Good afternoon. My name is Regina, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Mercury General's third quarter results conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star and the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the pound key. This conference call may contain comments and forward-looking statements based on current plans, expectations, events, and financial and industry trends, which may affect Mercury General's future operating results and financial position. Such statements involve risks and uncertainties which cannot be predicted or quantified and which may cause future activities and results of operations to differ materially from those discussed here today.
Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Gabriel Tirador. Sir, you may begin.
Thank you very much. I would like to welcome everyone to Mercury's third quarter conference call. I'm Gabe Tirador, President and CEO. In the room with me is Mr. George Joseph, Chairman, Ted Stalick, Vice President and CFO, Chris Graves, Vice President and Chief Investment Officer, John Sutton, Senior Vice President of Customer Service, and Robert Houlihan, Vice President and Chief Product Officer. Before we take questions, we will make a few comments regarding the quarter. For the third consecutive quarter, our premiums written increased over the prior year. In the third quarter, premiums written grew by 1.2%, and year-to-date, they increased by 1%. In addition, for the first time since the third quarter of 2007, California private passenger auto premiums written increased. While the rate of increase in California was only three-tenths of 1%, it is a good sign to see California premiums return to the black.
California growth is benefiting from higher levels of new personal auto business sales as compared to prior year. Furthermore, our retention rates remain near historic highs. With a combined ratio of 98.3%, our operating results continue to be steady and were aided by our continued focus on expense reduction. Lower profitability-based agent commissions, lower spending on information technology and consulting, plus reduced advertising expenditures have led to improvement in the expense ratio. Year-to-date, we reported $11 million of unfavorable reserve development compared to $18 million of favorable development in the first nine months of 2010. Excluding the impact from development, the loss ratio was 69.9% in the first nine months of 2011 compared to 69% in the first nine months of 2010. The third quarter and nine months of 2011 were negatively impacted by losses from Hurricane Irene totaling $4 million on a pre-tax basis.
An automobile class plan we filed for our California companies has been approved by the Department of Insurance. The revenue-neutral plan improves our segmentation and results in more refined pricing. The plan will be implemented in December and is expected to make the company more competitive in attracting new business but will cause some dislocation to our existing book of business. Our board of directors approved an increase in our quarterly dividend to $0.61 per share, marking the 26th consecutive year that Mercury has increased our shareholder dividend. With that brief background, we will now take questions.
As a reminder, in order to ask a question, please press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. We will pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Meyer Shields with Stifel, Nicolaus.
Thanks. Hello, everyone. How are you?
Hi, Meyer.
Let me start on the investment portfolio. The duration has come down pretty sharply over the past couple of quarters, and I'm wondering if you could give some guidance in terms of what we should expect from both yields and maybe the tax rate applicable to investment income.
Yeah. Hi, Meyer. This is Chris. Well, the duration has come down for two basic reasons. One is market related, and the other is the fact that we've been buying bonds with shorter calls for a number of years now. We've purposefully been trying to bring the duration back down from when it had its marked increase in 2008. I think where it is now is actually a pretty good level. The month of October has been a little soft on munis, so we've probably seen that duration move back out just a smidgen here during the month. Going forward, this is kind of where I'm targeting where I'd like it to be. I'm pretty comfortable with it right here.
Okay. That's helpful.
Yeah.
Big picture, is there a significant difference between the targeted combined ratio for auto and home?
Yes, there is a difference between the targeted, primarily because of catastrophes.
We should expect, just looking at the policy count, the mix is shifting a little bit towards home. That should translate into a lower combined ratio if I'm reading it right.
Absent any catastrophes.
Right. Of course. I'm sorry. Okay. Thank you very much.
For any questions, please press star one. Our next question comes from the line of Dean Evans with KBW.
Yeah, thanks. You did mention a little bit of commentary with respect to expenses, it seems the expense ratio showed some improvement this quarter. I was wondering maybe if you could just give a little bit more detail on how the expense savings plans are going through and sort of what the progress you're making there has been. If you have any numbers to help out, that would be great.
Ted. Hi, Dean. This is Ted. We really started this year with tightening our expense control through tighter budgeting processes. We took some expenses out in the IT area, primarily in the consulting area. We refined our agent contingent commission calculations, which allow agents profitability bonuses based on profit and growth. Let's see where else.
Advertising.
Advertising. We've cut our advertising expenses down somewhat this year as well. I think it's hard to compare all of last year to this year because there were some one-time expenses last year related to Proposition 17, which skewed last year upwards. We're probably going to see expense ratios in the 27-28 range going forward.
Okay, this quarter seems to be maybe a low watermark or may not be repeatable at the 27 flat. It could tick up a bit?
Well, we hope it's repeatable, I won't say that we will repeat it.
Okay. Second question, I believe you had about $125 million of debt mature in August, it looks like you've got another $120 million coming up early next year. Maybe could you give your sort of thoughts on, are you going to be looking to replace that on the capital side of the equation? How are we thinking about that now?
The $125 million of senior notes was paid off on August 15th. The $120 million, which was originally used to purchase AIS a couple of years ago, we have extended the maturity on that with the bank out three years, those will be maturing in 2015.
Okay, no plans to add more after the recent August that it matured? No plans to kind of add any additional debt to the balance sheet structure?
We're not adding any new financial leverage right now.
Okay.
Our next question is a follow-up on the line of Meyer Shields with Stifel, Nicolaus.
Yep. I was wondering if you could summarize, if it's even possible, the changes in the upcoming class plan. Is there a particular, I guess, subsegment that stands out as needing the improvement?
I'll let Robert Houlihan talk about that.
Yeah. With these changes, we've introduced a new proprietary symbol set, and we've adjusted all of our relativities for all of our rating factors. There's substantial number of changes. I don't think there was any one particular segment that sort of jumped out through that analysis. Okay. Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Alison Jacobowitz with Bank of America.
Hi. Thanks. Two questions. One, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the competitive environment in California, maybe in a little more detail. The second was on the reserve development. I don't know if there's anything else you can share, but I guess it's been unfavorable now to some degree for five quarters. How you're looking at that, how you're building that into the pricing changes going forward, and maybe, I don't know if you can share anything else, what you're thinking there.
As far as the competitive environment, Alison, it continues to be a very competitive environment. As I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we were very glad to see positive premium growth for the third consecutive quarter. The increase in advertising spend in the insurance space today as compared to, let's say, five to 10 years ago, is pretty dramatic. Our goal has been for us to increase the number of quotes being presented to potential customers, and we believe that we have competitive rates, but we need more looks. We also believe that our closing ratio can be improved upon with better segmentation. The class plan that I mentioned earlier, that filing that we just are going to be implementing in December should help us with our new policy sales as well.
I do think that generally speaking, that you're going to start to see, I think, more filings for some rate increases with loss costs going up in the future. That's just my personal opinion. I think severity on BI is going to be higher than it has been running, but we'll have to wait and see for that.
Once again, for any questions, please press star followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad at this time. There are no further questions.
No further questions. Okay. Thank you very much for joining us today, and we look forward to speaking with you next quarter.
Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference call. Thank you all for participating, and you may now disconnect.