events, not capital events. So I should probably say expose our earnings power to these events, not capital. But they do happen, and they can be significant. And if you get the wrong tornado in the wrong place, you could easily have a $70 million, $80 million, $90 million loss. Have we ever had one? No. Could it happen? Yes, it could.
And that's why we built this protection. The $100 million doesn't seem like a lot, but from a model perspective, it's close to the 500-year return period on AIR, less so on RMS. But we don't believe the models. We have our own view of risk and have stress-tested it around our peak zones of concentration to understand what could happen, and that's why we buy what we buy.
That makes sense. And we have a great question here. Just looking at your revamped underwriting, the efforts you've made to minimize earnings volatility, what aspects of the business do you think that investors are missing here or maybe underestimating, just given the relatively flat trend in the stock price over the last year?
Well, I definitely think they're missing the growth prospects for our company. We have talked for quite some time about the potential we have to export our unique underwriting capabilities to other products and to other geographies and now that we've spent the last three years rebuilding our balance sheet and demonstrating the earnings power of the business, and the last 12 months building out Skyway, launching into apartments, and we've put the team together, the platform together, systems, and all the capabilities needed to really leverage that into something that could be transformational for the company.
The only hesitation I have is the insurance cycle. market cycle is entering a more difficult phase nationwide, not just in Florida, that is still ripe for underwriting profitability if you select risk carefully and properly but that being said, you just have to be more careful and diligent about how you're doing it. So we'll let our partners lead us on the growth front instead of chasing growth, which we believe is a challenge and can be very dangerous in the insurance business. So letting our whaulsale distribution partners and AmRisc lead us to profitable risks is how we're going to deploy capital.
And obviously, there are other avenues we haven't talked about on that front, but we'll talk more about in January as we try and paint a picture on our fireside chat on January 14th to what this company will look like in five years, where I do think you'll see more balance in terms of the premium and exposures between what's underwritten through AmRisc and what's underwritten internally through Skyway and both inside and outside of Florida. That's my objective today is, first and foremost, underwriting profit. If we can't earn an acceptable return, we won't do it. We'll shrink if we have to in that kind of environment. But for the most part, we think there's clear skies ahead for expanding the pie for which we'll drive earnings per share higher over time.
Well, that's great, Brad a nd Lana, we really appreciate the time and the outlook there. Very exciting for the company. We appreciate everybody joining us today.
Thank you.
Thanks for having us.
Thanks, everybody. Have a great day.