Will a public adjuster get me extra money from my claim? The short answer is “no”. You are not entitled to receive any more from your insurance carrier than what is required to restore you to your condition prior to your loss, and a public adjuster cannot obtain for you more money than what you are entitled to under your contract with your insurance provider.
What the public adjuster does, however, is represent your claim to your insurance company to ensure that you properly claim all that you are entitled to receive. This is something that most policyholders are not able to do on their own and, because they cannot, are vulnerable to being exploited by their insurance company’s legal duty to show a profit to its stockholders, often at the expense of their own insurance claim.
Unknown to the typical policyholder is the fact that it is their burden to prove to the insurance company (a) they have a covered loss, and (b) the actual cost to restore them to their pre-loss condition. Because they do not know this, most of them will simply notify their insurance company of their loss and wait for the insurance adjuster to tell them if they are covered and how much they are willing to pay.
Your public adjuster, on the other hand, presents to the insurance company proof of your covered loss and the amount of money that you will require to recover from the covered loss. He is not “asking” – he’s proving the coverage, the damage, and the costs to restore you to your pre-loss condition.
The difference between allowing the insurance company’s adjuster to find the proof of a covered loss on his own and to “estimate” the amount of money necessary to restore it – and the public adjuster’s proof of the loss and presentation of the actual damages can and has resulted in differences amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single claim.
These differences in settlements derived from the use of a public adjuster are not “extra money”; rather, it is the exact amount of money that the policyholder requires and is entitled to restore them to their pre-loss condition.