Markus: You really are a contractor advocate for them, fighting for them and helping them to get this major problem resolved as quickly and painlessly as they can. That’s fantastic. So, what are some of the little-known pitfalls or common mistakes you see homeowners make on the road to having their roof or siding replaced after a major hail or windstorm?
Steve: Well, a big common mistake I see them make is that they call the insurance company before having their own inspection done. You would think that having the insurance company adjuster come out to do an inspection is a good thing because they’re trained to do it. You figure, “they’re going to come out and inspect my home and they’ll know if I have the damage, and then I can make up my mind who I want to use if they approve it.”
Well, the problem there is the adjuster that they’re working with is overworked, he’s tasked with doing many inspections per day. He comes out, he does a quick look over. If he doesn’t see anything that interests him, he’ll just deny the claim and move forward, and tell the homeowner, “There’s not enough here, it does not seem to be claim worthy.”
However, when we come out, we do a full inspection no matter what. We just don’t do a quick overlook. We’ll go through every inch, we’ll double check from gutter to gutter, and we’ll go through everything to make sure that nothing’s missed, and we find it time and time again that we need to help the insured file for a re-inspection so that we can get the adjuster back out there and very respectfully show them what they missed.
And we run about a 99% closing rate when it comes to insurance claims because you’ve got to remember, we don’t want to tarnish our name with insurance companies either. We’re not out here to hurt the insurance company, we’re just here to advocate for the homeowner and get the homeowner or the insured everything that they have coming because that’s what they’re paying for. Insurance companies are supposed to indemnify the homeowner, and we’re just here to hold them to that contract.
Markus: Absolutely. Now, you mentioned doing forensic inspections, which obviously, the insurance company is probably not doing, at least not in the first go around. So, do you have specialized tools that you use for that or special technology that helps you do this and find the things that get overlooked by the insurance adjuster?
Steve: Absolutely. Once we have a homeowner’s address, we send that address to our meteorologist to look back in time and see what storms have gone over that home and what type of damage the home or the building might have. And then we send our inspectors to the home, and depending on the type of building, we’ll either use a drone with specialized software, or we’ll send an inspector up with a ladder, and then he’ll do a formal inspection to match the damage on that home to those storms.
We’ll look for directionality, for size, for the depth of the indentations, the amount of granule loss on the roof, the size of the penetration on the siding, the dings and the dents on the soft metals, and we’ll match that damage to those storms using cameras, using pitch gauges, and the many other tools and applications that we employ. Once we gather all that information, we enter it into our system and it’s then sent over to the insurance adjusters who work directly for us in house, and they do an assessment and they work up our own estimate on what it’s going to take to indemnify that homeowner.
They then work up the same estimate that the insurance company works up, and we upload that information with pictures and our findings to the insurance company. Once that’s complete, we meet with the insurance adjuster, and they already know that we’ve done our due diligence because they’re given all that information up front.
Markus: That’s very thorough. Can you, Steve, share an example of how you’ve helped your clients overcome these obstacles and had a successful experience with their insurance restoration?
Steve: Absolutely. We were recommended to a lady in Northbrook, a Northshore suburb of Chicago. We went out to her home to do an inspection. We inspected her home and it was claim worthy, and we went through the whole process and got everything fixed for her. About a day after we finished, our telephone rang. It happened to be her neighbor, and it’s this great man.
So he calls us up and he says, “I’m the neighbor of so and so at this address. I watched your guys do their work, and they did a really good job. I might need a new roof too. Can you guys come out and do an inspection?”
So we did. We came out. He turned out to be a 98-year-old gentleman living on his own, taking care of himself, which was pretty awesome.
Markus: At 98, Wow!
Steve: Yeah, what a great guy. So we got on his roof and we did the inspection. My partner was with me on that day. He’s the one that generally gets on the roof and does the full inspection. We found that it was claim worthy. We gathered all our evidence and information, we sat with him and we let him know that his home was claim worthy and it would be covered under his insurance company depending on his policy and if we could see a copy of his declaration page.