When Hurricane Ian made landfall near Fort Myers in September 2022, it did not just cause catastrophic damage across Southwest Florida. It produced a detailed, involuntary audit of every construction decision made along the Gulf Coast over the prior two decades.
For builders with long histories in the region, the aftermath offered something more useful than a damage report. It offered confirmation, in some cases, and in others, a hard look at the gaps between what the building code required, what the insurance industry priced, and what a home actually needed to perform under real conditions.
Kent Pecoy, General Manager of Coastal Homes of Marco Island, has spent more than 45 years building in coastal environments, first in New England and then across Southwest Florida. Ian was not the first major storm he had built through or rebuilt after. But it reinforced lessons that, in his view, the industry is still in the process of absorbing.
What the Damage Patterns Actually Showed
Post-Ian surveys of residential damage in Lee and Collier counties revealed patterns that were predictable to anyone paying attention to how coastal structures fail. Roofing systems that met the minimum code thresholds when they were installed, but that were built with the minimum in mind, performed worse than systems designed with margin. Homes in flood zones where elevation was treated as a compliance checkbox rather than a performance variable took on water in ways their owners did not anticipate.
Pecoy points to the distinction between building to code and building for conditions as one of the central lessons the storm made concrete. The code establishes a floor, not a ceiling. Builders who treat it as a specification rather than a starting point are, in effect, betting their clients’ assets on the accuracy of minimum standards written to protect life safety, not to protect property value or long-term livability.
That distinction matters more in coastal Southwest Florida than in most residential markets because the asset values at stake are higher, the environmental exposure is more acute, and the buyers increasingly have the sophistication to ask whether their home was built to survive, or built to comply.
The Insurance Signal
The insurance market’s response to Ian was swift and, for many homeowners, alarming. Major carriers exited or restricted their Florida coastal exposure. Premiums for those who could still obtain coverage rose sharply. The Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, the state’s insurer of last resort, saw its rolls expand significantly as private options contracted.
For buyers entering the luxury market in the post-Ian environment, insurance availability and cost have become transactional factors in a way they were not before the storm. Homes with documented construction quality, specifically properties where the builder can demonstrate what went into the roof, the windows, the foundation, and the framing, are navigating the insurance market differently than homes where those decisions were made to minimum standard.
Pecoy describes the current environment as one where the underwriting process has effectively become a secondary due diligence review of construction quality. An insurance carrier’s willingness to write a policy, and at what premium, is functioning as a market signal about what a home is actually worth as a long-term asset.
For builders who have been doing this work at a high standard for decades, that dynamic is not a threat. It is a differentiator.
Code Evolution as Institutional Knowledge
Building codes along Florida’s Gulf Coast have changed substantially over the past 40 years, driven in large part by major storm events. The regulatory response to Hurricane Andrew in 1992 produced significant revisions to Florida’s building code framework. Subsequent storms, including Charley, Frances, and Jeanne in 2004, and Wilma in 2005, each produced additional rounds of tightening. Ian will generate another cycle.
Working through each of those revisions, as Pecoy has, produces a particular kind of knowledge that cannot be replicated by reading the current code. Each round of updated standards reflects what the previous round missed, and understanding that history means understanding not just what the rules require today, but why they require it and what the next revision is likely to address.
In the post-Ian market, that institutional knowledge is translating into a clearer competitive position. Buyers conducting serious due diligence on a luxury coastal purchase are asking about construction methodology in more specific terms than they were two or three years ago. Builders who can answer those questions in depth, not with marketing language but with technical specificity, are finding that the conversation goes differently than it does for those who cannot.
What Changes After a Storm Like Ian
The practical lessons that experienced coastal builders take from a major storm event are rarely about new information. They are about the confirmation of existing principles and the renewed relevance of practices that may have seemed overcautious when the market was tolerating less rigorous approaches.
Ian confirmed that storm-rated windows and impact-resistant materials are not premium features in coastal Florida. They are baseline requirements for a home that will hold its value and remain insurable over the next owner’s holding period. It confirmed that roof systems designed with redundancy perform categorically differently from systems designed for compliance. And it confirmed that elevation decisions made conservatively at the time of permitting tend to produce much better outcomes than decisions made at the minimum required.
None of these lessons are new. What Ian changed is the audience willing to pay attention to them. The buyers who are active in the Marco Island and Naples corridor today are arriving with questions that Ian’s damage patterns put on their radar. They are asking the right things. The builders who have been doing the right things for the past 40 years are in a position to answer.
About Kent Pecoy
Kent Pecoy is the General Manager of Coastal Homes of Marco Island. With more than 45 years of experience in residential construction across New England and Southwest Florida, he is recognized for his commitment to craftsmanship, innovative design, and reliable project management.
Published Originally — https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/what-hurricane-ian-actually-taught-kent-pecoy-about-luxury-coastal-construction/ar-AA20r1Hg?disableErrorRedirect=true&infiniteContentCount=0
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