Selective Insurance Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:SIGI) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And so, I think that’s always been our practice and will continue to be our practice. The pricing is also moving and moving pretty materially, and we think that’s appropriate in addition to the exposure change because you really do want to understand both of those pieces as they both do impact profitability. The commercial property pricing for us was up almost 4 points on a sequential basis to 11.8% and we’ll continue to push for more rate adequacy because the commercial property line, we’ve got a lower risk-adjusted target combined ratio on that. We need to continue to improve that performance. But I think the other important point just relative to property in the quarter, and I know there’s been some commentary around the miss relative to expectations in the quarter driven by cats.

Q1 tends to be at a higher cat load quarter for us relative to the full year. And you saw in the prepared comments, it was about a point above expected at 6 points. And you can see throughout the industry, the impact was much more significant on many others. And we do think that’s a testament to how we’ve always managed our underwriting and pricing philosophy relative to commercial property. So, I would suggest that the market dynamic there will continue to be, as you’ve seen in Q1. We did try to stay ahead of it in 2022. I don’t think we’re ready to declare a shift in severity trends in property, but it is favorable or nice to have a quarter where property losses on a non-cat basis came in better than expected and down on a year-over-year basis.

And Mike, I might not have hit all pieces of the question, so feel free to follow-up.

Mike Zaremski: Yes, you did. That was a long-winded question. Maybe lastly on the enhanced kind of disclosure or the commentary from Mark on commercial real estate, you did mention, Mark, low likelihood of loss attachment. This is – you and everyone are obviously getting a lot of incoming on this asset class and exposure. Any commentary about the CMBS exposure you have? Is it – is the mark-to-market losses, are they being driven more by spreads or just interest rates? Because there is plenty of at least on my screen kind of very high-quality AAA, AA-rated CMBS trading at a fairly substantial unrealized loss relative to your commentary about low likelihood of loss attachment, so just maybe any color you’d like to add there on what makes you comfortable?

Mark Wilcox: Yes. So let me give you a couple of more statistics and a little bit more color on the commercial real estate exposure, particularly non-agency CMBS, which is about 81% of our total CMBS portfolio, put the agency piece to the side because that has the guarantees behind it. But we feel very good about commercial real estate exposure, particularly within CMBS, but also the other allocations as well. But we recognize that it’s a moving market. And there on pressure on valuations, it varies by type of real estate, and it varies by location. And class within the various commercial real estate sectors as well. So, not all real estate is equal. But I think there could be some pressures as we look ahead throughout 2023.