What Can Allied Claims Do for You?
Have you ever had to make a claim on your property insurance for fire, flooding, burglary or criminal damage? If you have, you’ll know it can be quite an uphill struggle. Besides having to convince the company’s loss adjuster that there are no flaws in your claim, you’ll probably also be taking time off work for appointments with all the contractors whose quotes you need.
The good news is that you can use an independent loss assessor, such as Allied Claims. A loss assessor (sometimes referred to as a public loss adjuster) is as expert about insurance as the company’s loss adjuster, but is working 100% for you.
What Does a Loss Assessor Do
If you appoint a loss assessor for an insurance claim on either a residential or business property, you can expect them to deal with all aspects of making the claim. This covers surveying the damage and listing the repairs and replacements needed, negotiating with the loss adjuster to make sure you get what’s due to you, meeting contractors and submitting their quotes to the insurance company.
Some loss assessors, including Allied Claims, go further than this, however. We offer a full service where we project manage the repairs, ensuring everything goes smoothly and is done according to your wishes, right up to the point where we can return your fully restored property to you.
Services offered by Allied Claims include:
- Making a thorough survey of the damage.
- Producing reports that give full details of the damage and what needs to be done.
- Arranging and submitting the quotes required by the insurance company, without you needing to be involved.
- Meeting the insurer’s loss adjuster to put your case, using full knowledge of legal requirements and industry practice.
- Making sure any drying-out procedure required starts as soon as possible, to cut down on delay.
- Using our experience to ensure the claim is processed as quickly as possible.
- Project managing the repairs from start to finish.
- Submitting the invoices to the insurance company on completion of the work.
Special Clauses for Home and Business Claims
Whether you’re making an insurance claim for your home or for a business property, there may be clauses in your policy that require immediate action. This is one more reason for having an expert eye looking over the claim right from the start, to pick out urgent action.
If fire, flood or another disaster has wrecked your home, you’ll need somewhere to stay till repairs have been made. The problem is that the loss adjuster will want to take time over accepting liability for the claim. A good loss assessor, like Allied Claims, will make sure the process is speeded up.
If you have an insurance policy for a business premises, it should include a Business Interruption Clause, which is designed to minimise the losses caused by being unable to trade. This may include provision for temporary relocation, and we’ll push for all terms to be fulfilled as quickly as possible.
Finding Hidden Damage with Thermography
It’s important to get the obvious damage repaired, but can you be sure there’s no hidden damage that will cause trouble later? It could be difficult to open a new claim a few years down the line, but if the problems are clearly identified during the original claim, the insurance company will have little choice but to cover them.
The best way of achieving this is through thermography, a type of thermal imaging that shows up any object hotter than its surroundings. Everything produces heat in the form of infrared radiation, which can’t be seen by the human eye. Thermographic imaging equipment can pick it up, though, and use the data to create a computer-generated image of the object.
Unlike many forms of imaging, thermography is completely safe. X-ray imaging, for instance, involves firing radiation at you, although the risk is usually negligible. Thermography involves purely passive imaging of what’s already there and is no more dangerous than a camera.
How Is Thermography Used?
Thermography is used for military surveillance, allowing firefighters to find their way around smoke-filled buildings and providing diagnosis in hospital for issues like cancer, deep-vein thrombosis and back problems. Medical thermography works because tumours, inflamed blood vessels etc. are marginally hotter than the surrounding tissue. The small difference is hard to measure by conventional methods, but it shows up on a thermographic image.
In the same way that thermography is safe in medical diagnosis, it can be used to see the unknown in your property with no risk of causing damage. It can pick up places where heat is being lost, or where insulation is wet or missing, and detects water damage or mould. It can also pinpoint electrical hotspots and refrigerant leaks.
Allied Claims can supply thermographic imaging to any client whose property could be at risk of hidden damage.
If you have an insurance claim, contact Allied Claims for a loss assessor and project management service.