Documenting Damage: What Adjusters Look For

Two duties collide immediately after a loss. Your policy requires you to mitigate — take reasonable steps to prevent further damage. It also requires you to substantiate the claim, which means the evidence has to survive the mitigation.

These are not in conflict, but satisfying both requires a few deliberate minutes at a bad moment. Most people do the first and skip the second.

Before anything is touched

What to capture:

• Wide shots of each affected room from the doorway, so the extent is visible in context.
• Medium shots of each damaged area.
• Close shots of the failure point — the split pipe, the missing shingles, the point of entry.
• Something for scale in close shots. A ruler, a coin, a hand.
• Video walking through, narrating what you are seeing. Video captures relationships between rooms that stills miss.
• Undamaged areas too, to establish the pre-loss standard of finishes and materials.

Keep the failed component

This is the item most often discarded and most often decisive.

When a plumber cuts out a failed section of pipe, they normally throw it away. When a roofer replaces damaged shingles, the old ones go in the skip. That physical evidence is what distinguishes a sudden failure from gradual deterioration — the failure surface itself tells the story.

Ask for it, bag it, label it with the date and location, and keep it until the claim is closed.

Mitigation, documented

Your policy requires reasonable steps to prevent further damage, and those costs are usually reimbursable. But reimbursement follows documentation.

• Receipts for tarps, plywood, dehumidifier rental, emergency plumbing, water extraction.
• Photographs of the mitigation in place — the tarp on the roof, the boarded window.
• Dates and times for each action.
• Invoices from any emergency service, with the scope described.

If a restoration company asks you to sign a document before starting, read it. Some are an authorisation to perform work; others are an assignment of benefits, which transfers control of your claim to them. Those are very different documents, and several states now regulate the second specifically.

The inventory of damaged contents

For personal property, adjusters generally work from a list. Building it well is tedious and it is what determines the settlement.

For each item: what it is, brand and model where known, age or purchase date, original cost if known, and a photograph. Group by room. Do not throw damaged items away until the adjuster has seen them or has agreed in writing that photographs suffice — discarding them can be treated as failing to allow inspection.

What adjusters are actually assessing

Understanding this tells you what to document.

• Cause. What happened, and whether it was sudden or gradual. This determines coverage.
• Scope. Exactly what is damaged and to what extent. This determines the amount.
• Pre-loss condition. The standard of what was there before, which drives valuation and depreciation.
• Consistency. Whether the physical evidence matches the reported account. Inconsistencies invite investigation.

During the inspection

1. Be present if you can. You know the property and can point out damage that is not obvious.
2. Walk the whole property, including areas you think are undamaged. Secondary damage is easy to miss.
3. Give the adjuster your documentation rather than describing it, and keep copies of everything you hand over.
4. Ask what they are recording, and note it.
5. Follow up in writing afterwards, summarising what was discussed. This converts a conversation into a record.

Where to keep all this

Not only on a phone that was in the house. Cloud storage, or email the files to yourself, so the record survives whatever damaged the property.

The same applies to the policy itself. A policy stored only as a paper copy in a flooded home is not available when you need to read the exclusions.

What we are not saying

We are not saying documentation guarantees a favourable outcome. A loss that is genuinely excluded stays excluded no matter how thoroughly it is photographed.

What we are saying is that the evidence deciding these claims is physical and perishable, that most of it is destroyed within hours by reasonable and necessary cleanup, and that five minutes of photographs beforehand costs nothing and cannot be recreated later.

A photography method that takes fifteen minutes

Most people photograph damage the way they photograph anything else: a few shots of the worst bits. Adjusters and, later, appraisers or courts need something different — a record that establishes context, extent, and cause.

• Pass 1

  Context, from every doorway

  Stand in each doorway and photograph the whole room. These establish what the space contained and how the damage relates to it. Without them, close-ups float free of any context.

• Pass 2

  Extent, at mid-range

  Each damaged area from three or four metres, showing where it starts and stops. This is what a scope of loss is built from.

• Pass 3

  Cause, up close

  The failure point itself, with a coin, ruler or hand for scale. If a pipe failed, photograph the break from several angles before anyone touches it.

• Pass 4

  Video, narrating

  Walk the whole property saying the date and describing what you see. Video captures spatial relationships stills miss, and the narration is itself a contemporaneous record.

• Pass 5

  The undamaged areas

  Counter-intuitive and genuinely useful. These establish the pre-loss standard of finishes and materials, which drives valuation. An adjuster pricing a repair needs to know what was there.

What to photograph that people skip

That last item matters more than it sounds. Where a storm or a shared system caused the damage, evidence that neighbouring properties suffered the same thing on the same date supports the cause you are asserting.

Mitigation and preservation are not in conflict

Policies require you to prevent further damage. They also require you to substantiate the claim. Doing the first destroys the evidence for the second unless you take fifteen minutes in between.

That last item on the right is worth stating explicitly. Deliberately allowing further damage in order to show the adjuster is not preservation — it is a failure to mitigate, and the additional damage may not be covered.

Building the contents inventory

Personal property is settled from a list, and the list is where most under-claiming happens.

Do not discard damaged items until the adjuster has seen them or has agreed in writing that photographs suffice. Discarding them can be treated as failing to allow inspection, which is a policy condition in most forms.

Read anything a restoration company puts in front of you

Emergency restoration crews arrive quickly and frequently ask for a signature before starting. Two very different documents circulate.

Several states now regulate assignment of benefits specifically, following disputes about their use. If a document is presented during emergency work, read the heading and ask which one it is. A legitimate contractor will answer plainly.

During the adjuster's inspection

The tone that works is cooperative and organised. The adjuster is applying policy language to a file; a well-documented file with a clear scope is easier to approve than a vague one, and that is true regardless of anyone's intentions.

Where to keep all of this

Not only on a phone that was in the house, and not only in a folder in the property.

Cloud storage or email to yourself, so the record survives whatever damaged the building. The same goes for the policy itself — a policy stored only as paper in a flooded home is not available when you need to read the exclusions.

Name files usefully. A folder of images called IMG_4471 through IMG_4630 is far less persuasive than one organised by room and date, and organisation costs a few minutes at the point where you have the least attention to spare.

What documentation cannot do

It does not convert an excluded loss into a covered one. A flood is excluded from a standard homeowners policy no matter how thoroughly it is photographed, and a component at the end of its service life has worn out regardless of how well the failure is recorded.

What it does is ensure the decision is made on evidence rather than on an assumption, and that the evidence is yours as well as the insurer's. That is the whole of it, and it is worth fifteen minutes.

If you have already cleaned up

Most people read advice like this after the fact. The situation is not hopeless, and it is worth working through what still exists.

Ask the tradespeople who attended for a written description of what they found, even weeks later. A plumber who replaced a section usually remembers whether it had corroded through or split cleanly, and a short written statement from them is evidence you did not know you still had.