Hurricane Helene flooded properties and destroyed buildings in recent days as it swept across a wide stretch from Florida to Tennessee.

In the coming days and weeks, households will begin rebuilding – and the costs will be enormous. Some homeowners will have a hard time affording it.

The devastation comes after years of skyrocketing home and flood insurance prices that have left some households without coverage and others opting for low-cost plans with weaker policies, experts told ABC News. The increase was partly due to an increase in the cost of construction materials as well as the risk of more frequent or severe storms due to climate change, they said.

For homeowners of properties damaged by Helene, insurance costs are likely to rise even further, which will place a financial burden on them for years to come, the experts added.

“There's no question that the strain on household budgets has increased in recent years,” Benjamin Keys, a professor of real estate at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, told ABC News. “It has become much more expensive to live in danger.”

Helene, which made landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida on Thursday evening as a Category 4 hurricane, was the strongest hurricane ever to make landfall in the Big Bend region.

At least 120 people were killed by Helene, The Associated Press reported Monday.

Helene dropped more than 30 inches of rain across North Carolina, causing the largest local flooding in history. The storm's devastating path spanned more than 600 miles.

Homeowners have to resort to insurance that has become significantly more expensive in recent years.

In 2023, the nationwide average homeowners insurance premium rose about 11%, increasing three times more than the overall inflation rate, p&P Global found in January.

A few years earlier, insurance prices for homeowners in the region affected by Helene rose even further. In Florida, the average home insurance price increased an incredible 43% from January 2018 to December 2023, according to S&P Global said. During the same period, the average homeowners insurance price in North Carolina increased by about 36%.

Rising prices reduce the likelihood that customers will purchase strong plans with extensive benefits in the event of a disaster, Shan Ge, a professor at New York University who studies insurance and climate change, told ABC News.

“As costs go up, people are getting less insurance, and that will be a problem when a disaster like this occurs,” Ge said. “The recovery will be slower and the financial impact will be greater.”

Homeowners insurance sometimes includes separate hurricane insurance, which typically includes an additional deductible that the consumer pays for damage caused by a hurricane.

However, neither home insurance nor hurricane insurance cover flood damage. Instead, consumers are required to purchase flood insurance, but a far smaller proportion of homeowners purchase flood insurance than homeowners insurance.

The damage caused by Helene could reveal the difficulties caused by this relatively low flood insurance enrollment rate, Jeff Waters, an analyst at Moody's Analytics subsidiary RMS, told ABC News.

“With an event like Helene, where we see all the water, there's probably going to be more uninsured losses due to water because there's not as much pent-up demand as there is with hurricane policy,” Waters said.

Flood insurance prices have also risen in recent years and are expected to rise even faster for some households in the future as the National Flood Insurance Program rolls out what it calls “Risk Assessment 2.0.”

The new approach will set the price of flood insurance based on a calculation of each home's flood risk, changing a previous policy that considered whether a home was in a general risk area.

Some homes damaged by Helene will face a price drop as they deal with a rise in flood insurance costs, along with the expected increase in home insurance that typically follows a hurricane, some experts said.

“It's pretty clear after these disasters that homeowners' insurance premiums are going up,” Ishita Sen, a finance professor at Harvard Business School who studies home insurance rates, told ABC News.

The prospect of higher insurance costs could lead to difficult decisions for homeowners and their communities, Keys said.

“These higher costs of living in disaster-prone areas are putting a strain on household pocketbooks in ways we have never seen before,” Keys said. “Ultimately, it will create significant opportunities in these communities, whether in deciding where to live or how to build.”

ABC News' Emily Shapiro, David Brennan, Leah Sarnoff, Julia Reinstein and Meredith Deliso contributed to this report.