The visit to Bermuda last year by Florida governor Ron DeSantis to meet Bermuda’s reinsurance community was a pivotal event for Florida homeowners during the return of orderly renewals that this year shows a steadily improving insurance market.

This from the man who founded Mangrove Property Insurance Company last year specifically to provide the very Florida homeowners insurance that was in short supply.

Stephen Weinstein, founder and chief executive of Mangrove, said Bermuda reinsurers were reassured by the Governor’s visit that significant and necessary legislative reforms are here to stay, revitalising and stabilising the insurance outlook, curbing fraudulent litigation and inviting new capital.

He said the success for his company and Florida’s future is because of the return of the reinsurance community to support Florida insurers.

He said: “The most important market in a thriving, ready, willing, and able global market for Florida, is Bermuda. And I'll always be grateful for the support from friends, colleagues, former colleagues here in my other home, Bermuda, as we launched Mangrove and as we grew this year with a larger and even stronger programme.

“But our support is worldwide. We have support from London, from Europe, from Asia, from the United States. And that's the right way to manage the world’s peak risk, which, as we’ve touched upon, is Florida hurricane.”

The industry veteran had spent two decades in the Bermuda reinsurance community and was determined to build a Florida insurer that could provide stability and comprehensive solutions for homeowners, particularly in hurricane-prone and high-risk areas.

Part of that mission has led more recently to the establishment of Buttonwood Re, a Bermudian-based special purpose reinsurance vehicle created to issue catastrophe bonds on behalf of Mangrove Property Insurance.

The listing of Mangrove’s inaugural cat bond on the Bermuda Stock Exchange was celebrated with a bell-ringing ceremony at Exchange House on Pitts Bay Road.

Mangrove also formed a property insurance sidecar this month, a Bermudian-domiciled Class 3A insurance company, Grove Re, to support its long-term risk management and underwriting strategy.

Mr Weinstein said: “Both those Bermuda entities are part of the group of companies we built, whose core carrier is Mangrove Property Insurance Company, a company operating only in Florida, writing only homeowners, only admitted. So one peril, one state, but it's the world's biggest peril in the most important market in the world.”

Mangrove is one of 17 companies who believe in the tort reform and who have started issuing policies. As the insurer of last resort, the state was incentivised to make it more attractive for private capital to return.

Mr Weinstein said: “We welcome competition. It's healthy for consumers and strong competition will make Mangrove better.

“One of the factors that made it possible to accelerate at the scale that we did, though, were the market conditions that prevailed 18 months ago. And it's a different market today.

“The opportunity to underwrite with rigour a non-trivial amount of policies out of Florida's residual market, Florida's citizens’ property insurance — that story is now behind us.

“That enormous need that agents had to replace the companies that had failed with new capacity is also largely behind us. I like where Mangrove is positioned. There’s always room for new competition, but that wave of new capital formation that we saw following Mangrove, I guess, I personally suspect will have abated by now.”