HARD KNOCKSCONSULTING
Local Conditions
The estimate is usually right about the quantity and wrong about the material
High-value homes are not simply larger. They are built from different things, by different trades, to tolerances that generic unit pricing does not contemplate.
Slate, cedar, tile, and copper
Each requires a specialty trade and a unit price that generic roofing entries do not carry, and each raises a matching question when the original material is no longer produced in the same dimension or color. This is the single largest scope error on Birmingham roofs and it is almost never intentional — the estimator simply used the line item they had.
Interior finishes and continuous runs
Custom millwork, plaster detail, wide-plank and inlaid flooring, and stone that ran continuously through several rooms. When a covered loss damages part of a continuous run, the question is how far replacement has to extend to restore the property — and spot-repair scopes on a hand-finished floor are not restorations.
Finished lower levels
Wine rooms, theaters, gyms, and guest suites below grade. These are the most expensive square feet in the house to rebuild and the ones most exposed to water, and they collide directly with sewer-backup sublimits written years before the space was finished.
Mature canopy and teardown-era neighbors
The tree cover through Quarton Lake and Poppleton Park produces large falling-object losses. And in a neighborhood with active teardowns, construction next door introduces damage and vibration questions that need to be documented as distinct from weather.
Areas Covered
Neighborhoods in Birmingham
Every part of the city, and the surrounding communities as well. If your street is not listed, it is still covered.
Local Questions
Birmingham claim questions
What comes up most on files in this city.
My roof is slate and the carrier priced asphalt.
That is a line-item substitution, not a judgment call, and it is corrected by putting the correct material, the correct specialty labor, and the correct waste factor into a written scope. Where the original slate is no longer available in the same size or color, the matching provision in your policy becomes the next argument.
The contents number they offered is nowhere near what these things cost.
High-value personal property — art, rugs, wine, jewelry, furniture — is chronically undervalued by blanket per-room allowances, and some of it may be separately scheduled under its own endorsement with different terms. It requires an itemized inventory with real replacement pricing. Tedious, and worth more than any other single task on a Birmingham file.
We already have an architect and a builder. Where do you fit?
Alongside them, not instead of them. They design and build; the claim work is establishing what the policy owes for it, in a format the carrier has to answer. The best outcomes happen when the builder’s scope and the adjuster’s estimate are the same document written two ways.
By Loss Type
How each loss gets fought in Birmingham
Birmingham sits in Oakland County — that page covers the county-wide conditions and the questions that come up across the whole area.
Nearby
Other cities we cover in detail
Birmingham
Priced as asphalt, built as slate
Send the estimate and photographs of the actual materials. Material substitution is the most common and most expensive error in this city.
HARD KNOCKS CONSULTING
220 South Main Street
Royal Oak, MI 48067
(947) 241-2950
stanley@hardknocksconsulting.com
State of Michigan — statewideNPN 20573993