What a public adjuster actually does

A public adjuster is a licensed insurance adjuster retained by the policyholder. We prepare, document, present and negotiate your claim against your own insurer.

When a fire or a flood happens, the insurer assigns an adjuster. That person may be courteous, competent and entirely straight with you — most are. They are also being paid by the company whose money is at issue, and their job is to determine what the policy obliges the insurer to pay. Nobody in that arrangement is tasked with finding the coverage you did not know you had.

The three adjusters

What the work consists of

Very little of it looks dramatic. A claim is won or lost in documentation, and documentation is unglamorous.

• Policy interpretation. Limits, sub-limits, endorsements, exclusions, deductibles, the loss-settlement basis, and any time bar that applies.
• Scope of loss. A measured, itemised statement of what was damaged and what it costs to put right at current Lower Mainland rates.
• Contents. Inventory, valuation, and the replacement-cost documentation insurers require before they will pay it.
• Additional living expenses. What you are owed while displaced, which is routinely under-claimed because people do not keep the receipts.
• Correspondence. Every exchange with the insurer handled on your behalf, in writing and on a record — so that the claim stops being something you administer.
• Settlement review. Holdbacks, recoverable depreciation, and release wording before anything is signed.

When to call

There are three moments when people reach us. All three are workable — but they are not equally good, and it is worth being honest about which is which.

Before the insurer's adjuster attends

The best time, and by a wide margin. The scope of a claim tends to get anchored at the first inspection, and it is far easier to establish the extent of damage properly than to reopen it later.

Engage us at this point and you never really manage the claim at all. The insurer's adjuster corresponds with us from the outset, so the calls, the forms and the requests for one more document do not arrive at your door in the middle of a week you are already struggling to hold together.

When the offer looks short

The most common. You have a number, it does not match what the repairs will cost, and you have no particular way to prove that. This is the ordinary case, and it is what a documented scope is for.

After a denial

A denial is a position, not a verdict. It rests on a reading of the policy and of the facts. Both can be answered, and sometimes the answer is straightforward — a peril characterised wrongly, an exclusion applied too broadly, an investigation that stopped early.

What we are not

We are not lawyers, and we do not give legal advice or conduct litigation. We are not a restoration contractor and we do not perform the repairs — which means we have no interest in the scope being any particular size other than correct. And we are not a claims-filing service: we take the file from first notice to closing.