Insurance claims can be a make-or-break factor in real estate investing. So, in this episode, we invited Andy Gurczak to share crucial strategies for maximizing insurance payouts and protecting your investments. Learn how to safeguard your assets and ensure you're fully covered by tuning in now!
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Resources mentioned in this episode
About Andy Gurczak
Andy is the Founder and CEO of AllCity Adjusting, a public adjusting company that works directly with the insured to guarantee fair insurance payouts. Since founding the company over 10 years ago, Andy has led its exponential growth, handling multiple multi-million dollar property claims, both commercial and residential. He also specializes in property investment, with multiple locations across the Midwest. With expertise in sales, construction, and real estate, Andy has built one of the most efficient public adjusting firms in the nation.
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It's all performance. So we want to maximize, we want to get every penny for these clients. And we charge them 50%, they'd still have more than they did without us.
So at 10%, you have nothing to lose.
Neil Henderson:Welcome to truly passive income. I'm Neil Henderson.
Clint Harris:And I'm Clint Harris. And today we have Andy Gurczak with us. Andy's the founder of all city adjusting.
He immigrated to the US from Poland at the age of nine, found his calling in public adjusting after yields in construction, specifically in fire restoration. So I want to talk more about that.
And he spent over a decade helping thousands maximize their insurance claims, ensuring that they receive what they truly deserve when they have an incident. So, Andy, great to have you with us today. How are you, Neil?
Andy Gurczak:Clint, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I'm great. Good to be on your show.
Clint Harris:Yeah, thank you. Thanks for coming on. We were talking before we started recording. We talk about real estate a lot because we've kind of pigeonholed ourselves.
That's what we do, that's how we operate. And a lot of investing specifically, we talk about the offensive side of things. How are you deploying your capital?
How are you finding the right investors?
And one thing that we haven't talked a lot about is protection and playing defense and making sure that the assets that you built up, that you've got a plan in place. And this kind of reminds me of a book that I constantly bring up, which is Dan Sullivan's book, who not how.
And it feels to me like the challenge is right there on the bookshelf. Look at that. For those watching on YouTube, how do I make sure that my properties are adjusted correctly?
I have a feeling the conversation that we're about to have is that I don't have to know that. I just have to know who knows how to make sure that they're adjusted correctly.
So tell us a little bit about yourself, about your background and how you got started, and we'll go from there.
Andy Gurczak:Yeah, so, like you said, I was restoration, was in construction, met a pa that was in the industry for 40 years who took me under and taught me, the entire industry. There's no book. There's some classes now about for PAS, for public adjusting. But at that time, I don't remember any classes or anything.
So he taught me everything. 40 years of everything he learned, I took in within three years, then started all city adjusting. And then we kind of went nationwide.
We targeted our clients of mostly our investors, landlords, business owners. So as their portfolios grew, we kind of grew with them. So, you know, they bought a property here, they bought another property out of state.
So we just kind of kept expanding to different states. Now we cover about 40 states. We also invest in real estate with my wife.
So I know that aspect on the offensive side all of the time, like all our money, anything we've saved up, we put away goes into investing in real estate. So we play that side.
And again, now, knowing the claims department, knowing that it's easy for us when we do have a claim and all that, but for someone that doesn't, that's what we're going to get into, I guess.
Clint Harris:Let's start at the bare bones basic. Explain to us what public adjusting is, who you're an advocate for and your thought process and who you're protecting.
Andy Gurczak:So we are licensed by the states to represent only the insured. So advocate for the insured, the policyholder, we're the middle guy. So we take over the claim for them. We're able to negotiate it.
We were able to negotiate, handle all the properties, discuss policy, language, basically everything on their behalf. The only thing where we stop, we can't litigate. So we cannot go to litigation. It would have to go to an attorney.
But most of the claims we take on, 95% we handle in house and we get them settled. About 5% will then end up going litigation.
If, like, the insurance company is really pushing back or something's being handled really poorly, then I'll have to go to an attorney.
Neil Henderson:So you, just to clarify, you're there for the insured, the policyholder, and oftentimes the dirty secret with insurance companies is usually they're always going to say no. That's the way they make money, is they say, no, no, no. And you're there to say no.
Listen, the policy says, this is what you would pay out, this is what's happened. And you're advocating for the policyholder to get what they've paid for. Correct.
Andy Gurczak:That's 100% accurate. That's the best way you could put it. Right. A lot of people understand. They think, you know, insurance are on my side, they're gonna help me out.
People don't look at it as like they're in business to make money, obviously. They've become billion dollar companies, Allstate and all these guys, not by, you know, collecting more premiums.
It's not like they have that many more offices or more clients. It's because their claims are getting underpaid. So they have reserves for claims and they underpay them. You understand?
There's incentives for staying under an amount of a claim. Where we come in is, again, we're trying to maximize the claim on each of their. And again, you have different coverages.
Coverage A, coverage b, trying to maximize everything we can for the policy terms. Right. Because it's what's in the policies where we can go after.
Clint Harris:So talk to me about the value of coming from a construction background. You specifically were working in fire restoration, or at least a part of. That's what I know from your bio.
So I'm sure that you were in a situation where you saw the damage, you saw what the insurance company was paying. I'm sure at some point there was a disparity there, and you realized, oh, man, somebody's got to advocate for this. Somebody's got to fight for this.
What was that like?
And then how did you recognize the opportunity and go in that direction from swinging a hammer or whatever you were doing and recognize an opportunity that you could be an advocate.
Andy Gurczak:Yeah. In that whole life. Summary there of me in the beginning, there's a lot more. I did a lot of exterior work.
I started with, you know, roofing, siding, went to do interior work, had my own construction company. Then I was doing fire restoration. So I. I was tied into it. So having that, for me, that's huge, right? Cause now I'm negotiating.
When we're talking about property damage, right? We're just talking about coverage, a physical property. I discuss it from a term of.
I know exactly what it takes to put this property back to prelost condition. Cause I did all the work. I know exactly what needs to be done. I know building codes.
Whereas 99% of the adjusters coming from the insurance side have no clue. They've never done any of the work. Right. They were given a laptop and some guidelines, so that's huge.
And everyone in our team has some kind of insurance and some kind of construction knowledge saying that, yes. So when I was in fire restoration and we were doing projects, I remember, and I remember when that Pa that mentored me showed up on the job site.
I was working for someone back then. I asked my boss who that is. He's like, oh, he's the one that helped them get all this money, helped them get this situated, this.
And I was like, no, that's interesting. I kind of want to get into. Learn what he's doing, not just the construction.
So then I was able to get his number, get under him, learn the aspect of just adjusting. And that's all my focus just went that way. I really enjoyed helping people enjoy that a lot more than I did the construction aspect.
Clint Harris:So I want to just highlight something here that there's a similarity between your story and what we do with. Neil and I are general partners with a group called Nomad Capital and we buy old vacant big box retail buildings and we convert them to storage.
And right now because of the capital market situation, the interest rates, there are a lot of operators sitting on the sidelines, not operating, just kind of sitting and waiting things out.
The reason that that hasnt been the case for us and were still moving ahead is because our partners or father and son team of Eric and Levi Hemingway and their general contractors, when you are a GC and when you have that knowledge and you have what we call vertical integration, top to bottom from, you can look at a project, you know what the cost is going to be, you can get in, you can control that cost. In a market where you dont have to pay retail for a lot of things. Now in your situation its the opposite.
You know what the cost is for the construction and you're using that to leverage the insurance companies and they're pencil pushers right? And they're used to pushing back against pencil pushers and that's not you right. You've got a construction background.
It's really hard for them to come to you and argue when you're like, look, I used to do the roofing, I used to do the siding, I used to do the fire restoration. I think there's a ton of value there.
And it's really interesting that you built off of that platform and it puts you in a situation where you have an authority on this. It's really hard for them to argue. And then you didn't just use your experience, used a relationship that you got.
And it's honestly, I've seen a couple of your bios now and you can't go anywhere without hearing about Herb Johnson, first african american public adjuster in Illinois. Who was your mentor? Who gave you that 30 years of experience? So how did that shape your career?
What are some of the key lessons that he gave you that really launched you?
Andy Gurczak:He was old school, I have an old soul. So he was 70 when he got with me. When we got together, he was kind of on his way out.
I got an old school, so we worked out like he does everything old school. You know, when he went and met with adjusters on site, his whole thing was settled with them on site. He negotiated on site.
He wasn't this new school like just said emails and text messages, right? No, he wanted to meet on site, shake hands, talk. Let's go sit down. We used to call, let's go break some bread with adjuster. Right?
Hey, there was something about him and the way he handled it and how cool manner that I took. You know, there was bad stuff, too.
Again, when you have a mentor, right, there's good and bad, I think, and you have to pick out what you want to incorporate into your life and how you handle claims or your business, whatever mentor you have in industry and what bad, like, oh, this stuff, I don't want to do. I don't want to do it this way. But all that knowledge he gave me, I mean, you could write it. There's no books. There's nothing on it. It was priceless.
To this day, and going back to that knowledge, you're talking about in construction now, we had a claim last year for brother Eliza. There's videos of him, actually on our YouTube channel. You hit a fire here not far from our office. He called us, he got opera at 800,000.
This claim ended up settling for 3 million. So it's 2.2 million increase in his claim settlement. But when we met, they sent the initial adjuster who gave him that first estimate.
Then we came in, wrote our estimate, we sent it in, send them all the paperwork. So the insurance company sent in, they said a church specialist. So he came out, the gentleman.
I remember meeting him, and I'm thinking, shoot, you know, I'm compared to this guy because he's like, I've been building churches. I've been doing this. I'm like, shoot, you know, I don't have, I built but never built churches or anything.
But as soon as we started walking and discussing the claim and I started pointing out stuff, I'm like, huh? This guy knows as much as me, not, maybe less. So that construction. So. And that was their, like, guy, hey, this guy built church, got everything.
So that knowledge. And then, like I said, rest of our team, we go up against any insurance company. We're always on the winning side.
Neil Henderson:Now, Andy, do you guys do any sort of pre claim consulting for people to make sure that they're properly insured?
Andy Gurczak:Always, if they're properly. So regarding insured, if they're insured properly, we do free evaluations all the time.
So, like, our investors, landlords, our clients that we've been with us for a long time, when they buy new properties, they'll send us their policies, and then we'll make sure that everything looks good.
So we'll look through the policy, we'll do the coverages, make sure there's no extra endorsements they need or maybe there's some exclusions that they have that they shouldn't have. So we do that. Free cost policy evaluations all the time.
Neil Henderson:I have to speak from a property owner.
I feel like a babe in the woods most of the time when it comes to property insurance, you talk to an insurance salesperson, they tell you okay, this is the policy you need and I may adjust the premium up or down, whatever. I really have no idea.
So what you're saying is somebody might benefit from reaching out to you guys when they get a new policy and just say, hey, I'm going to look at your property, I'm going to look at the policy and see whether or not you're fully covered, whether or not you should add or subtract anything 100%.
Andy Gurczak:And even if they have existing policies, people will contact us and say can you review? These are the properties we have. Heres the coverages policies.
Can you guys look it over and well spend time looking over and making sure theres no gaps, Preston, because the.
Neil Henderson:Incentive structure for the salesperson is to always just maximize the policy. Max bias the premium sometimes theyre not to say that theyre being crooked, but their incentive structure is different from perhaps yours.
My next question is how are you guys compensated in something like that?
Andy Gurczak:Yeah. So going back to what you just said though, with those agents, I think there's lack of knowledge with agents.
I think a lot of them don't even know their own policies. I mean think about State Farm, right? You purchase a policy and all of a sudden they send you a deck page. It's three pages.
But when you request the full policy, they don't send you a full policy. Right. It takes weeks to get the full policies.
They're sending all these coverages and these policies without actually seeing the policy or reading it or knowing what's in it. Kind of scary right? But again, ultimately they're just a salesperson, they're just trying to get you insurance. That's it.
They're not worried about the claims that department, they're just worried about the sales and collecting premiums. Going back to us, we get compensated on a percentage so it's contingency and our fee starts with at 10% and then it goes up from there.
If we get involved in a claim a little bit later, it might be a little bit more based on anything extra. We get like an above contract.
If we're starting from beginning, it's usually 10% and then for when it's large claims, we have a deal with, like, some of our investors where our fee actually goes down. As the claim goes up, our fee structure goes down. So we accommodate pretty well to all our clients. So we don't get paid till the end.
So once we finish the claim, once the claim is settled, you get paid. That's when we get paid.
Clint Harris:So, yeah, assuming that once a payment comes out, that's when you guys are getting paid. Right. So it's honestly performance based. Like, yes, there's a policy there, but it's basically performance based. And you're fighting.
You're an advocate for the claim holder because that ultimately determines what your compensation is as well, but you're fighting for them to get that.
Is there any kind of data out there as to how much more you typically get in a settlement when you're using an adjuster that knows what they're doing versus just filing the paperwork and hoping they say yes or something like that?
Andy Gurczak:I forgot there's a graph somewhere. I think the average with the public gesture that we're getting is 74%, so we charge 10%.
So if we charge our clients, I look at it all the time when we look at our claims, whether we were involved right from the beginning, because most clients, when they find us, when it's you, right. They usually have a claim, and it's a month. Two months after is when they're starting to see all the B's, and that's when they reach out to us.
But then going forward, they'll always call us. Right. As soon as something happens, say, hey, Andy, we had this happen. Can we file a claim? You know, can you look this over?
So it's a little bit different, but again, it's all performance. So, yeah, we want to maximize. We want to get every penny for these clients, and we only charge them 50%.
They'd still have more than they did without us. So at 10%, you have nothing to lose. And here's the thing now, right, it's not just the money. It's how much quicker the claim gets settled. Right.
Your claim doesn't get delayed, and it doesn't get denied, because now claims are getting denied left and right. Right. They're putting people under all. They're literally sending out as many third party vendors. I mean, Basil, I mean, engineers.
It's getting crazy, especially on a large loss, right. Anything they could prevent from paying out the claim.
Clint Harris:So what's the smallest claim that you guys will work on? Like, hold on, let me back up for a second? I'm going to be a little bit selfish here.
I've got a duplex, three quadplexes at the beach on the island where we live. Some of them in a flood zone, some of them not.
I've taken all those with bad long term tenants and I've converted those into 14 Airbnb units, started a property management company that manages those 14 listings and about another 75. Some of those listings in a flood zone, some of them not. And when some of those people are coming to us, my wife is a real estate agent.
She's got five properties under contract right now. And people are like, well, who do we use for this? Who do we use for that?
So selfishly, I'm curious to know, what's the smallest size claim that your work on? Is it like single family homes? Are you typically doing portfolios or multifamily?
And then if I come to you and I'm like, hey, here's this property, here's the challenges about where it is. It's three units, it's four units, and it's in the ve flood zone or the AE flood zone or it's on this island.
Can you give guidance as to what type of policy we should be asking for and make recommendations for that?
Andy Gurczak:Yeah. So regarding the first one, regarding the claim size, so we like to stick to 100,000 and up kind of.
You know, our, most of the claims well handle is fire claims. We'll do water claims. When it comes to hurricane like hail, wind, storm damage.
Exteriors on commercial properties, those we make sure it's commercial. Anything residential we don't really touch. But let's say, Neil, clean, like you guys are investor, you guys have a bunch of problems.
You call and say, hey, we have this loss, can you look at it? We'll take smaller claims because you're part of our, like, long term clients. You're calling us for everything. So we'll take small claims.
We'll look into all the claims. Right.
Because we can handle out for if a homeowner calls and said, hey, we had a pipe break in the basement, you know, we'll recommend someone if we know someone in the area. Otherwise we have to pass on because again, we're trying to as we're growing, this is a business.
Ultimately, we want to focus to what we're good at and not spread ourselves. Sure. And then do claims that that's not our specialty. Your second question was regarding if you can recommend us to review policies.
Clint Harris:Yeah.
Like if you can give guidance as to this type or, and again, it sounds like residential is kind of not your wheelhouse, but we also, we do commercial development as well. So, like, if we kind of show you, like, hey, here's the warts on this property. Here's the potential risk.
This is a Kmart next to a river in an AE flood zone or whatever. Can you make recommendations as to what we could look for there?
Andy Gurczak:100%? Like, if you send me a positive, even a single family, hey, we're looking to buy this single family.
You have a client that's looking by a single family, we can take a look at it. I can look at the age of the building.
I can pretty much, from pictures and data, good estimation on what coverages you're going to need and what you don't need when it comes to insurance. Now, construction wise, I have my construction on, so I can, it's just personal advice, but when it comes to our properties, I don't need inspectors.
I don't need, I do my own inspections. I look at all that stuff.
So to me, I guess when I'm looking at policies, I look at clients homes, you know, I can kind of take a look and say, this insurance, you're going to need this coverage. And I could say, hey, your roof's 20 years old. They might not insure you or they might drop you.
If you do have a roofing claim, you're going to have a hard time because we're going to say, your roof's old. You know, just because of knowledge. I construction, I know all, you know, we know all the basics.
Neil Henderson:I don't think I got this question answered, which was, what do you charge for the consulting? Like the pre policy consulting?
Andy Gurczak:Nothing that's free.
Neil Henderson:Nothing?
Andy Gurczak:Yeah, that's free. If you send us your whole portfolio, look over the. We spend a week, it's fine.
If something ever happens again, not always, but we guess most of the time we'll get the call and still look at the claim. So why wouldn't we? And again, it's just creating a relationship. And sometimes we learn stuff, right?
When you look at policies, we'll learn stuff and know in the future. Okay. When we have this insurance, there's this claim, that policy that has this, you know, exclusion. Make sure we're aware of it.
Clint Harris:Yeah. This is very much a relationship business.
Like, this is something, I'm buying properties for 20 years, and I've got the adjuster that I'm using across that, that portfolio. And listen, $100,000 for a claim?
I don't think that's as big as it sounds like, the number sounds big, but $100,000 claim is not that big, especially in terms of commercial properties. Like we've got our most recent self storage conversion that we did.
We got a dozen self storage facilities in our portfolio at Nomad, and the last one came in right now at certificate of occupancy, appraised for 11.3 million. At stabilization, it's about 13 and a half. You have a leak in there or a little bit of flooding or a little bit of wind damage on that.
That adds up very, very quickly. And having somebody else take the, the other thing is that you mentioned earlier is that the time that it takes, right?
Time is money, especially in commercial real estate. So being able to act quickly on that is worth a lot just by itself in terms of the timeline. Let's zoom out for a second.
Now that I've got you here, let me ask you about where do you think insurance is headed over the next decade?
Like everybody's talking about global warming, about rising sea levels, about, you know, across Florida, we're typically looking across north and South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia. And part of that is just because the insurance costs in Florida are ridiculous in some of the markets that we look at.
So is there any like red herring that you're seeing out there in terms of are areas going to not be able to get coverage? Is coverage going to drop or lapse or where do you think things are headed for the industry as a whole?
Andy Gurczak:This question in last year I got more often. This question was never asked. And now I feel like I get it asked pretty often.
Knowing that the carriers are pulling out of different states with regulations, something is going to have to change in terms of maybe states easing up on the regulations. So the insurance companies stay. I mean, soon, if at this rate, soon everyone's going to be out of California, who's going to insure them?
So I don't know. There's going to be new carriers that come into play, maybe more online base to save money. I'm curious to see myself.
I know the claims system that's getting more difficult and it's just getting harder to get out money from claims paid that we could see on our end if a homeowner is trying to handle or a business owner is trying to handle a claim on their own, like God bless you, because I know what people are going through, we see every day and how we handle claims. So if you're doing it on your own, good luck. So that aspect, the claims, that's getting more difficult to get money out with premiums.
I mean, premiums have doubled, I think, for everything. When I look at our own properties, the premiums have gone up, and it's getting harder to even get coverage.
This property, we couldn't get coverage on. I don't know how many carriers we shopped at. It was hard to get coverage.
Clint Harris:Yeah, well, listen, I think that times like this, it's all the more important to make sure that as those claims get harder and harder, it becomes more imperative to have somebody that knows how to navigate those.
Neil Henderson:Well, I want to start wrapping it up, but I've got a question I wanted to get answered before we let you go is you've highlighted the importance of having a good insurance agent. Can you share a story where clients inadequate coverage led to a significant challenge and how are you able to help them?
Andy Gurczak:Yeah, there's one. I think it was a 16 unit that burned down was an ACV only policy.
I don't want to get into much details because we'll go down a rabbit hole, but ACV is actual cash value, so you're only getting the initial value. You can't recover that depreciation. So let's say the succeeding that burned down, the adjuster wrote that up.
I think the limit of the insurance coverage was 500,000. So I think it was 500.
He rolled his estimate like 505 and then depreciated like, half the buildings is an older building, so the insured only got a payout of like 300. So when we looked at that, you know that first of all, the agency should have had an RCV policy, the full replacement cost. Right.
It was only a couple of dollars more. I know the insurance company. I know their previous. I know how much it would have cost them. Only a couple dollars more.
So that was just bad advice, whoever sold them that. But when we got involved, adjuster, I remember a call. Yeah. Reached out to us and said, hey, why did he hire you? I already paid limits.
Well, you paid limits, but he's got an ACV policy. You're only giving him half the money. And it looks like you stopped writing when you got the limits. You stopped writing your estimate.
You didn't do a full estimate. When we got involved, we ended up writing that for like, 850. So even after this huge depreciation, then sure got policy limits of 500.
He had other endorsements, ended up being like a $600,000 claim.
Clint Harris:Yep. You're taking home 10% of that, and he's walking away with more than half a million than it would have gotten otherwise.
Andy Gurczak:Oh, are you kidding me? He bought that for like 100 grand. Was the best thing that could have happened. Yeah.
Clint Harris:That's amazing. What a good feeling.
You know, when you know you're really helping people and when they're in a tough spot, when people are really down and something has really gone wrong. It's not every day you run into somebody like that, or it might be for you, but it's not for me.
And it's important, I think, to try to remember that as an opportunity to step in when people aren't always that vulnerable. Be able to step in when people really need that help. I'm sure that's a good feeling.
Andy Gurczak:We just had a fire, actually. Literally, we just got and paid a ton of money just to see the look on people's faces. Like, man, we've never had this much money.
We've never had been able to put in that. We've always been, like, behind on everything. It is a great feeling on the claims, the side that we see.
Clint Harris:I love that. Well, Andy Gurchek, founder of all city Adjusting, thank you for your time today. This is the first time we've been able to have this conversation.
I've learned some things today. I don't see a reason why someone would not use a knowledgeable adjuster, especially when you have a claim coming.
So thank you for sharing your knowledge with us.
If anybody, any of the listeners want to hear more about you or find out how to connect with you or more about all city adjusting, what would be the best way for them to do that?
Andy Gurczak:Yeah, they can check us out at all cityadjusting.com for your listeners. I'll leave them with my cell phone number. If any of your listeners wants to call and discuss policy or discuss claims, look at policy language.
-: Clint Harris:That sounds great. Thank you, Andy. We really appreciate your time, and thanks a lot.
Andy Gurczak:Thanks, Andy, Neal, Clint, thank you guys.
Neil Henderson:Thank you so much for listening and watching the truly passive income podcast.
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