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It may come as a surprise to you to learn that the overwhelming majority of insurance adjusters, no matter which insurance company they work for, use the same computer software to generate estimates from which they pay insurance claims.  The corporation that owns and manages the software that creates the computer-generated estimate that your adjuster is using to pay your claim is called Verisk Analytics, Inc.

When you visit this page of the website for Verisk Analytics, Inc. you will see something very interesting about its managers and Board of Directors.  Most of them, including the director that bears the title of “Lead Director” are from the insurance industry and/or have professional backgrounds in the very closely associated financial investment industry.  Very few, if any, have backgrounds or practical experience in the industries or trades associated with performing the restoration work or providing the materials that are represented in these computer-generated estimates.

This could lead a reasonable person to question whether the computer-generated estimate provided by the insurance adjuster represents the financial interests of the insurance industry managing and producing it … or the interests of the policyholder who is presumably expected to have enough money to fully restore his property from the amount estimated by the software program.

Prudent policyholders, however, will carefully read their policies and discover that their payments from their insurance companies are to be based upon the actual … and not the “estimated” … cost of restoration.  They will know that they are not limited to receive only the insurance adjuster’s home-grown estimate generated by his own industry’s managed computer software program but are entitled, instead, to the amounts that it will actually cost to replace or restore the property that is destroyed or damaged.

If they don’t know this and settle for what the computer-generated estimate guesses that their payment should be, they are likely to be underpaid for their loss.