MIAMI  — In late 2022, Melissa Marro got a notice from her private home insurance company that her rates would soon go up to a degree she found shockingly high. The only option, her insurance agent told her, was to see if she qualified for Citizens Property Insurance, the taxpayer-owned property insurance company.

Marro hired a licensed inspector to come to her Palm Harbor home in Tampa Bay to do a four-point inspection and a wind-mitigation inspection. After she sent in the resulting reports, Citizens accepted her home, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

It was much cheaper than the private cost of insurance she had just been quoted.

“Then shortly after the policy started with Citizens, I received an email saying: ‘You have to have another home inspection.’ And I didn’t understand why, since I had just had two inspections,” Marro said.

What happened next to Marro in Palm Harbor is a byproduct of a major but little-known push by Citizens to inspect a startlingly large number of homes per year and its methods to go about it.

Marro’s insurance agent said there was no choice but to allow the inspection to move forward. The insurance company, he assured her, would pay for it. She would not have to spend anything out of pocket.

“They had us by the neck. Let’s say that,” Marro said. “I had absolutely no choice.”

In her case, a staffer from Sutton Inspection Bureau — a company contracted by Citizens — came to Marro’s home to take photos.

Marro was unable to be there for the inspection, and her mother was present. But when she later saw the final report, Marro said she was shocked by the factual errors that were listed.

Three black cats’ worth of accumulated hair on her crown molding was listed as “weird looking mold, fuzzy stuff growing on the walls.”

A wooden fence on her side yard was listed as “rotted” even though most of the fence had just been repaired.

“The thing that really got me was the completely deceptive picture she took from an angle in front of my neighbor’s house so that their tree — which is nowhere near my house — it looks like the branches are overhanging my roof,” Marro said. “I mean, it was clearly on purpose.”

Sutton Inspection Bureau did not respond to requests for comment about errors on its reports, or how much training it gives employees.

The photo in Marro’s inspection report was captioned “large tree hanging over roof/branches.”

Within three weeks of receiving the report, Marro was issued a cancellation by Citizens. If she was thrown back on the private market at the rates she was being quoted, the ramifications would have been life-changing. Marro works at a nonprofit that runs a driving while intoxicated program in Pinellas County, and she does not make a lot of money.

“I would have lost my house if I lost this coverage,” said Marro, matter-of-factly.

The inspection ordered by Citizens appears to be a new practice by the insurance giant.

In 2019, Citizens Insurance, the state-created and taxpayer-backed insurance company of last resort, ordered 2,200 home inspections. By the end of 2023, the company estimates that it will have ordered about 300,000 home inspections.

That’s more than a 100-fold increase in inspections, compared with a few short years ago. The number of properties the state company insures has roughly doubled over that time frame.

The public company was created in 2002 to be an insurance company of last resort, for properties that could find no other reasonably affordable insurance coverage. But over the past few years, the policies it holds have skyrocketed, and it has reluctantly become the largest insurance company in the state.

The goal of these inspections, according to the company, is to get more accurate information about the homes it insures.

Property owners such as Marro have told WLRN they are concerned about the contractors being used to perform the inspections. Reports have been filled with factual errors, they say, threatening their coverage or raising their insurance premiums based on falsehoods.

The people hired by Citizens to do the new home inspections are not licensed by the state of Florida, they point out. The company then relies upon reports made by those unlicensed inspectors to make decisions that can upend the lives of Florida residents.

“It’s really, really scary,” Marro said. “You would think they would be required by law to only hire licensed contractors or licensed inspectors.”

After getting the policy cancellation letter, Marro started calling her insurance agent and calling Citizens to fight the report and the outcome it led to. She scrubbed the black cat hair off the crown molding, climbed onto her roof to prove the suspicious tree was nowhere near the roof, and scrubbed the fence to prove it was simply dirty, not rotten.

She sent photos to everybody and spent hours on the phone.

“I was able to keep my policy,” Marro said. “But had I not had the fortitude to fight it, I would have been at the mercy of this woman who seemingly purposely wanted to get me canceled so that Citizens didn’t have another policy.”

Citizens acknowledged to WLRN that field inspectors hired by its contractors are not licensed by the state of Florida.

“Field inspectors are not licensed but all decisions are made by licensed inspectors and then reviewed by Citizens’ underwriters,” Michael Peltier, a spokesman for Citizens, wrote WLRN in an email. “The inspectors are required to photograph their findings, enabling Citizens to confirm the risk meets our underwriting guidelines and validate certain building characteristics.”

Internal data shared with WLRN showed that out of more than 200,000 inspections conducted through the program between January and September of 2023, only 62 resulted in a vendor error complaint.

“While one error is too many — especially if it affects your policy, it appears that, overall, the program is pretty accurate,” wrote Peltier.

Mark Friedlander, the director of communications at the Insurance Information Institute, an insurance industry-funded trade organization, told WLRN the admission that Citizens is using unlicensed inspectors for the program is alarming.

“From an industrywide perspective, property insurers typically use licensed inspectors that are well-trained and provide very objective analysis of conditions of homes. If companies are not following that standard, that is very troubling to us, and I could understand why some homeowners are reporting that there’s major errors taking place,” said Friedlander.

“If companies are taking shortcuts, that’s extremely concerning and the insurance companies should be accountable for that,” he said.

Friedlander stressed that insurance companies have ramped up inspections in the current property insurance market, but the standard is to use licensed inspectors.

Citizens does not appear to be breaking any regulations or laws, he said, but it is not following industry best practices.

As companies have fled the state of Florida in recent years after successive hurricanes and being hammered by lawsuits, the number of Citizens policies has exploded.

State lawmakers are uneasy about the rapid growth of Citizens, arguing that Florida taxpayers could be left on the hook for billions of dollars in damages if a major disaster strikes. The state has passed laws and nudged Citizens to shed its risk by shifting policies to the private market.

The initial decision that Citizens would sharply increase the number of inspections it orders for properties was made in July 2021. Board members argued that ordering more inspections would potentially play a major role in slowing the rapid growth of the state’s largest insurance company.

“They’re just trying to get a handle on the book of business. They have the properties that they are insuring, just to make sure that everything is on the up and up,” said Mel Montagne, an insurance agent based out of the Florida Keys.

Citizens Insurance is the only option for home insurance for many residents of the Keys. Montagne also serves as the president of the grassroots group Fair Insurance Rates in Monroe.

Even though he feels like he understands why Citizens is ordering so many more inspections, Montagne has concerns about Citizens hiring people who are not licensed by the state of Florida to do field inspections.

“It’s better to hire a person that is licensed and has had some experience rather than just, you know, anybody that you’re picking up off the street,” he said.

A typical wind mitigation inspection could cost around $150 per property from a licensed inspector, he estimated. The inspections ordered by Citizens, which it calls “General Condition” inspections, go for as low as $32 per property, according to publicly available contracts.

Montagne said the motivation for using unlicensed inspectors is likely to save money as it ramps up inspections.

“At the end of the day, they are owned by the folks in the state of Florida, the folks are paying the premiums. And they want to be good stewards of those funds and not triple the cost of an inspection,” he said.

This report is from WLRN News, a Miami Herald partner. Listen to WLRN on 91.3 FM in Miami or go to WLRN.org