Georgia Property Study Guide

Before the law, one fact about the license itself, because it shapes everything else: Georgia does not issue a Property-only license. OCI’s instruction is that you “must select both Property and Casualty when applying — we do not license just Property or just Casualty.” The Property exam (12-GA-03) is real and you may sit it on its own, but as one half of the P&C requirement rather than a credential in itself. About thirty of its eighty scored questions are Georgia law, and they land hardest on how rates get approved, where a rejected property risk goes, and what it takes to place business outside the admitted market.

Rate regulation — Georgia is not one system, it is two

Almost every study aid flattens Georgia into a single label. It doesn’t fit. O.C.G.A. § 33-9-21 sets up two different regimes inside personal private passenger auto alone:

• Minimum-limits private passenger auto is prior approval with a deemer. A rate is effective only when the Commissioner approves it, or after 45 days have passed with no disapproval — and the Commissioner may extend that period by up to 55 additional days, for a 100-day outer limit.
• All other personal private passenger auto is file-and-use: the rate “shall be effective 60 days after such filing and shall be implemented without approval of the Commissioner.”

In every case the standard is the familiar one — rates may not be excessive, inadequate, or unfairly discriminatory.

The FAIR Plan — Georgia has one, whatever older material says

This is the single most common outright error in Georgia P&C study material: the claim that Georgia has no FAIR Plan and that high-risk property goes straight to surplus lines. It is wrong.

Title 33, Chapter 33 is captioned “Fair Access to Insurance Requirements.” Section 33-33-1 authorizes licensed property insurers to “establish and maintain a Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) Plan and to establish and maintain an underwriting association.” The association operating it is the Georgia Underwriting Association — note that the name is the association’s own; the Code refers only to “the plan and the underwriting association.”

Membership is not optional. Under § 33-33-3, each insurer authorized to write and writing property insurance in Georgia “shall be required to become and remain a member of the plan” and to comply with its requirements “as a condition of its authority to transact property insurance business.”

What it writes: building and personal property coverage against fire, lightning, removal, windstorm, hail, explosion, riot, smoke, aircraft and vehicles, with vandalism and malicious mischief available as options and — in coastal areas — a wind-only policy available to supplement other coverage. The statute itself (§ 33-33-2) leaves the perils to the plan document rather than listing them. It is designed as a last resort: narrower coverage at a higher premium than the standard market.

The standard fire policy

Georgia requires fire policies to “conform as to all provisions and the sequence of the standard or uniform form prescribed by the Commissioner” (O.C.G.A. § 33-32-1(a)), with an exception for approved multiple-line forms. The Commissioner keeps a true copy on file, and the form itself is Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. 120-2-19-.01. Casualty, marine and crop insurance are outside the requirement, and nuclear damage may be excluded absent an endorsement.

Chapter 32 also carries a rule worth knowing on its own: for certain fire policies, the amount of insurance is conclusive as to the value of the property insured (§ 33-32-5), and § 33-32-4 requires a premium refund on a total loss where less than the maximum is paid.

Surplus lines — three sections, and the two that get miscited

Placing a Georgia risk with a nonadmitted insurer takes a surplus lines broker license on top of your producer license, and the prerequisite is specific: § 33-5-22 routes you to § 33-23-37, which requires an active resident agent license as to property, casualty, and surety, a $50,000 bond, and a written competency examination.

Before placing, you must make a diligent effort to find the coverage in the admitted market — the insured or the insured’s agent must have “made an effort to procure the desired” insurance from authorized insurers. That requirement is at § 33-5-21(a)(3), and Georgia sets no numeric count of declinations. It is waived entirely for an exempt commercial purchaser who requests a nonadmitted placement in writing (§ 33-5-21(b)).

You must also vet the carrier: § 33-5-25 requires the broker to “ascertain the financial condition of the unauthorized insurer before placing insurance” and forbids placing with one below the statutory capital-and-surplus floor.

Then there is the money. The surplus lines premium tax is 4 percent, and the broker remits it — quarterly, on or before the fifteenth of April, July, October and January, with the quarterly affidavit (§ 33-5-31).