Posted By MBoy on 06 Aug 2009 10:47 AM
If you like cookie cutter claims, this is wonderful. Experienced adjusters like Mr. Toll would get bored after a day of doing this.
I understand that this was your experience, and respect that.
I think that the nature of the claims is more dependent on the type of storm, and how hard-hit that region was.
Mother nature is an equal-opportunity offender. The damages on claims assigned to me by State Farm are not different than claims from other insurance companies, and as an independent I have worked for quite a few other companies.
3 of the storms I have worked for State Farm had claims assigned to me that were damaged to the point that the home was uninhabitable. I am including 2 storms that happened this year in 2009 before the hurricane season.
Anytime you have trees hitting houses, breaking trusses, that have plumbing, wiring, and HVAC running through the truss system you will be very busy writing an estimate that also includes drywall in undamaged rooms that have ceilings attached to the bottom of the other end of those trusses, etc.
I talked to Tom when he was working the California Fires a couple years ago - he was looking at severely damaged homes. Although he wasn't working State Farm claims, you might have been assigned a loss like that if you were deployed there for State Farm. Many of them were just smoke damage, but not all of them.