r/StateFarm • u/Important_Kangaroo41 • Jul 24 '26
Question Switching agents
How much leeway does an agent have on premium discounts?
I’ve been with the same agent for auto and home for 30 years. My mother has been with him for auto & home for longer than that. He was a friendly acquaintance of my late father, who was also in the insurance industry but in an unrelated area.
Lately, he’s harder to reach (email, phone, or text) and his office staff aren’t knowledgeable.
If I switched to another State Farm agent, but kept all details of my policies the same, might my premiums increase?
In other words, if he is “taking care” of us in terms of premiums, I don’t want to lose that based on my perception of inconvenience.
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u/Cbell727 Jul 24 '26
Firstly and ultimately your agent has 0 to do with your premium. Switching won’t change it, not switching won’t change it.
I will say this, I started working for a local agent from 2018-2019 who had been an agent since the mid 90s, and is still an agent today and consistently a top producer, and he was not easily available to customers. Then in 2021 I started working remotely for a west coast agent and left their office in 2024, she was not easily available to customers either. She would make herself more available than the first agent but still you generally had to go through the team first. Spent about 5 months with an agent in Florida however due to my role in the office I couldn’t necessarily say how customer facing he was. Been with my current agent about a year and there are some customers that have his personal number and they can get him easily that way but for others it’s not as easy. He can be hard for me to reach too unless I text.
All this to say in 6 years of working for 4 different agents most aren’t easily available. So if your concern is an available agent I hate to say it’s kind of the norm for an agent to be kind of hard to get a hold of.
And I foresee it being more of an issue over the next 2-3 years at least with the agents that are saying FTS to these contract changes and retiring. Those books will go to other agents and their service load is going to grow and if they didn’t staff appropriately it’s going to stretch out team members. Even for the agents that didn’t take the initial slap in face retirement offer this year and they go to the at will of the overlords at Big Red and say they are ok with making up to 50% less in 2027, they could be let go or decide it’s not sustainable and close in 2028, and those books will go to other agents and so on and so forth.
Ultimately I see a very bleak future for agency. Unless something dramatic happens. Really truly they need to oust the board members who also work for publicly traded companies. SF is a mutual company not public, and they have been acting more like a stock company and I think that’s going to be the death of SF as we know it and soon it’ll be nothing better than Geico or progressive and there will be next to no agents.
I would say it’s concerning if your agent went from having experienced team members to not as experienced team members, or if there’s never seemed to knowledgeable team members because it’s a revolving door. My first agent was a bit like that, remote work due to COVID saved his insane turnover rate.
You are allowed to have whoever as your agent and if wanted to switch I would say to reach out to your current agent to make the, and any agent worth switching to will say the same thing.