Insurance Claims Step by Step Process - Part 1
The last few days I have been working on an insurance claim for my twin home rental property in Maple Grove Minnesota. About 1 week ago we had some very bad storms and hail damage to many different cities. To my surprise Maple Grove was one of them. For those of you that don’t remember there was one of the worst storms I remember about 2 years ago in Maple Grove, I also had storm claims back then on a different properties. You learn a little bit each time you have storm damage and an insurance claim. Hail damage, high powered winds, and rain really can cause a lot of damage to a property, more than you can imagine. It’s not uncommon for $10,000 to $50,000 in damage easily just from a good size hail and wind storm. When this happens you will see contractors out with their signs trying to help homeowners with their insurance claims. I have to say I can’t remember a summer and spring in Minnesota ever on record like the one we are having. I think we had two very big storms in just the same week.
I heard Otsego, Forest Lake, Hugo, Albertville, Maple Grove, Coon Rapids and many other cities got hit hard from the storms. Keep in mind even if and when you get an insurance claim it takes a lot of time and effort to go through the process, it’s not very fun, especially if you have to take your time out from being landlord and other job related activities in real estate just to get your houses repaired back to their original condition. I believe most claims won’t leave your property any better off than it was before. The hail chipped my siding in many spots. The hail damaged my roof pretty bad. We had to put 4 roof vents on. All my wraps around my garage door and gutters, etc in the front got hurt bad. We are fixing all of it with the help of the insurance company. We are working on finding replacement siding, but the chances of the siding being discontinued after only a few years is pretty good, so we are likely going to find it hard to replace. This is a twin home, so I need to have the neighbor be on the same page as me and want the same stuff and fix it at the same time. When you have damage to your property, I would inspect it ASAP. Check the inside for water damage, my property luckily we could not find anything inside for water. You also want to check for damage everywhere, I mean everywhere, you may want a contractor to even look at it, as he/she does this for a living and may be able to find stuff you were not able to see. Also you will want to call in your claim ASAP. That’s where I made a mistake and waited a few days to call in the claim and waited a couple of days for the adjuster to call me back. By that 5 day lapse, the adjuster who came up from another state because the insurance company was so busy, actually told me he was booked 2 1/2 weeks. Well I was on tight timeline due to selling the property and some other stuff, so I had to have it moved up a lot. We did the claim tonight, and got the schedule rearranged to an earlier time. When you meet your insurance adjuster, as you can imagine many adjusters work for the insurance company, so you can imagine their job is to find as “little” wrong with the house as possible, and find all the “quick fixes” they can.
It’s very important you bring a good contractor with you that knows how to work with insurance companies. Not any contractor, one that works with insurance companies. This way you can have someone in your corner. We are still going to work on this claim and have my contractor keep the dialogue going to make it a win-win-win for everyone. Storm damage is expensive, due to how many storms we have in Minnesota, you definately want insurance. I have talked to contractors in the business who have fixed the same things on the same houses 2-3 times in the same 12-18 month period because of the storms. I had a $1000 deductible, I would highly recommend that deductible amount or less. Make sure to have adequate insurance. I spoke to an insurance salesperson today who agreed to write a valuable informative post on the different types of insurance and why people need them, so that I can educate you all on what insurance can do for you.
