Most prudent insurance carriers today rely on vendors with seasoned professionals to complete thorough property inspections. However, how much do you really know about these vendors? Taking the time to understand the practices of your inspection vendors and any potential loopholes that they may be taking can help you mitigate your loss exposure.
Do you know which practices and methods your vendor is using to complete property inspections?
One horror story that immediately comes to mind is related to a local insurance carrier. This carrier had been partnering with a vendor for property inspections and learned too late that it was the vendor’s policy not to climb on top of roofs until a loss was experienced. The carrier simply assumed that climbing on top of roofs was a standard inspection process for the vendor, and therefore was hit with a much larger loss for making this assumption.
Does your vendor for property inspections use employees or contractors?
Another important question that you should ask is if the vendor’s inspectors are employees or contractors. We’ve talked a lot about how the vendor that insurance carriers use for property inspections often represents your company in face-to-face interactions with insureds. In fact, as far as the insureds are concerned, the vendor is the insurance carrier. Therefore, you’ll want to partner with a vendor that will represent your company well with experienced and professional property inspectors. As we have all experienced before, sometimes getting rid of an employee takes time and certain steps to manage an employee out of an organization or role. Relying on a vendor who contracts its inspectors helps to ensure that if excellence is not reflected in each and every inspection nothing is required to stop utilizing that contractor immediately. This approach ensures there are no shortcomings between the expectations of how the insurance carrier wants to be represented and what actually takes place.
At Insurance Risk Services, we value transparency and want to make sure that our property and casualty insurance partners truly understand our services and policies up front. After all, our job is to provide you with the most accurate underwriting reports possible to allow you to make informed decisions.
To address these two key areas that we’ve brought up in this article, we first want to make you aware that our property inspectors at Insurance Risk Services rely on camera poles for high quality, accurate images of areas above the sight plane (roofs, for example). In some situations, we will discuss other ariel options for capturing images if needed. Most importantly, we’re always very transparent with insurance carriers about our efforts and reasoning for using particular methods.
We also want to put your mind at ease about the property inspectors that would be representing your company by partnering with Insurance Risk Services. We only work with the absolute best contractors. Though excellence must be exuded to be chosen as one our contractors, we still require that they go through our extensive training so that our brand will be represented well. This, in turn, also ensures that we only send the most professional and responsible property inspectors to represent our insurance carriers well.
The best piece of advice when considering which vendors to work with for property inspections is to have a thorough understanding of their policies and methods for completing inspections. It’s in your best interest to ask a lot of questions when choosing a partner for insurance inspections, which is why we’re always happy to discuss these questions with insurance carriers. With transparency being very important to us, we encourage you to contact us to learn more about how we can best serve your needs.
One horror story that immediately comes to mind is related to a local insurance carrier. This carrier had been partnering with a vendor for property inspections and learned too late that it was the vendor’s policy not to climb on top of roofs until a loss was experienced. The carrier simply assumed that climbing on top of roofs was a standard inspection process for the vendor, and therefore was hit with a much larger loss for making this assumption.
Does your vendor for property inspections use employees or contractors?
Another important question that you should ask is if the vendor’s inspectors are employees or contractors. We’ve talked a lot about how the vendor that insurance carriers use for property inspections often represents your company in face-to-face interactions with insureds. In fact, as far as the insureds are concerned, the vendor is the insurance carrier. Therefore, you’ll want to partner with a vendor that will represent your company well with experienced and professional property inspectors. As we have all experienced before, sometimes getting rid of an employee takes time and certain steps to manage an employee out of an organization or role. Relying on a vendor who contracts its inspectors helps to ensure that if excellence is not reflected in each and every inspection nothing is required to stop utilizing that contractor immediately. This approach ensures there are no shortcomings between the expectations of how the insurance carrier wants to be represented and what actually takes place.
At Insurance Risk Services, we value transparency and want to make sure that our property and casualty insurance partners truly understand our services and policies up front. After all, our job is to provide you with the most accurate underwriting reports possible to allow you to make informed decisions.
To address these two key areas that we’ve brought up in this article, we first want to make you aware that our property inspectors at Insurance Risk Services rely on camera poles for high quality, accurate images of areas above the sight plane (roofs, for example). In some situations, we will discuss other ariel options for capturing images if needed. Most importantly, we’re always very transparent with insurance carriers about our efforts and reasoning for using particular methods.
We also want to put your mind at ease about the property inspectors that would be representing your company by partnering with Insurance Risk Services. We only work with the absolute best contractors. Though excellence must be exuded to be chosen as one our contractors, we still require that they go through our extensive training so that our brand will be represented well. This, in turn, also ensures that we only send the most professional and responsible property inspectors to represent our insurance carriers well.
The best piece of advice when considering which vendors to work with for property inspections is to have a thorough understanding of their policies and methods for completing inspections. It’s in your best interest to ask a lot of questions when choosing a partner for insurance inspections, which is why we’re always happy to discuss these questions with insurance carriers. With transparency being very important to us, we encourage you to contact us to learn more about how we can best serve your needs.
