Why you should hire a public assessor if you have a homeowner insurance claim

As an avid DIYer, a public assessor is one professional I would highly recommend if you ever need one. Read why.

When our house burned down November of 2015 (Read our story here), we had a lot to think about. One of our neighbors came by and gave us a card to a public assessor they had used to deal with their house fire claim. We also had other “fire truck chasers” show up and tell us they were public assessors and could help us with our house fire claim. If you think that the insurance company is going to work in your best interests financially.. you can rethink that. No doubt the agent you are talking to is going to genuinely want to do the best job they can for you. But the policy that the insurance company writes to remain a for-profit business is fairly iron-clad. Plus, it is a huge pain in the booty dealing with your living arrangements right after you lose them unexpectedly along with probably, all of your belongings. Dealing with the insurance’s annoying policies is the LAST thing you would want to sign up for. A public assessor works for you for a fee, to deal with the insurance company. They will fight to get you as much as you are owed, they know more about this than I ever did, and they typically run things like hiring an inventory specialist.

 

Commission VS standard rate. We dealt with 2 different assessors and the one we went with had a good point. If you agree to pay a standard rate to deal with your claim, there is not build-in incentive to get you as much as possible. The agent that works on commission will work harder, naturally. I believe we paid 10%. Let me tell you how that worked out for us.

I was under the impression that our house claim would be 240k as that is what we paid for the house. Reading the contract, it was insured for 240K. Anyone could read that and make that assumption. But for the structure alone, our public assessor got us 330K. How? They know what they are doing. They already paid for themselves and then some. One of the points I remember is that there are all sorts of codes that did not exist when the house was built. There is a secret pot of money the insurance needs to pay you to bring the house up to code. But average Joe who just lost everything and has other priorities may not know that or find that information and may settle for a straight 240k and live with less house than they had due to unforeseen costs and think that the insurance company had their back 100%.

They negotiated for us so we could live on our property while the process occurred. Our mortgage was 1400 with taxes, insurance (so glad to have that), and our mortgage. They found out that to rent a comparable home of this size, on this much land, or hire someone to watch our livestock while we rented and renting furniture would cost around 3,500 a month. Initially, the insurance company was only going to pay the minimum monthly for the first 12 months on a trailer payment. Were talking hundreds a month, not thousands. Luckily we knew someone who would rent us their RV indefinitely and accepted 3,000 for the first 12 months and nothing after. It took 18 months to build our house, we were glad for that arrangement.

We got some upgrades. Such as a new metal roof, which was much better than the 3 tab we had before. We got air conditioning that we didn’t have before. We got a hookup for the RV we stayed in on the property. I doubt we would have been able to request that without the assessor. We added a bathroom and a bedroom. We fixed the goofy layout. How? I’m really not sure. But they made it happen. We almost had to buy part of the roofing ourselves due to some error in communication but we instead chose not to put a wood stove back in as that was something we could do ourselves and there was already a furnace. We did have a 2.5 story chimney before that we didn’t put back in which saved a lot of money we were able to use in other places. The public assessor with the contractor was able to help us know what money could be moved without having us owe. We ended up building a really nice house in the end.

 

They cut the B**sh**. To start, as soon as our insurance company was told we hired a public assessor, they switched our agent to one that is used to dealing with public assessors. I thought this was a little funny but then I learned that the assessor probably knows a lot more than the average agent such as specific laws in your state that give you more than the insurance agency is nationally required. For example, in the state of Washington, you actually get 3 years to make new claims against an existing claim like “I forgot we had priceless paintings that burnt up in the fire” up to 3 years later. The insurance company will typically only give you the national 1 year timeframe. And why would you think any different? Unless you have an assessor to tell you otherwise. Another thing is there was this weird policy that we had to purchase our contents and return the receipts to get the other half of our money back. Our assessor was able to waive this rule. The only thing we missed out by not doing this was the money paid in sales tax. Luckily we knew we had 3 years to turn it in. Funny thing though, you don’t always want all of your same stuff back. Plus if we were able to get it on sale the second time around, it made more sense not to turn that in.

They hired the inventory specialist. An inventory specialist is a Godsend. They go through your house, pick up everything, research how much it costs, and write it all up. Not only would that be horribly depressing to do post house-fire, it takes a lot of time and you are exposing yourself to a lot of toxins just being in the house after the fire. This was part of their 10%, they did not charge extra for this. If you don’t hire an assessor, I’d at least recommend hiring someone to take care of your inventory. We got around 100,000 from this. If I had done it, I’d probably have quit after we had enough money back to buy some clothes again.

They hired the contractors. We didn’t have to find a contractor to do the work. The public assessor already has a general contractor in the area who is used to dealing with house fires and restoration and hires our all the subcontractors. Now, I do have a negative here as it seemed like not everyone was on the same page. We’d go days and weeks watching nothing being done. But since then we’ve come to realize that is a common practice in the field of contractors. Yay..

We got good deals on some really nice appliances, cabinets, flooring, other building materials because of their connections. We had to drive an hour or so to go to their place but we were getting contractor pricing, not homeowner pricing. They held our hand through the process of picking out all the tile, cabinets, etc. My husband and I actually had a lot of fun with this part of the process.

 

It did take longer I believe, to reach an agreement. Our assessor was relentless in getting us more money to adequately replace our home, find us a place to live, and replace what we lost. The first 4 months were awful. It did get dragged out a bit. But in the end, I would highly recommend hiring a public assessor if you ever have an incident with your house. They did a great job.