It’s a surprisingly difficult job to put together an inventory for your insurance company after a disaster, especially if you’ve experienced home loss. Remember that, following a disaster, you’ll still be expected to go to work, drive your kids to school and baseball practice, and all the other things you normally attend. Now you have to find the time to inventory all the lost possessions from your home loss.
Many Items Never Get Counted When Homeowners Do Inventory
Not only that, but it’s challenging to remember everything you owned. Think about it. Can you close your eyes right now and name every single item in your bedroom? Most homeowners get overwhelmed with this task and end up submitting a partial inventory containing the larger items like the sofa, bed, end tables, and desk. Thinking they’ll submit a complete inventory later, they move on with their lives. But somehow that complete inventory materializes.
Public Adjusters Know the Right Questions to Ask About inventory
This is how a public adjuster can come in and save the day. They’ve done home loss inventories a multitude of times before. They’ll be able to cue you so you remember all the things you lost, not just the big things. They’ll ask, for example, did you own a ladder? What about a bucket? What about a mop and a broom? What about the light fixtures? Did you have ceiling fans? With the help of a public adjuster, soon you’ll have a truly comprehensive list to submit to the insurance company, including the pens and pencils you kept in a junk drawer in the kitchen.
Public Adjusters are Experts at Accurately Valuing Lost Possessions
The other way that a public adjuster helps with inventory is with pricing. People have a tendency to undervalue their possessions. But the public adjuster gets the prices right down to the penny. The number doesn’t just come off the top of their head. First, they have experience with pricing common household items. Second, if they don’t know the price, they do the research to find out the value. This way, the value submitted to the insurance company is defendable. You can prove that such and such item is worth a certain amount.
Public Adjusters Create Aging And Conditioning Reports
The other service that public adjusters provide is doing an aging and conditioning report. This is especially important because if you have items that you’ve owned for several years, like kitchen towels, you might not be going out and replacing all of them first thing. But if you have certain older items that get less wear and tear, like an antique bedroom set in the guest bedroom, that’s not going to get a fair value from the insurance company unless you have a public adjuster working for you.
Trust Your Public Adjuster to Pick up on the Fine Print
Finally, public adjusters are experts at reading the fine print in insurance contracts even when the insurance rep doesn’t. In many cases, caps on payouts may not refer to your exact home loss scenario, but your insurance rep may think so. Your public adjuster can set them straight.
There are so many ways that a public adjuster works for your interests, including helping you inventory your home losses and getting fair value compensation from your insurance company. If you’ve suffered a catastrophic home loss, you owe it to yourself to hire a public adjuster. For more information about our services, please contact us today.