NEW ORLEANS – The Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) has surpassed 100,000 FORTIFIED properties nationwide, with Louisiana emerging as the organization’s fastest-growing commercial market — expanding nearly three times faster than any other state — as businesses and insurers look for ways to reduce storm risk and improve resilience.
Inside a massive research facility in South Carolina, engineers at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety subject full-scale buildings to hurricane-force winds, pounding rain, wildfire conditions and simulated hailstorms in an effort to develop FORTIFIED standards designed to reduce storm damage and speed community recovery after disasters.
“We crash test houses and other kinds of buildings to try to understand how they fail,” said Fred Malik, managing director at IBHS, who has worked in residential and commercial construction for more than three decades and has been with IBHS since 2009.
The aim is to come up with solutions that help homeowners, businesses and communities better withstand severe weather.
“We have a one-of-a-kind research center in South Carolina,” said Malik. “Our test chamber is large enough for us to fit nine single-family homes inside of it.”
IBHS can test structures at full scale by creating Category 3 hurricane-force winds, 8 inches of rain per hour, wildfire conditions and realistic hailstorms that throw thousands of hailstones at buildings inside the research facility.
“Much like the IIHS that crash tests cars, we can look at the entire building as a system and understand how it’s performing as a system — where are its weak spots, where it’s going to fail first,” said Malik.
Malik said IBHS programs including FORTIFIED Home, FORTIFIED Commercial and FORTIFIED Multifamily are designed to “translate the science into practical action steps that people can follow.”
FORTIFIED Performance in Real-Life
Malik pointed to Hurricane Sally in 2020 as an example of how FORTIFIED structures performed during a real-world storm event. Approximately 18,000 FORTIFIED properties were located in the storm’s path in Alabama.
“The University of Alabama, at the behest of the Alabama Department of Insurance, took a look and were able to find that FORTIFIED structures were 70 percent less likely to have a claim and if they had a claim, the value of the claim was more than 30 percent lower,” said Malik. “All of that translates into community durability. Being able to recover faster.”
Business Impact
Malik said FORTIFIED standards can help businesses reduce property damage, protect inventory and limit operational disruptions following major storms. For multifamily and rental properties, the standards can also help keep housing available after disasters.
“Hurricanes can displace the workforce,” said Malik. “FORTIFIED has the benefit of keeping the business community vibrant and operating and recovering faster because the workforce doesn’t get displaced.”
He said communities often struggle to recover once residents and workers relocate after severe weather events.
FORTIFIED designations in Louisiana grew from approximately 1,000 to nearly 10,000 in just 18 months, marking the fastest growth period in the program’s history and nearly triple the pace of any other state.
In May 2026, IBHS surpassed 100,000 FORTIFIED properties nationwide, with more than half installed within the last three years.
“Louisiana is a big reason for this,” said Malik. “It is our fastest growing market, reaching 10,000 structures.”
Malik said growth in the state has been fueled in part by the Louisiana Fortify Homes Program, which provides grants of up to $10,000 for homeowners to upgrade to a FORTIFIED Roof.
Malik said Louisiana has also become IBHS’s largest commercial market, driven in part by federal mitigation funding programs that have encouraged more resilient commercial construction.
“Commissioner Temple has been a stand-out in carrying forward the FORTIFIED programs and bringing the industry along in terms of incentivizing proactive mitigation,” said Malik.
Malik said FORTIFIED certifications also help insurers better evaluate property risk.
“When a property earns a certificate of compliance from us, that is a meaningful and tangible way for a property owner to communicate to a potential insurer that their property is a better risk,” said Malik. “It creates the opportunity for greater affordability and greater availability because now there’s a common language to have a conversation about what the risk really looks like.”
