First of all, we are terribly sorry that you have experienced an unfortunate event which has caused damage to your home. We know the experience in itself was not good and now it is time to deal with your insurance company. Not all insurance companies are alike and most do not want to pay you the full value of what your project is worth to completely restore your home to its prior condition. We are not an attorney, but we are a licensed contractor and will fight for you to be properly reimbursed for your loss so you can get back to the way things were before this happened.
The estimate process is not as easy as if you were just coming to us without an insurance claim. Our estimates are based on the “lump sum” estimating process which gives you a total price for the job to be completed from start to finish. This type of estimating and invoicing allows us to not charge you sales tax on materials. Sales tax is still collected by the state when we buy the products at wholesale prices. So instead of charging you sales tax at a higher retail price, as long as we are installing the product, we do not have to charge you sales tax which saves you money and it saves us time filing sales tax reports.
When the insurance company gets involved, they want an itemized cost for every nut and bolt, the cost to install every nut and bolt, and room by room, foot by foot. This takes our normal few hour process to compile an estimate into multiple days and sometimes weeks depending on the complexity and scale of the project. It also includes multiple meetings with your adjuster and what sometimes seems like endless back and forth.
We are more than happy to assist you through this process, however, after years of experience doing this for people, we have had some that used us to get the money and then went elsewhere, decided to handle the repair themselves, or did not make the repair at all. We are a small company that is dedicated to our customers and therefore we have enacted a policy to handle insurance based estimates differently than our normal “free” estimate policy. We will still provide you with a free “lump sum” estimate for your project. You can conduct your due diligence, search all of our wonderful reviews, speak to our past customers about their experience with us, meet our wonderful employees, and decide if you would like to move forward to hire us for your repairs. We will require a 10% nonrefundable deposit on the total project before we move forward with the itemization and negotiation process with your insurance company.
Please email the following items to service@affordablecontracting.net
Thank you very much and we look forward to meeting you soon.
Sincerely,
Bill Nobles & the Affordable Contracting, Inc Team