Insurance adjuster playing games after House fire contents claim

[todaystheday]

I had a house fire in January of this year. My contents portion of the claim had JUST been settled (kind of). I used one of the insurance company preferred providers to do the clean out and inventory. The insurance company paid them for their services. The clean put company provided a list of unsalvagable items to both me and my insurance company back in May. My insurance adjuster had me value and age the list on 2 separate occasions, both times I completed his tasks within a week or 2. Now 5 weeks AFTER the last time I valued and aged the unsalvageable list, I recieved a check from the insurance company for ACV, and since it was significantly lower than anticipated, I had to request the itemized invoice. I also was not informed by the agent about recoverable depreciation until I directly asked.

My biggest issue is that the insurance adjuster made some OBVIOUS changes to the items on the list when confirming the values I provided. For instance, 5 televisions were on the list from the cleanout company and on the valuation list I submitted, yet only 2 were on the adjusters invoice. 75 pairs of pants was reduced to 14 pairs. This has happened to several items. In addition to this type of inaccuracies, there are out right wrong pricing examples given, for instance washing machine was listed by both the cleanout company and myself, and valued at 899, but the invoice listed the item description used for their pricing adjustment as a washing machine pedestal for only 299.

I can understand some pricing adjustment for similar items from different vendors, but it seems as if they are trying to lowball me and screw me over.

Is this standard practice? Or are they trying to get over? I am documenting and highlighting the discrepancies preparing a list to reply back to the adjuster, but I was wondering if I should just quit fighting myself and hire a lawyer to do it for me? I know the insurance adjusters job is to keep payouts as low as possible, but this seems like outright fraud, and if not fraud then poorly done rushed work with no oversight.

 

[servantofchrist27]

@todaystheday I don't know exactly what happened, but based on your description I might be able to point out where a miscommunication happened.

ACV is based on the cost of an LKQ replacement, minus deprecation. The values that are placed on the items on the inventory lists that are submitted don't really matter, what matters is what the price is for the replacement items at retailers today.

What often happens is that the insurance company takes the inventory and sends it to a vendor who finds the LKQ replacements, where they're available for sale, what the replacement price actually is, and what the ACV would be after subtracting depreciation. As you can imagine, there is a lot of different things that people own, lots of different potential replacement items, and lots of different retailers to check to find prices, so this is a task that is well suited to having AI involved to sort through all this information quickly. The problem is that the AI isn't good enough yet, and these companies that price things out are stingy about hiring real humans to review and correct these inventory lists before sending them back to the insurance companies. The insurance adjusters are too overworked to comb through all these inventory lists when they get sent back.

I expect that there is opportunity for you to point out needed corrections and obtain approval for changes before you purchase different items than what is on their list. Use the item numbers from the list they sent you to keep things simple.

 

[todaystheday]

Would that account for the reductions in quanity? Because it makes sense for weird values, slight valuation discrepancies, and item descriptions.