Providing an Up-front Estimate for Mitigation Services
We here at Built Restoration understand that the last thing a homeowner wants to deal with is having to dry out and repair their home after a loss. Logically, one of the first questions raised is “How much is this going to cost?” There are simple and more complicated answers to that question in this industry. Realizing this, we would like to shed some light on the matter.
Firstly, knowing your home insurance deductible is very pertinent to handling a loss in your home. Basically, when a loss occurs in your home and it is decided that a claim will be filed, the only expense incurred by you would be your deductible amount. The insurance company then handles all agreed upon expenses pertaining to the drying out and restoring of your home. We here at Built handle the bulk of communication, estimation, and documentation needed to be provided to the insurance company to facilitate this process. As a side note, depending on the scope of the loss incurred, the cost to repair your home may be less than the deductible, which in that case it may be smarter to pay out of pocket.
The main issue we would like to address here is providing a concrete estimate up front before we start drying services in your home. We often are asked to provide an estimate of our services needed for dry out so a homeowner can compare multiple estimates and make a decision based on the information provided by multiple companies. This is a logical and smart approach to any situation but can be a little bit tricky given the nature of our industry. For example, a dishwasher fails and leaks out into the kitchen causing significant water damage to your kitchen and crawlspace material. The cost of mitigating the damage and drying out your home is largely dependent upon how long it takes to dry out the effected area. Therefore, a concrete estimate is tough to provide given the dry out process can take 3 days or it can take 5 days depending on various conditions, the scope of the loss, the saturation of the material, etc. As a result, providing a concrete estimate of services for 3 days of drying can be problematic if the actual services are required for longer, creating a discrepancy in cost. It would be simply unfair and dishonest for us to say, “The drying out will cost X up front,” only to then have to dry out a home for longer and provide a bill for a cost larger than X.
All that being said, there are industry standards, regulations, and training we adhere to here at Built. By doing this we can ensure that we do everything needed to dry out your home for as long as that process may take. The uncertainty of exactly how long it will take to dry a home out before actually starting services is what makes providing a concrete estimate up front difficult to do. We simply do not know how long a mitigation service will take until we have started the drying process and are actively measuring moisture content in the material while it is drying. Hopefully, this sheds some light on the mitigation industry and, as always, if you have any questions or concerns feel free to contact us any time.
