Good morning, everyone. Thanks for being with us here today. Our next presenter of the day is Meryl Golden, with Kingstone Companies. The floor is yours.
Who is excited to learn about property insurance? I knew that there would be no seats available in the room this morning. Nice to meet you all, and thank you for taking the time to learn about Kingstone. My name is Meryl Golden. I'm the President and Chief Executive Officer of Kingstone. I've been with the company about five and a half years, but I've spent almost my entire career in the insurance industry, other than a small stint where I left to work for a hedge fund. I spent my time at Progressive Insurance, which you may have heard that I was there for 19 years, and then Liberty Mutual, then worked for an insurtech out of Tel Aviv before joining Kingstone as the CEO. A little bit about Kingstone.
We are a regional property and casualty insurer, but most of our business is property insurance in downstate New York. If you think about, for example, Long Island, where it's surrounded by water, there's not many companies that really want to write that type of business. That is our niche. We're a catastrophe-exposed property writer. The New York market is non-core, and we call New York core. The reason being that we lost a lot of money in those states, and we retrenched, and I'm going to talk about that today. I forgot to say that what I'm going to talk about today is Kingstone's journey. When I joined the company, I was hired to modernize the company and turn the company around, and we have done that in a really dramatic way.
That is what I'm going to talk about today, is tell you a little bit about the catastrophe-exposed homeowners market, as well as our journey to profitability. As I said, downstate New York is our core market. We were writing in other northeastern states, but withdrew pretty much from those states. We just reduced our business in those states. Of my five years at Kingstone, the first four, we're really rebuilding the company. I'm going to talk about that. We lost money. We came out of this tailspin in the fourth quarter of 2023, and we have made incredible profits since then. 2024 was the year where all of the hard work over the round of the company really showed into Kingstone's financial result. For the year of 2024, we improved on just about every metric.
For perspective, our premium in our New York state, our core state of New York, was up 31%. Our profit improved by $25 million over the prior year, and our stock price increased from $2- $15 in 2024. It was really a banner year, and I'm going to take you on the journey to how we got to those fantastic results. Just a little history of the company. Believe it or not, we've been in business since 1886. How many companies can say that? We weren't called Kingstone. The companies had a lot of different names, but we became publicly traded on NASDAQ in 2009. What I'm going to share with you is our journey since becoming a public company.
After Kingstone became public, for the first, I don't know, eight or nine years, we had incredible results. So 20% growth, 20% ROE consistently every year until we did not. What happened is that competitors entered into our niche market space, and we, unfortunately, during that period of 2020, had not really made requisite investments in the company, in people, or systems, or product. When the competitors entered the space, we did not know how to respond. That was one of the reasons that I was hired, to help the company change path. The other thing to know about Kingstone and also the property insurance market generally is that our results are very impacted by macroeconomic factors. If you think about, let's say, 2022, 2023, there were headwinds that impacted our results.
It took us a bit longer to turn the company around because of those headwinds. Three that I'll mention, one is inflation. When there's inflation, it costs more to settle claims. Typically, there's a lag. You have to pay the claims before you can file a rate increase to price for the claims. Inflation is typically a headwind that affects property insurer results. Right now, with the tariffs, if you think about it, for auto insurance, for example, there's the cost of new cars. The cars aren't even available. Costs are going up. It's taking longer to repair. Auto parts are coming internationally. All of those things, all of that inflation impacts the auto insurance industry as well, and they will have to raise prices to consumers. Inflation is a headwind. A second is the reinsurance market. It was hard.
What a hard market means is rates are going up. For particularly a catastrophe-exposed property insurer, reinsurance costs are the largest cost. If rates are going up, that really has an impact on our bottom line. The third is interest rates going up. Most insurers have a large part of their investment portfolio in bonds. If interest rates go up, bond values go down. Those headwinds were impacting us during this turnaround period. Some of those headwinds have now become tailwinds for us in terms of our result. I would be remiss if I did not also mention global warming. I guarantee you, maybe five out of seven nights, you turn on the news and what do you see? Another catastrophe event around the world.
What's happened in the marketplace is companies you've heard of, like State Farm, Allstate, Travelers, they have taken a—they don't want to write as much catastrophe-exposed property insurance because of the volatility in their results. Global warming has created more frequent and more significant catastrophe events than ever before. As these very large carriers are withdrawing or writing less of this business, it's created a whole industry of insurance companies who are focused on and specialists in catastrophe-exposed property insurance. That's what Kingstone is. In terms of the turnaround, this is a busy slide, but there's a bunch of things that we did. We had kind of two strategies to turn the company around. The first we called Kingstone areas of the insurance company. We hired a lot of great people. We got off our legacy systems.
I'm sure you've heard that across lots of different industries, the need to do that. We developed a new product that better matches rate to risk. Key in insurance is understanding how to price. Having a product that can match the price to the cost of paying claims is really important. We developed and rolled out a new product using advanced data science that does a better job of that. Last, we just kind of challenged everything we do and put some processes in place to improve our results. As an example, a lot of costs in property insurance is for roofing. If someone's home has a roof that is old, chances are when there's a big storm, there's going to be water into the house, and that's a claim.
We started to use aerial imagery as an example to look at the quality of roofs, which previously were difficult to look at. Those things, the company's results started to improve. Then we had our next initiative we called Kingstone 3.0. I knew you would guess that. That was really the turning point for the company. There were four key things that we did in Kingstone 3.0. The first was we got out of those other states in the northeast. I mentioned we had expanded to New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. We did not really get out of them. We just reduced the amount of business we had in those states because the way we entered those states was not effective, and we lost a lot of money. The second was we took a lot of rates. We talked about inflation.
When you insure your home, you need to make sure that you're insuring it for what it would cost to rebuild. What we did with inflation was we re-underwrote every policy to make sure that no one was underinsured. That is really important for our policyholders and our producers to make sure that we're keeping up on that. That drove prices up a lot, but again, our policyholders understood that it's more coverage. We also took rate because, as I mentioned, with inflation, it costs more to rebuild a home, so we wanted to make sure that we were priced adequately. The third was, given that hard insurance market that I mentioned, we did a lot to manage the cost of reinsurance. For example, almost all of our policies have a hurricane deductible.
What that means is that the policyholder shares in the cost of rebuilding their home after a loss. Something like that helps you manage the cost of reinsurance. We kind of run our portfolio through different models that determine how much reinsurance will cost, and then we make underwriting changes to manage the cost of reinsurance. Last but not least, we were relentless about reducing our expenses. The way insurance works is if you have high expenses, you have to have high prices. If you have low expenses, then you can become more competitive in the marketplace, or you can expand your margin. In our particular case, we reduced our expenses by 25% from 2021 to the end of 2024. It was a really dramatic improvement in our companies' withdrawing from the marketplace.
The second green bar shows how much of our growth was from renewals. We are reducing the business outside New York, as I said, and those are the lighter green bars. If you look at 2025, even though we're not giving you numbers, we do put out guidance that I'll cover, and we are anticipating growing between 15% and 25%. It is still a hard market in New York, meaning we do not have many competitors, and companies are still restricting their business, and we are, again, the recipient of those hard market conditions because we think we're priced right and making money, so we're open for business. What you can see in the chart for 2025 is we are not going to write as much new business, but we are going to write more renewal business. That is from the new business we wrote last year.
Insurance is kind of like an annuity, or if you think about a technology company where you talk about recurring revenue, I mean, that's what insurance is like because we have a very high retention rate. If we write a lot of new business and then it renews and renews in future years, it enables us to grow faster. This just shows that mostly our business in New York is growing a lot. In last year, we were up 9% in terms of our policies in force in our core state of New York, and we reduced our business in those four other northeastern states materially. For the full year of 2024, I'm going to just go over our results, and then I'm going to cover our guidance for 2025 and open it up to any questions you have.
First of all, overall, we grew 21%, which is insurance, you might not know this, it's easy to grow fast. All you have to do is price wrong. It's hard to grow fast and be profitable. That's what we did in 2024. We grew 21%. In insurance, there's something called a combined ratio, and it includes your losses and your expenses, and then you add them together to get your combined ratio. Think of it this way. If you have a dollar, how much did you spend on losses? How much did you spend on expenses? And how much is left as your margin? If you're under 100 combined ratio, you're making money. Of insurance. We spent 48.7 cents out of every dollar on losses. What's great about that is we improved that from the prior year by almost 24 points.
That amount of improvement is just unheard of. Our expenses, we spent 31 cents on every dollar on expenses, and that was an improvement of 1.6 points from the prior year. We ended the year at an 80 combined ratio, meaning we had a 20-point margin on the business of insurance, and that was a 25-point improvement from the prior year, which means in the prior year, we were at a 105. We lost 5 cents on every dollar of insurance we wrote in the previous year versus making 20 cents in 2024. The business of insurance, there's make money on insurance, and you make money on your investment portfolio. In 2024, we made $6.8 million on our investment portfolio, which was up almost 14%.
The good news for this year and subsequent years is because we're making money, we can contribute more to our investment portfolio. We're cash positive, so our investment returns will improve. Overall, for 2024, our net income was $18.4 million, which was versus a $6.2 million loss in the prior year. Our basic EPS was $1.60. Prior year, we had lost $0.57. Our return on equity was almost 36%. The prior year was a negative 22%. Our intention for 2025 is to keep the priority going. It is still a hard market. All these changes that we made to improve our results. We have put out guidance every quarter for 2024, and now for 2025, we update the guidance quarterly so you can track our progress.
What we expect for 2025 is to grow in our core business of New York between 15% and 25% to make between a 15-19 percentage point underwriting margin. Again, think about the combined ratio as out of 100, how much are you spending on losses and expenses, and the rest is your underwriting margin. We expect to have an EPS on a basic basis between $1.90 and $2.30, on a fully diluted basis between $1.75 and $2.50. Thank you for listening to our story. We're a great company, and I'm hoping that I get the opportunity to talk to you further today. On that, I'll open it up for any questions that you might have. I guess I did a really great job since there aren't any questions, but okay.
In that case, again, I look forward to talking to you at the conference, and have a great day.