Jim Williamson, President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Everest Group, has praised the excellent job of the firm’s reinsurance team in navigating a more challenging market at the January 1st renewals, while also stating that the reinsurer outmanoeuvred the property catastrophe market with average rate declines of 10% globally.
Everest recently held its fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings call, during which CEO Williamson commented on the carrier’s experience at the 1.1 2026 renewals, particularly in property cat, with a view to subsequent 2026 renewal periods.
“As expected, market conditions softened across many lines in the Jan 1 renewals, with property cat rates down an average of 10% globally, while remaining above our required technical price,” said Williamson. “As has been the case in past renewals, our preferred market position allowed us to shape our signings to maximize expected profitability.”
At Jan 1, Everest bound more than $6.3 billion of premium, reflecting a decrease of just 1% over expiring, while terms and conditions and attachment points largely held for the firm, explained the CEO.
“Total property limit deployed decreased for the first time since 2022, with a modest 2% reduction. Capacity deployment was selective. We retained over 95% of our in-force premium with our top tier accounts, while deliberately reducing exposure to less profitable deals,” continued Williamson.
He went on to note that Everest is still seeing good opportunities in Asia, including in its new India branch, as well as in targeted specialty lines.
“The global development of data centers, supporting energy capacity and other infrastructure investments, has helped propel and diversify the development of our specialty book, which is now approximately $2 billion in premium with an attritional loss ratio in the mid 80s.
“Our Mt. Logan third party capital business is also performing well, with over $2.5 billion of AuM as of January 1st. We have an excellent pipeline of investor interest in Mt. Logan across multiple lines of business, and I would expect Logan to assume a more prominent role in our capital mix over time.
“Overall, the Everest reinsurance team, once again, did an excellent job navigating a more challenging market,” said Williamson.
Later in the call, an analyst pressed Williamson on the 10% average rate decline the firm saw at 1.1 2026, to which he replied: “Now, I think, based on what I’m hearing from certainly some of the broker indices, maybe some of our esteemed competitors who have reported, I still think our 10% is a good number. I think we outmanoeuvred, frankly, the market… I think a lot of people are more in the low teens, and I think that’s a testament to our market position.”
Adding: “If we look at where property cat pricing is right now, there’s a lot of attractive opportunity around the world. Clearly, I think the US, particularly southeast US, is the best priced peak zone, but there’s good business to be had around the world. And we were active pursuing those opportunities globally. So, there was really no one region where we said, okay, we want to double down here because of where it’s priced relative to others. It’s a pretty broad based opportunity.”
During the Q&A, the CEO was questioned further on reinsurance pricing and how he sees it playing out, notably in the property cat space, over the course of this year.
“As a general expectation, given what we saw at Jan 1 from a supply demand perspective, I would sort of expect the rest of this year to be similar to the 1.1 renewal, with rates on property cat down in that 10 to 15% range that various folks are reporting, I think that’s a reasonable expectation.
“Florida will be an interesting dynamic. There’s a clear dependence on reinsurance capacity to serve that market, which I think will help buoy the demand side of the equation. At the same time, it’s pretty clear to us now in our data, and I think we’ve been quite conservative about this, that the reforms in Florida are working, and we’re seeing it clearly playing out in our data, and I think others will be as well. So, I’m not going to give you a point estimate on how those two factors intersect, other than to say I think there could be some reasons to suspect it may be down a little bit more than what we saw at 1.1,” said Williamson.
Given the softening seen at 1.1 in the property space, which some in the industry have said was more dramatic than expected, rate adequacy of the business has been a hot topic, and Williamson was asked how it compares today to 2022, prior to the property market reset.
“I would say that from a rate adequacy perspective, return on capital, I like property cat better today than I would have in 2022. And certainly, you saw us cutting back in ‘22 pretty meaningfully, which I think was the right move, particularly in light of the cat losses that occurred toward the end of that year.
“And then, in addition to rate, what’s also really critical to keep in mind is structurally, how programs are crafted today is much more advantageous, I think, to the reinsurance market relative to program structures like aggregates, the low down covers are gone, we’re not participating in those. So, feeling much better about returns given where we sit right now,” he said.
