And so you can answer that question in a lot of ways, I would overall say that our exposure is fairly balanced between the Southeast and California earthquake with Hawaii falling behind as far as that ranking. So I would say that we’ve brought up our hurricane exposure to be more in line with earthquakes. Although I would say in the last few months, in particular, the growth of our exposure has slowed tremendously as we manage all of these various metrics that we use.Mark Dwelle To the extent you’re writing, I guess, where you’ve been adding property exposures, what sort of limits are you typically writing or maybe there’s not atypical.Jen Klobnak Well, there can be typical. We look at $5 million or even down to $2.5 million limit in the highest concentrated areas like Florida and the Houston area.
And so we’re trying to stay open for new business with our producers so that they at least can get a quote. And to do that, we really have to limit the dollar amount of capacity that we can provide. So we can continue to see some good business throughout the cycle.Mark Dwelle Are you primarily participating as a primary writer — or are you part of an excess tower?Jen Klobnak Historically, we’ve been very focused on the primary. The excess portion of our portfolio has grown a bit just with the change in other carriers’ limits where they’re providing less and so a lot more of that business is in towers now with a lot of carriers participating. So we’ve seen that area of our book grow as far as excess but we still prefer and enjoy a lot of primary business in the portfolio.Craig Kliethermes Still predominantly primarily excess will be 15%, 20% mean…Mark Dwelle Okay, that’s very helpful.
And then one other question, Craig, in your comments, you mentioned the wheels businesses and Cat as being the areas where there’s the most dislocation. I’ve just quizzed you extensively on the cat portion, I suppose. So could you share any thoughts you might have on what you’re seeing in the Wheels business collectively kind of where the dislocations are most acute and maybe some sense of what the rate increase environments are like in some of those areas.Jen Klobnak Yes. I’ll actually jump in. If you look at our auto exposure, the main business unit that I said is our Transportation division. And I would say the auto space is pretty diverse. There are parts of it that are still very healthy in other parts, when there’s a lot of competition.
So the most challenging section of that market is actually the trucking market, both on an admitted and non-admitted basis I don’t understand why but people don’t appreciate that 2020 was a lull. And so losses were down for insurers that year but they incorporate that into the pricing and assume that losses will be down going forward. But in reality, there are accidents every day. And so there are more markets entering trucking. We heard about a new one yesterday and it’s frustrating because you need to charge enough to cover, you’re going to have claims and you need to charge enough to cover that. And that market is experiencing some issues. I’d say the other areas of the market are a little healthier. We have a public portfolio. We have some specialty commercial auto and those are a little bit healthier from that standpoint.Overall, in the first quarter, we were able to achieve an 8% rate change on the transportation portfolio.
The other area where we have some auto exposure would be in our personal umbrella product and we’re a primary focus. And there, we fight with the various state insurance departments to get a little more rate on the portfolio. And again, these losses being low a couple of years ago, people are trying to assume that losses aren’t happening but they are. And so we do see other carriers, competitors struggling in that market, again, with the social inflation and other factors that we’ve talked about previously. So that’s a disruptive market. We’ve been growing in for a bit and we continue to see opportunity. But with new growth at RLI, we always watch it very closely.Operator Thank you. Our next question comes from Casey Alexander.Casey Alexander I was wondering if you could give us an overview of what you’re seeing in reinsurance markets relative to the increase in your property exposure and how you’re managing the obvious change in prices in reinsurance markets?
Just kind of an overview of how you’re dealing with the whole situation.Jen Klobnak Sure. Thank you. Obviously, January 1 was challenging for us. We were able to renew our reinsurance and we did get coverage but it was at a higher cost. We’re able to cover that cost by passing that along to some extent with our rate change. We see that the reinsurance market is continuing to be firm. So we do have renewals that happened from January through July on various parts of our portfolio. So recently, April 1, we renewed on our Surety treaty and our professional services group which is that architects and engineers, both — those renewals were better. They’re not a property focused. And so the rate change was pretty manageable there. But we know from talking to our brokers and from hearing about what’s going on in the market, that property will continue to be a challenging area.
