Hazard Claims Administration
Safeguard has extensive experience in working with insurers to file claims and efficiently work with the insurance companies’ adjusters to quickly provide the documentation necessary to accurately and timely adjust our clients’ claims. Safeguard’s Hazard Claims Coordinators will provide administrative tasks such as:
- Providing documentation to the carrier as requested
- Providing insurance adjuster access to the property for inspection purposes
- Providing ongoing claims status reports during the initial 30 days
Once a claim has reached specific benchmarks, our specialists proactively work with the insurance adjuster to:
- Review the claim settlement or decision with appropriate contractors to ensure the scope of work is properly addressed in the settlement
- Provide our clients with the terms of the settlement and appropriate bids for decision
- Supervise the repairs under the contract
FHA Insured Loans
Generally, servicers are not permitted to convey a property back to HUD if the property has sustained damage due to fire, flood, earthquake, hurricane, tornado, or mortgagee neglect (for mortgages insured on or after January 1, 1977) without securing prior approval from HUD. If permission is not granted to convey the property with damages, then the mortgagee is responsible for repairing the property, with or without insurance proceeds.
In many instances, for the sake of expediency and to eliminate or minimize the costs of debenture interest, HUD will allow the conveyance of a property with damages and deduct the amount of insurance proceeds, if any, or the estimate to repair, from the mortgagee's insurance benefit. While this method may be expedient, it poses substantial costs to both mortgage servicers and HUD, because it prevents either party from obtaining recoverable depreciation from the insurance carrier and other benefits of obtaining insurance funds and repairing properties. In most cases, it is not cost-effective to convey properties in damaged condition.
Because of our presence in several distinct niches within the mortgage field services industry, we are uniquely positioned to effectively assist our clients in the hazard claims administration process and obtain maximum recovery. We typically can coordinate reputable contractors to repair properties for the amount of funds received without contribution from the servicer.
