Roger Cregg
Analyst · David Goldberg of UBS Investment Bank. You may proceed
Yeah, David, this is Roger. There is no way to give you a very short answer to this. It is very complicated, because when you build houses, over periods of time they fall on different years, the insurance affects it by what you could have bought for insurance in those particular years. So you know, let’s say some of them were back in 2004, 2005, you know, you could have a claim in those years, and then you could have a different impact on an actuarial basis because of the way you bought insurance in those particular years. So really, the tail in our business is a lot of it’s mandated by state governments, and so you have a tail on it that could last ten years. So with that, you’ve got claims that can come in at basically any point in time, but some of our more severe ones were ’05, ’06 timeframe. ’04 timeframe seemed to be at the peak, some of them also correlate to when the market started to turn down, and again, correlate those last four years, as pricing has come down significantly, we’ve seen the increase in the number of claims. I’m not saying those are absolutely related, but when you look at what’s happened in the four years, as prices and values have come down, you also see a significant increase in the number of claims. So you know, it is a bit of art and science when you go through this, sort of throw it in the black box and come up with it. But clearly, when we have issues, we’re certainly addressing them, and then some of them we’re more proactive on, which in itself creates a little bit more liability from us, because we do that. So all of our approach to this, as well as the operating procedures, the way we bought insurance, the way the claims are coming in, and there’s some for instance, where all of a sudden you’ve got rain in areas where you haven’t had rain before. Significant rain, again, not an excuse, but standards that were set for construction standards at a particular point in time may not be appropriate given the changes that we’re seeing there. I know I’m not being specific, but there’s a lot of different items that make that up, and they’re not easily just carved out to one little piece that created it.