Two reports out this morning say the same thing from different seats: carriers have stopped pulling back on homeowners and started spending to win them. Most of the people they are spending to reach already have a policy. Here is what that means for your renewals, and what to do about it this week.
MediaAlpha released its first State of Home Insurance report this morning. The company runs a customer acquisition marketplace for insurers, so what it sees is what carriers spend to find new policyholders. The headline finding is that insurers increased home insurance ad spending by 84 percent in the first nine months of 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier, counting only insurers that were advertising in both periods. Carriers are also advertising in roughly twice as many state markets each month as they were in 2023.
The same morning, Goosehead's third quarter earnings call described the same market from the agency side. CEO Mark Miller said carrier appetite has expanded, capacity has returned and pricing has stabilized across much of the market. President Mark Jones Jr. put numbers on pricing: auto is down mid single digits and home is down low single digits year over year. Goosehead's client retention ticked up to 86 percent. Its premium retention fell to 87 percent from 93 percent a year earlier, because the same clients are now paying less.
Put those two reports together and you get the shape of the next twelve months for a personal lines agency. Carriers want growth again. They are paying to reach homeowners who are already insured. And the premium on every account you keep is likely to drift down even if you do nothing wrong. This is not a crisis. It is a change in who is on offense, and it changes what your renewal process has to do.
Who the Ads Are For
The detail in the MediaAlpha report that matters most for an agency is not the spending total. It is the shopper. Home insurance searches hit 122 million from January through September, the highest in the company's data going back to 2016. Of the shoppers who disclosed their coverage status, 62 percent already held a policy. The money is not chasing first time buyers. It is chasing switchers, which means it is chasing your clients.
The report also shows how fast carriers now return to markets they left. Four months after Hurricane Helene, insurers in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina were spending above pre storm levels. In Florida, spending dropped after Helene and Milton and then began recovering within months. In California, spending rose in December 2024 when the state finalized its wildfire catastrophe model rules and kept rising after the January fires. MediaAlpha CEO Steve Yi summarized the logic: what carriers spend to acquire customers shows where they see opportunity, often well before it shows up in policy counts.
Texas is the largest ad market at roughly 19 percent of insurer spending. Georgia is second, with average monthly spending per insurer up 148 percent year over year. Illinois is fifth despite ranking 29th for new home construction, with per insurer spending roughly tripled. If your book sits in any of those states, your clients are seeing more homeowners advertising this fall than they have ever seen.
Why Rate Decreases Cut Both Ways
Softening shows up in regulator data too. The Connecticut Insurance Department reported this week that it had identified 19 personal auto filings from 14 companies and 19 homeowners filings from 16 companies that include rate decreases for some consumers. Liberty Mutual and its affiliates cut homeowners rates about 5 percent on more than 30,000 policies. On the auto side, State Farm affiliates filed an average decrease around 8.4 percent and Farmers Casualty around 14 percent. Commissioner Josh Hershman was careful to say that rate changes vary by insurer, coverage and rating factors, so not every policyholder will see a lower premium. Texas reported a similar pattern in October.
For the client, a decrease at renewal is good news and you should deliver it as good news. For the agency, the same decrease has two edges. Commission on a renewal that drops is a smaller commission. And the client who got a decrease from you is the same client who is now being told by an ad that someone else can beat it. A softening market lowers the cost of switching in the client's mind, because the quote they get elsewhere will often look better than the one they remember from two years ago, regardless of what you did for them.
Goosehead's numbers are the clean illustration. Client retention improved. Premium retention dropped six points. An agency can be keeping its clients and still watch revenue slide, and the slide will not show up in the metric most agencies watch.
What a Renewal Has to Do Now
In a hard market, the renewal conversation was about explaining an increase. In this market, it has to do a different job: it has to make the client feel the value of the relationship at the exact moment an ad is offering to replace it. That means the renewal touch cannot be a declarations page and an auto pay notice.
Lead with the remarket you already did, or do one. When carrier appetite expands, the honest answer to a client who asks whether they can get a better deal is often yes, and you want to be the one who found it. A renewal note that says you checked three markets and the current carrier is still the right fit, or that you moved them and saved them money, closes the gap the ad is trying to open. Miller said it on the call: when carriers are competing for business, agents can do what they do best, which is evaluate individual needs and find the right coverage. That is only true if the client knows you did it.
Then say something about coverage, not just price. The ad is price only. The switcher who leaves over a lower number and loses a water backup endorsement or an agreed value on a vehicle finds out at claim time. You do not need to scare anyone. You need one sentence per renewal that names something specific the policy does for this household. That is the part of the relationship no acquisition campaign can copy.
What to Watch
MediaAlpha flags a few questions for the next report: whether the growth spreads beyond Texas, Georgia and California; whether State Farm and Allstate follow through on resuming new homeowners business in California; and what Illinois's rate review process does to that market when it takes effect in July 2027. Each of those is a change in which carriers will be competing for your clients and where.
The practical move this week is smaller. Pull your renewals for the next 60 days and sort them by premium. The largest accounts in states with the heaviest ad spending are the ones most worth a call rather than an email. Carriers are back on offense. Your renewal process is the defense, and it has to be visible to the client to count.