We’ve seen plenty of property owners try to cut costs by avoiding professional services and handling their insurance claims themselves, but the value of expert assistance far outweighs the cost of what you could be losing with an unfair settlement. It is just good business practice to use professionals to protect and advance your cause with financial endeavors; from using CPAs to deal with the IRS, to doctors in handling medical conditions, to lawyers when you need to go to court, to financial advisors when building wealth. So, when it comes to your property suffering significant damage from an insured event, it is the professional public adjuster you turn to, for representation when dealing with your insurance company, to assure yourself of collecting the full recovery from the insurance policy you purchased.
Some of these undesirable outcomes are the result of preventable mistakes that we’ll be going over today.
Take a look at these rookie mistakes that are preventable for you to avoid by hiring a professional team like Altieri Insurance Consultants to handle your property insurance claims:
1. Not Fully Understanding Your Insurance Policy
Just because you have insurance doesn’t mean you’re covered. This is a critical mistake that many property owners make, and many of them have quite literally paid the price. Policies have terms for a reason. If you want to ensure that you will be covered for certain damages, you need to understand your policy and decide if your current insurance provider can assist you when the time comes. Trusted insurance consultant companies like Altieri Insurance Consultants, offer policy review services before disaster strikes, to help you decipher the fine print and suggest any changes that should be considered.
2. Missing Your Deadline to File a Claim
It doesn’t matter how much you’re paying for your insurance, missing a deadline can disqualify you for coverage. You’re just one person, and there’s a lot to take in just after facing a natural disaster. It’s not unheard of for property owners to get caught up in their other responsibilities that they miss the deadline for possibly life-changing reimbursement. By calling a trusted public adjuster immediately, you can guarantee that these responsibilities will be done on time and with the utmost care.
| Why Do Insurance Policies Have Deadlines? Because when you have a claim, the policy requires you to make timely notice to your insurer to allow them the proper opportunity to inspect the damage right after it happens and before you mistakenly clean up and unknowingly eliminate the evidence of your loss. When you wait too long after the day of the incident to file your insurance claim, it becomes harder to prove the extent of the damage. It may be nearly impossible to distinguish what damage occurred from the natural disaster and what happened after the fact. |
3. Falling Short In Your Property Inspection
When you perform your own inspection, unless you perform this function for a living, you will not know exactly what to look for. It’s not enough to only identify the obvious. You must be aware of where the subtle points of damage form and what the domino effect of damage can cause. Insurance company adjusters cannot, and will not, spend the amount of time a professional public adjuster will dedicate to your property to understand the full damage impact a hurricane will produce. Only an expert like a public adjuster would know what to inspect and how to apply those findings to your insurance policy, to produce the fair settlement needed for full recovery.
4. Agreeing to An Unfair Offer
Even if you do everything correctly, your lack of industry knowledge can be used to your disadvantage by you not truly knowing a good offer from a bad offer. If you don’t know what’s fair and what’s not, how will you know whether you’re getting the right amount of money that your policy dictates is due? Your insurance company has all the experts working for them but are very limited in time to spend just on your case. Without a dedicated advocate spending the right amount of time and effort to understand what happened to your property, you can only come out on the short end, potentially costing you tens or hundreds of thousands and sometimes even millions of dollars in lost recovery ability. With an insurance consultant as your dedicated advocate on your side, you can ensure that this doesn’t happen to you.
5. Regretting Hiring An Appraiser
At the onset of a claim, some people have thought of hiring an appraiser as a smart move to avoid these mistakes. However, an appraiser’s only function is to assess the damage. Appraisers cannot analyze policy language or negotiate what is covered. This leaves the policyholder vulnerable to an insurance company who rejects coverage for certain damaged areas. You need a professional public adjuster who will quantify damage as is dictated by the policy, who can direct the insurer on why a claim is covered, which creates leverage for you to be able to settle a claim fairly and completely allowing you to rebuild in full as you desire. That’s the difference between a public adjuster and an appraiser.
Let Altieri Insurance Consultants Take the Wheel!
Avoid these costly mistakes by hiring Altieri Insurance Consultants, The Partner Property Owners Rely On! Hear our client’s success stories and see how our dedicated team of public adjusters can help you receive what you are owed.
