Resources · Fire loss
The fire started at the range, and the department had it out before it reached the second floor. Your carrier accepted the loss. What arrived after that was an estimate to rebuild what burned, a blank inventory form for everything that had been inside, and a question about how long you'd be living somewhere else.
A fire claim looks like one file. It behaves like three.
There's the structure, meaning what it costs to rebuild what burned. That one gets priced the way any repair gets priced, off a scope of work and local costs, with a subtraction for age.
Contents come next. Personal property, valued item by item, built off a list somebody has to sit down and write.
Then loss of use, which many policies call additional living expense. That one isn't measured in items at all. It runs on how long the repair reasonably takes.
Three valuations running inside one claim, argued in different ways. It's a large part of why fire files stall on the number long after everyone agrees the loss is covered.
This page is an informational overview of how fire losses get valued. It isn't legal advice, and your policy's exact language controls everything described below. Ironclad Assessment Group serves as a neutral appraiser and umpire. We're not a public adjuster, and we don't adjust, negotiate, interpret your policy, or settle your claim.
Fire leaves an edge you can see. Smoke doesn't.
That's the largest scope argument on most fire files. Heat and smoke ride on air, so they travel through joist bays and wall cavities, up a stairwell, into the return side of the HVAC system, and into rooms the flame never entered. Nobody disputes that part. What gets disputed is what the contact requires.
One position holds that most of it cleans. Framing gets washed and sealed, ductwork gets cleaned, and contents go out to a facility and come back. The other holds that certain materials keep odor in a way cleaning doesn't reach, so they come out instead. That list usually runs to porous insulation, carpet pad and the subfloor beneath it, and upholstered pieces that absorbed rather than caught.
Both get argued in good faith, and odor testing turns up on each side.
A total loss has a grim simplicity. Everything goes.
A partial fire is the harder valuation, because somebody has to decide where the demolition stops, and reasonable people put that line in different places. The charred studs come out, and nobody argues about those. The argument is the next bay over, scorched but sound, and the bay past that, smoke-stained and not scorched at all. One estimate cuts back to sound material and treats what's left standing. The other cuts past the last visible damage, on the reasoning that stopping short leaves new work to be finished against old.
Matching turns up again here, the same way it does on a hail file. A hardwood run doesn't end at the doorway where the fire did. Neither does a cabinet run or the trim that wraps a room. Whether a policy asks for reasonably uniform appearance, and how far that reaches, are policy-language questions, and your copy is the only one that answers them.
What a total loss does to the figures, and how policy limits enter into it, come out of that same language. That one belongs with a policyholder-side insurance attorney rather than with a valuation.
The contents side is the most laborious part of a fire file, and the part homeowners are least ready for.
It asks for a room-by-room list of what was in the house. Each item, its age, its condition, and what it costs to buy again. It reaches the linen closet and the garage shelves and the boxes in the basement nobody had opened in years. Writing the list, rather than arguing over it, is usually the part that takes longest.
Depreciation on contents doesn't behave the way it does on a building. A thirty-year shingle at least carries a product designation people can argue from, even though the figure that comes out of it is still a judgment. A sofa is a different problem. Useful life on personal property gets assigned by category, so a mattress and a dining table draw different figures from different assumptions. Condition matters too, and condition is a judgment about something that no longer exists to be looked at.
How RCV and ACV work, and what depreciation does to both, are laid out plainly on our glossary page, and those definitions hold here too. What changes is where the useful life comes from.
Loss of use is the odd one. It isn't tied to an item. It's tied to how long the repair reasonably takes.
So a disagreement about the construction schedule turns into a disagreement about this number, without either side saying a word about drywall.
What's available under this part of the policy, and for how long, is set by the policy language. Some policies are written as a period of time and some as a dollar limit. Whether this piece belongs inside an appraisal at all follows from that same wording.
Every fire claim has an investigation behind it. The vocabulary is cause and origin.
If the disagreement is about how the fire started, or about whether the policy responds to the loss at all, an appraisal panel has no role in it. None. Appraisal decides the amount of a covered loss, and it presumes a covered loss to begin with. A panel can't make a finding about how a fire started, and it can't reopen a claim the carrier declined.
That isn't a technicality, and it can't be worked around by wording a demand differently. Where cause or coverage is genuinely in dispute, that's a conversation for a policyholder-side insurance attorney, and it's worth having early. Fire files are slow. The deadlines in the policy don't slow down with them.
The mechanics don't change because the loss was a fire. A fire file is an amount-of-loss dispute like any other, carrying valuation problems of its own. A written demand invokes the clause, each side names an appraiser with no financial stake in the result, and an umpire decides whatever the two can't close. That sequence is laid out step by step on its own page.
What's particular here is that the award has to come apart into pieces. A structure figure and a contents figure aren't the same kind of number, and an award that reports them separately is one both sides can check. Where loss of use sits, if it sits inside the appraisal at all, follows the policy.
The record matters as much as the arithmetic. A fire valuation gets built from photographs taken before anything was cleared and from the inventory with its ages and conditions. Pricing sits under every line, at what framing and finish carpentry cost in Columbus this year rather than at a national average.
Our fee is set in writing before the engagement begins and never depends on the size of the award. That's what keeps the number credible. Nobody bought it. The full picture of what we do as appraiser and umpire is on the services page.
A disagreement about what personal property was worth is generally an amount-of-loss question, which is what the appraisal clause addresses. The loss has to be covered, and the argument has to be about value rather than about whether the policy responds. A panel works from the inventory and what each side put against it.
That's usually an argument about what the repair involves and what it costs, which puts it in amount-of-loss territory. A panel weighs both positions against what the record shows about the material. What it can't do is resolve a coverage question sitting underneath the dispute.
No. Appraisal decides the amount of a covered loss, and it presumes the loss is covered. How a fire started, and whether the policy responds, are coverage questions an appraisal panel has no role in. Those belong with a policyholder-side insurance attorney, and soon, because the deadlines keep running.
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