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 more money than 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 correctly 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 duty to show a profit to its stockholders.
It is unknown to the typical policyholder 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 will 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.
On the other hand, your public adjuster presents to the insurance company proof of your covered loss and the amount of money 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 evidence 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 using a public adjuster are not “extra money”; instead, it is the exact amount of money that the policyholder requires and is entitled to restore them to their pre-loss condition.
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Hi! Somehow, I feel obliged to share this information with my sister-in-law’s neighbor as soon as possible to ensure he takes the right actions afterwards. His house was partially destroyed due to a fire incident in the kitchen last week and he’s now filing a claim to cover the restoration expenses. You made a really good point by saying that public adjusters must make sure we receive every valid compensation from our insurance provider to prevent unnecessary loss or exploitation.