RenRe built one of its largest & most profitable property cat portfolios at mid-year renewal: CEO O’Donnell

Bermuda-based reinsurer RenaissanceRe (RenRe) had a strong mid-year renewal and constructed one of its largest and most profitable net retained property catastrophe portfolios, with the firm’s President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Kevin O’Donnell, revealing that 80% of Florida premium the company wrote was at private terms above market rates.

Speaking recently during the reinsurer’s Q2 2025 earnings call, O’Donnell and David Marra, RenRe’s Group Chief Underwriting Officer (CUO), discussed the firm’s experience at the mid-year reinsurance renewals, a key period for US markets, including Florida.

“As one of the largest P&C reinsurers in the world, we have built a company designed to solve any risk problem in any class of business for any client. We augment this powerful platform with people and technology that are industry leading and client focused. This incentivises customers to come to us first, because we can design better solutions for their biggest problems, and back it with significant capacity,” said O’Donnell.

“This ability to do these things enables us to secure better than market terms, a good example of this is the recent Florida renewal. 80% of the premium we wrote was at private terms above market rates. While we have been doing this for years in property catastrophe, our increased scale allows us to do so more broadly across classes. Obviously, this makes a substantial difference in the quality of our underwriting portfolios, and it bolsters our ability to continue to produce strong returns,” he continued.

O’Donnell explained that RenRe always has a high percentage of private terms within its portfolio, with 80% being on the high-end of the company’s execution.

“I think there’s two things that we tried to highlight. One is this was exceptionally good and great execution. And secondly, because we’re so broadly integrated with the largest buyers, our conversations begin earlier and more broadly, and the size of our capacity and the expertise we bring allows us to have an increasing percentage of private terms in different areas of our business,” said the CEO.

Expanding on this, Group CUO Marra highlighted RenRe’s risk selection capabilities and its access to business as two key drivers for what he described as a great renewal for the reinsurer.

“And those two things (risk selection and access to business), I believe, are sustainable. The market was not uniform; it was an underwriters market. You had to pick and choose risks. Our underwriters know that business better than anyone, and we think we have the best access there. So, that was a differentiator, not just in Florida, which allowed us to get to the 80% of the book on private terms and deliver flat rates. But also, in understanding and being able to execute on the other key areas there. We talked about California. The key there was understanding the wildfire peril and being able to figure out how to execute into a post-loss market quicker than anyone else. And then the loss impacted nationwide, that was really about risk selection and then our ability to get those lines,” said Marra.

In his opening remarks, Marra noted that RenRe believes that the pricing environment, terms and conditions and tort reform have helped stabilise the Florida market, while growth in demand created an opportunity for the carrier to deploy significant capital on private terms as buyers looked to secure increased capacity.

“We had been underweight in Florida, but our position as a market leader enabled us to grow with rates roughly flat. We also grew in California, where most business had been impacted by the catastrophic LA wildfires last quarter,” said Marra.

During the Q&A, O’Donnell was quizzed on how the company is thinking about the January 2026 and mid-year renewals next year.

“This year has gone exceptionally well, and I think it’s important to remind ourselves as to where we are as we think about planning for 2026. We’ve grown our portfolios where we’ve chosen to grow, and we’ve had good opportunities, and we continue to execute our strategy well. So, as I look at where we are, heading into 2026, really at this point, as I mentioned in my comments, not much business comes up between now and year-end, so one of the bigger variables will be what happens in wind season. But if you break wind season down, all wind season does is, if it’s an inactive year, it gives buyers pricing power, and if it’s an active year, it gives reinsurers pricing power,” he said.

Adding: “What we’ve talked about before is, since 2023 we think the market has reset and will trade around this new level. And that is really what we’ve seen. And we have proven that we can execute to produce better than market returns in that environment. So, regardless of what happens between now and year-end, really, the way we’re looking at it is, we’ll continue to execute our strategy. We believe we can continue to preserve our margin. We have no change in our ability to find opportunity to deploy capital. We have a strong capital and liquidity position. So, we believe we can continue to manage capital through share repurchases.

“So, as we’re really beginning to shift our focus from writing our book for 2025 to planning for 2026, nothing has changed with our strategy. Between now and year-end, we’ll have great conversations, have price discovery, we’ll sharpen our tools and tactics, but I think at the end of the day, ’26 is going to look a lot like ’25 for us.”

Of course, property and property cat reinsurance rates have come down from the highs of 2023, and in light of this, O’Donnell was also questioned on the potential for a soft reinsurance market.

“There are price changes, but I think the real focus should be rate adequacy,” said O’Donnell. “Rates went up 50% in 2023 and over the last two quarters, we’re talking about rate changes in the 10-ish percentage change, obviously less for us because of our portfolio construction and access to business.

“So, we believe that the market will continue to trade, both on terms and conditions and rates, at the levels that were reset in 2023. As with any financial market, there’ll be times where buyers have a bit more to push on price, and there’s times where sellers have a bit more to push on price. But we don’t see a downward trend to rate inadequacy in the near-term. We continue to believe that rates will trade at highly adequate levels. Whether they’re up or down a little bit, is something the market will decide as we move forward,” he said.

As we reported this morning, the reinsurer posted a solid set of results for Q2’25, with Group-wide gross written premiums reported at $3.42 billion. In property, RenRe grew the catastrophe class by $98.1 million, or 7.8%, driven by strong mid-year renewals reflecting organic growth on existing clients, and new underwriting opportunities, including in US catastrophe-exposed business.

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