Shownotes
January’s wildfires in Los Angeles will leave scares. Even those whose homes seem to be structurally sound may actually be hiding severe damage that will only be uncovered as LA begins to recover and rebuild.
Garret Gray, CoreLogic’s President of Global Insurance Solutions is one such case. Following a harrowing race against time to evacuate the threatened area with his family, Garret prioritized safety, not possessions. Miraculously, while nearby homes burned to the ground, his house remained standing.
While at first glance this seems like a small miracle, on the inside, the hidden damage tells a very different story — a story that highlights a significant and often-overlooked cost of wildfires: the massive, unanticipated strain on the insurance industry from homes that appear intact but are uninhabitable. Garret’s home, while structurally sound, was inundated with soot, ash, and toxic smoke particles.
His story is one of many. While the focus must remain on the families who have lost everything, it’s crucial to recognize the hidden costs for those who only experienced partial damage.
Homes like Garret’s reveal a secondary, equally significant layer of loss that will also take years to recover from and may have long-term implications for insurers grappling with claims far more complex than they initially appear.
In this episode of Core Conversations, host Maiclaire Bolton Smith and CoreLogic’s President of Global Insurance Solutions Garret Gray sit down to discuss the emotional and financial toll that these hidden losses can have on families, communities, and the insurance industry.
In This Episode:
2:27 – Listen to Garret Gray’s experience evacuating from the Palisades Fire and how he learned that his house remained standing.
6:50 – Why do wildfires impact some homes and not others even if they are on the same street?
11:22 – Erika Stanley goes over the numbers in the property market with The Sip.
12:33 – What are the hidden costs of wildfires, even for homes that seem to be structurally sound?
16:22 – How will the scale of this disaster – both for complete losses as well as partial losses – impact the insurance industry?
21:24 – How long will it take to rebuild or restore properties in LA where the construction industry is already strained? How are we going to accommodate the demand in materials and the resulting prices?
Up Next: Does Low Wildfire Risk Create a False Sense of Security?
Links:
Find full episodes with all our guests in our podcast archive here: https://clgx.co/3HFslXD5 Copyright 2025 CoreLogic
Transcripts
Garret Gray:
Even people who didn't lose everything, the cost and time to get back into their houses, it could be years and it could cost significant dollars and probably will. So it is a hidden cost. You look at houses that say they're not burned, but the inside of those houses are going to take time to become livable again.
Maiclaire Bolton Smith:
Welcome back to Core Conversations: A CoreLogic Podcast where we tour the property market to investigate how economics, climate, resiliency, governmental policy, and technology affect everyday life. I am your host Maiclaire Bolton Smith, and I'm just as curious as you are about everything that happens in our industry. Today. We're going to talk about the devastating wildfires that began burning in Los Angeles on January 7th. While they are still burning at the time of this recording, it's already clear that these catastrophic fires will be remembered as the most disastrous in LA's history. The Palisades Fire and the Eaton fire have been the most destructive up heaving lives and displacing people from their homes and communities. While the final impact of the fires will take some time to determine the recovery process is already beginning and recovery may take more time than someone might think. Just because a house looks intact from the outside, it doesn't mean that these fires haven't left their mark smoke ash heat and the fires themselves have touched many structures leaving the damage that may be only discovered later. This hidden damage is a cost that both insurers and homeowners will have to bear in the coming months and years. So to talk about these wildfires and the hidden costs that they leave behind, we've invited someone who's living through this catastrophe. Garret Gray CoreLogic's President of Global Insurance Solutions. Garret, I know you and your family have been through a lot and you're still displaced, so thank you so much for making time to come talk to us today.
GG:
Of course, thanks for having me.
Erika Stanley:
Before we get too far into this episode, I wanted to remind our listeners that we want to help you keep pace with the property market. To make it easy, we curate the latest insight and analysis for you on our social media where you can find us using the handle at CoreLogic on Facebook and LinkedIn or at CoreLogicInc. On X and Instagram. But now let's get back to Maiclaire and Garret.
MBS:
Okay, so we are recording this just a week after the fires began and the situation is far from over. But just to get us started today, can you just take us back to last Tuesday when you got the call that there was a fire in the Palisades? What went through your mind and what did you do?
GG:
So I was very close to my office driving towards sunset, and it was really scary. I got this call from someone at my house saying that the hill was on fire behind our house, and one of the reasons why that makes it really scary for me is not just that my house might be affected, but my kids were physically on that same street. Their school is right next to the house. And so my priority was getting to where my kids were driving down sunset and what was heavier than normal traffic because everyone was looking at this big plume of smoke, and as you got closer, you saw really how big this was, which really created this panic in me because I was talking to the person who was picking up my kids and what they were saying is, I've got your kids, but we are in a log jam of cars and no one is moving and the fire is coming.
And so for me, I was like, how do I get there? How do I get my kids and how do I get out of this area? And what ended up happening is I was able to get to sunsets and b Bonita, which is where my kid's school is and where my house is, and I had to instruct my kids to abandon the car they were in because it still hadn't moved run down the street to meet me. I was running up to meet them and it was like you could see the planes, it was smoky. And now we know that every house that I ran by to go get my kids was burned to the ground. It was a bit of a traumatic day, but very happy that we were all safe, and that's all that really matters. We were lucky though that our house in the end did not burn down in these fires, and I know we'll talk about that, but yeah.
MBS:
So how long did it take you to learn that? How long did it take you to learn that your house seemingly survived, and what went through your mind in that whole time while you were trying to figure anything out?
GG:
So as we were evacuating, I was getting videos from all people, so people that were at my house that were showing me the videos of the fire and how close it was all the way down to where our backyard, I had a neighbor sent, and this is at 12.
MBS:
Wow. On Tuesday
GG:
On the seventh. So I had a neighbor send me a picture or a video, a short video of our two doors down from them, which is just across the street and two doors down for me, completely engulfed in flames in the back. Goodness. And so as it was very clear, this was going to be a very devastating fire as the hours were going on, and because we were at the beginning of it, I just assumed going to bed that night, it's total loss. It's going to be completely burned up. There's no chance it felt like you could have asked me to do a double or nothing on the value of my house, and I would've bet gone. It seemed impossible. And so we were sort of preparing the kids and preparing people around us for that was the most likely scenario. It wasn't until sometime the next two days where people were starting to put drones in the air and then we saw, oh wow, it looks like from the outside, from the front of the street, it looks like my entire cul-de-sac is unaffected. So then we started to believe, wow, our structures going to stand. And then the question was like, well, what does that mean?
Is it damaged on the inside? Did the firemen soak the house? And so did water get on the inside? Is it mixed with soot and smoke? There's a whole sort of things that go through our head of what is the actual state of the house, even if it's standing
MBS:
Right. And I mean that's really what I want to get into today. But I guess the first question is it really is incredible that some homes look seemingly untouched, whereas others are a complete loss. And there's a lot of questions on why the fire impacted some homes and not others, and there's various reasons for that and location and topography play a role. But something else that I know that I want to talk about is that the impact of mitigation. And I know you personally had done a few things to your property to help mitigate something bad happening. So can you just talk a little bit about the kinds of things that you've done to your home that maybe actually helped protect it?
GG:
Yeah. So one of the benefits of being in the position I am at CoreLogic is I get my CoreLogic Fire Risk Score, which was already high even when I bought the property, it was very high. And part of the reason is because we back up against the canyon. So some of that you just can't mitigate. Although one of the things that we did do is we cleared brush even past our property line to try to help make sure there was no fuel right up against the back of our hill. So we did some of that. There were some really big trees. There was two in particular that were big oak trees that were right over the house essentially. They were kind of big and up and right by the house. We removed those trees because we knew if there was ever a fire, they would be the reason why our house and maybe other houses would've gone up. A couple other types of trees that we remove, like eucalyptus trees, which I hear turn into Roman candles when they ignite. So we did our best to kind of learn what kind of vegetation needed to be around the house. I will say we didn't do a perfect job. I've talked to some of the firefighters that were in that area and they're saying there's still too many trees or bushes in between properties. But yeah, we did a lot to try to mitigate our risk here.
MBS:
So have you actually gotten access to your home to see if there's been damage and what that extent of damage might be?
GG:
Yeah. Before the National Guard completely closed down the area, I was able to get in briefly and it was very clear there's a ton of ash all over the place and every single window, every single door, there is a kind of pile of soot that's clearly blown in from the wind and it just kind of goes and then spreads through the house to a little bit of a thinner degree. But if you go to our primary bathroom, our primary rooms bathroom, it's like a white kind of tile or marble, and it's just like you see this layer of black
And it obviously smells like smoke. We had a car in the driveway, it smells like smoke. So the question is, gosh, how bad is it? What were the level of toxins in the smoke? Is this going to require just some light cleaning or is this a gut it and put it back because it's just so contaminated there? Our pool equipment in the backyard was completely melted. The fire came all the way down to our property. We had trees that have cinch marks on them big with big beautiful trees, that kind of redwood type trees have these very burned at the bottom. We have our patio furniture with some couches out there that are completely either burned or covered in black soot. We had a tree that was removed to mitigate the fire risk, and we had furniture that was under that tree would've been under that tree that had burn marks from the as falling.
MBS:
Wow.
ES:
e sticker shock. Last year in:MBS:
Okay. This is what I really want to talk about because from the surface, if you look at the street view, your home from a damage assessment probably would be marked as, okay, it looks like it's fine. You peel back the surface, there is this damage to your backyard, to your pool area, your patio furniture. But then inside the house too, there's a lot of damage of things that people don't necessarily think of. And a lot of the focus, especially from people think of insured losses, the focus is on the homes that are totally destroyed. And not to downplay or ignore the impact of that. Those are horrible losses, but this hidden costs to the insurance industry and the rebuild that people probably aren't thinking of. They'd be like, oh, Garret's so lucky his home is standing. But for your home and homes like yours that appear to be okay, but actually there's a significant amount of damage to them and the remediation that's going to need to take place. Can you just talk through that a little bit?
GG:
Yeah. First of all, one of the reasons why I bet we're not talking about it is because for people in this situation, there's a bit of survivor's guilt. And so you sit here with a house that looks completely undamaged and you don't even want to talk about it because you don't want to make anybody else feel bad and you feel have this guilt that your house survived. But it is very true that for those people whose houses were in the middle of this that survived, their structure survived, and maybe even some of their most prized unreplaceable possessions survived, which makes that a really much better situation than somebody who lost everything.
But it is true that at this point, we don't have access to our house. We don't know when we're going to have access. It's impossible right now to plan for what to do. We don't know where our kids are going to go to school or should we move from the area? Cause we don't know if we're going to be back in the house in three months a year. We don't know the state. So there's a little bit of that going on. But on top of it, one of the things we know, especially from being in the fire business for 20 years myself, is that any house that is close to a fire event is inside the damage is pretty extensive. And what that means is these, the soot and the ash and the smoke that came off of these fires are toxic just in of themselves and they spread so fast. What happens is your air conditioning keeps running while as long as the power's on and then just sucks in all of this air. And on top of that,
MBS:
Oh, of course. Wow.
GG:
The winds were so strong in this event that even if your air conditioner wasn't running for some reason, if you go to my house, I was able to look inside just briefly and every single opening, every single door, every single window, there's just this pile of soot that was blown in. And so that level of so damage for houses that are standing, it could require not a full rebuild, but a complete tear down to the studs.
So the actual cost is not just cleaning, which even cleaning is significant fire cleaning. This is not cheap. It takes a long time to do properly. You have to get an expert out to do it. But a lot of times if you test it, you have to take it back down to the studs, which is a significant, potentially multi-year project.
MBS:
Right. And a very expensive loss. A very expensive claim too. That's right. That to me is a really interesting part of this story is that the focus, and for reasons that you've explained it, it really does need to focus on the people who have lost everything. But if we look from an insurance claims perspective, and on the surface, like we talked about before, it looks like, oh, Garrett's going to have a really small insurance claim, but for your house and homes like yours, and there are actually several homes like yours that could have massive insurance claims from either just remediation from smoke, but also the availability to be able to do something like that. If there's a single house fire, you call in a smoke remediation company, they come within a couple of days, they do it, you get back into your home. But the scale of this disaster for both Palisades, Altadena, Pasadena, like the areas that have been impacted by these, in particular the two fires, the Eaton and the Palisades, there've been other fires as well. The availability of resources and then the broad impact really adds up.
GG:
And time is not our friend, the longer sits. Oh, of course it's corrosive. It eats away at whatever it's on. And so the integrity of whatever it's sitting on is being degraded every day that it's not able to be
MBS:
Cleaned.
GG:
And so yeah, you look at the maps of, okay, this house survived. This house didn't survive, and the focus should absolutely be on the people who've lost everything. The only other thing to just for people to understand though is that even people who didn't lose everything, the cost and time to get back into their houses, it could be years and it could cost significant dollars and probably will. So it is a hidden cost. You look at houses that say they're not burned, but the inside of those houses are going to take time to become livable again.
MBS:
And I want to talk about that time too. So I mean every insurance policy is different. I think pretty typical is the additional living expenses or a LE, which it's commonly known as is typically 20% of your reconstruction cost value. So it could be hundreds of thousands of dollars to, I mean, some of these houses in the Palisades, everybody knows they're very expensive homes. It could be up to millions of dollars of additional living expenses because the way that they're designed is that it enables you to live in a home like your own home for the amount of time it would take to rebuild your home. So that's why these additional living expenses can get to be so long. And to your point, it may be a few months, it could be years before you and others are able to get back into their homes. In particular, those that do have a complete loss and do have to entirely rebuild, it's going to be years before they get into their homes. So those additional living expenses and the contribution of that to the overall insured losses of this event, it could be massive.
GG:
Oh yeah, it is going to be. And partly because this scale of this event is so big, unprecedented, and even though I know that our restoration community is going to rally and bring resources from other states, even that's not going to be enough. It's going to take more time than normal. And I think all of us have really good intentions. I think even the government here is trying to figure out how can we get rid of some red tape? But there's a lot of things to reconsider when you're rebuilding a complete community that is in a fire prone area. Is there a way to rebuild it that makes it less likely to have such a catastrophic event and figuring that out and making those decisions just take time?
MBS:
oth Paradise, the campfire in:ES:
So what is conflagration? It's a wildfire that begins in a natural vegetation environment and then transitions to an uncontrollable structure to structure fire in the built environment.
MBS:
But that fire, the Tubbs fire was on such a different scale than what we're looking at here. This is just a massive area impacted. And I guess Garrett, that kind of leads to my last question on when we talk about the rebuild, people have thrown around years, it's going to take 10 years to get back, and there's a lot of different moving parts here. But I guess there's multipart to what I want us to talk about here to close today is that if you had a crystal ball, what do you think it looks like both from the amount of time it's going to take to rebuild or restore properties with this already strained construction industry? How are we going to accommodate the demand and the prices as well? A lot of these things are top of mind for a lot of people when they think of how the rebuild will go.
GG:
Yeah. Locally, we're experiencing a ton of price inflation from the cost of rent and what it takes to get a place that is even similar to your house. It seems not just impossible from the prices, but just there's just such a lack of inventory and there's so many people that need a new place to live. The length of time here is going to be really interesting. I am both an optimist but also a realist on this. It's just going to take time. And partly because people are going to be reconsidering, okay, what am I going to build back? They're not going to just build back exactly what they have. They're going to build back something that is to their new modern taste. And
That requires architecture and plans and permitting. So the idea that we're just going to go back and build exactly what was there is that's not reality. There's going to be a lot of changes to the neighborhood, and that just takes time. That said, I've heard some people say, okay, the Palisades will never repopulate the same way and it will, I just don't believe that the land is so beautiful, right between LA and the ocean. They're definitely going to be rebuilding. They're definitely going to be rebuilding in a way that I think will be better. It's just going to take time. And I think the sad thing is we like to think about the lives beyond the buildings at CoreLogic. And this is like being one of those lives. Now, I have this appreciation that I've not had in such a personal way before, but my kids are most likely not going to go to school with their friends for the next couple of years. And people are going to go to different schools, people are going to move the air. I've talked to different parents who are just leaving California for the next two years just because they know it will be at least two years before our school comes back to the campus.
And you think about, okay, so I have a nine-year-old who's most likely going to be a teenager when things maybe get back to normal. That's really, there's going to be a lot of kids that what their plan was or what they thought was going to be their life has just completely been uprooted on them. I think the emotional toll and what that's going to do to families who decide, Hey, we're just going to leave the area for a little bit, and what that means in terms of what actually gets reconstituted, I think is going to be something that kids are going to deal with for some time.
MBS:
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, time will tell. I think you're right. I mean, this is a beautiful area of the country, a beautiful part of California, a beautiful part of Los Angeles. People will want to still live there. They will want to come back. And I think even if you look at some of the disasters that have happened around different parts of the country in the world, we see this all the time. People do flee. They go to other areas, they will leave. They'll move to other different parts of the country or different countries even. We've actually done a podcast on this before, but ultimately people want to live where they want to live. And this is one of those areas. And so it will be really interesting to see how things go. I know we do plan from CoreLogic thought leadership perspective to obviously keep an eye on this. We want to look every few months to kind of track the rebuild, to track the status, see what's happening, see how fast it's happening, see what are some of the issues that come up. And it's something that this is a topic that we are going to talk about for a number of years. This is definitely one of those industry changing events, this life, life-changing event. And Garrett, I know you're going to be a central part of us having this conversation. So thank you so much for joining us today on Core Conversations, the CoreLogic podcast.
GG:
Of course. Thanks for having me.
MBS:
Alright, and thank you for listening. I hope you've enjoyed our latest episode. Please remember to leave us a review and let us know your thoughts and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to be notified when new episodes are released. And thanks to the team for helping bring this podcast to life producer Jessi Devenyns, editor and sound engineer, Romie Aromin, our Facts Guru, Erika Stanley, and social media duo, Sarah Buck and Makaila Brooks. Tune in next time for another Core Conversation.
ES:
uired by CoreLogic in August,:
