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Show Summary
In this conversation, Ron Snouffer shares his journey from being a retail real estate agent to becoming an investor and public adjuster. He discusses the challenges faced during the housing crisis, the importance of understanding insurance policies, and the role of public adjusters in helping property owners navigate claims after disasters. Ron emphasizes the need for investors to be proactive in reviewing their insurance coverage to avoid devastating financial losses.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Ron Snouffer (00:00)
Correct. You you think you pay for insurance in order to protect you when an event happens. The problem is, policies have become more more difficult to understand and understand what you have coverage for. I mean, during the last couple of hurricanes here in Texas and in Florida, I had clients who thought they had a $250,000 deductible. They had a 5 % deductible, which was $3 million.Dylan Silver (02:02)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest Ron Snouffer is an investor for 20 plus years and he’s also a public adjuster. He also has a background as a general contractor. I’m excited to have a conversation with him today. Ron, welcome to the show.Ron Snouffer (02:03)
ThankThanks for having me on Dylan.
Dylan Silver (02:20)
It’s great to meet you. And I always like to start off at the top of this show by asking guests how they got started in real estate.Ron Snouffer (02:27)
So I originally got started as a remax agent, selling houses to single families, ⁓ starter homes, so on and so forth, and quickly realized that I did not enjoy that aspect of real estate.Dylan Silver (02:42)
He said, the retail is not for me.Ron Snouffer (02:44)
Retail was not for me. know, you’re basically on call seven days a week, 24 hours a day. People don’t respect your time whatsoever. As I recall, it was crazy being in that business. I did it for two years. And then what ended up happening was one of my buddies was flipping houses, not a ton of houses, but he was flipping a couple of houses a year. And he wanted me to help him sell one of his flips.And I was like, man, this is just too easy because an investor doesn’t care if the paint colors don’t match or what the deal is. All they care about is will the numbers work? And so I saw immediately a niche there and I switched from being a retail ⁓ residential ⁓ real estate agent and I started selling investor properties exclusively.
Dylan Silver (03:36)
I am involved in both of these worlds. I’m a realtor in Texas as well. what this taught me from both being working with investors and working with retail buyers is like you mentioned, it’s two totally different arenas. Like they could basically be two totally separate careers as far as I’m concerned, because you’ll talk with some agents and I don’t think this is true for all agents, but you’ll definitely talk with some.who almost have a negative perspective of working with investors. Like they’re going to be, you know, big ego, they’re going to have their own vernacular, they’re not really buying and so on and so forth. And I come from the perspective of working first with investors as a wholesaler and then now working with retail buyers. So I see all sides of it. When you were making that transition to working exclusively
with investors, were you thinking, hey, this is going to be the niche that I stay in? Or were you also looking at that same point in time and looking for properties for yourself?
Ron Snouffer (04:34)
combination of both, initially I was only looking for investors, right? I didn’t have the capital. I was still pretty young, just barely got married. And I was looking for just that paycheck at the time. And I was kind of forced into it because one of my investors, we were partnering in on a job together, 50-50 split. He ended up not showing up for the closing.And so I already deposited my money into escrow. I already signed all the documents. He never showed up for closing. He flaked out on me. And so I ended up having to buy the property myself and it forced me to become an investor overnight. And after that, then I did a combination of investing and still selling stuff to wholesalers on properties that I didn’t want.
Dylan Silver (06:11)
How is that for a first deal? You found out at closing, you’re the buyer.Ron Snouffer (06:15)
yeah, I was expecting I’ll get some tutelage. Somebody would show me how to go out and find ⁓ the subcontractors and so on and so forth to do the work that needed to be done. And nope, I got thrown in the deep end of the pool and did it all. And ⁓ lucky for me, I had a pretty successful outcome and pretty happy with it all.Dylan Silver (06:37)
What time period was that first deal?Ron Snouffer (06:39)
As far as how long did it take me?Dylan Silver (06:41)
No, no, year is we talking about?Ron Snouffer (06:43)
That would have been around 2004, 2005.Dylan Silver (06:49)
So pre-housing crisis. At that point in time, was this DFW area?Ron Snouffer (06:55)
It was. It was DeSoto, Texas, if you know where that is.Dylan Silver (06:59)
Were there lots of folks who were looking at ⁓ flips? I’m imagining, you know, this was maybe less common than it is today, but I don’t know. I wasn’t around at that period investing. Were there lots of competition and folks looking at flips or was it a niche market at that point?Ron Snouffer (07:00)
Airway.Now there’s, there’s still a pretty active buyers out there. There’s multiple real estate investment clubs that we’re teaching people how to buy properties and go out and find stuff. ⁓ I mean, I’m not familiar with how difficult it is today with that because I do my own thing. But back then we had competition, but I did, I rarely ran into somebody else that was buying or after the same property that I was after.
Dylan Silver (07:34)
Yeah.And then, know, housing crisis hits. So now we’re in a totally different area. Things change drastically. You know, you’ve got Dodd-Frank. It’s now harder to qualify for loans for everybody. And the whole real estate industry changes. But I also understand that I believe it was after that time period that you ended up getting into public adjusting from a tornado, if I’m not mistaken.
Ron Snouffer (08:08)
And so what happened in 2008, you couldn’t get retail loans for your investors anymore. It didn’t matter what the numbers said or what the property qualified for it. Unless they had a 50 % down, weren’t getting bought for anything. So I had to make a drastic shift. Somebody told me I should get into adjusting. And so I started as an IA for the insurance company in 2008 during Hurricane Ike and quickly realized, well,I know enough about construction. should be on the other side and help the property owners get their properties built back. And then in 2011, one of my clients who was a professor at TCU, they got hit by a tornado and the insurance company was paying them about 20 cents on the dollar for their damage to the property. And I had so much business, I didn’t have time to help them negotiate with the insurance company, so on and so forth. She went out and found a public adjuster.
that helped her through the process of getting her property back paid for correctly. And then I was able to rebuild it. during that process, I learned what a public adjuster was. And I really fell in love with that aspect of being the advocate and helping property owners get back to where they were before an event happens.
Dylan Silver (09:23)
Yeah, I mean, a tornado will do it. I experiencedone living in Denton myself earlier this year. And when we talk about, you know, worst case scenario homes being destroyed, you know, all different types of damage. People typically think and of course, as a public adjuster, I’m sure you have tons of experience with this, I’m going to go call my insurance company first, and it’s not until their back is up against the wall that they start looking at
other options.
Ron Snouffer (10:26)
Correct. You you think you pay for insurance in order to protect you when an event happens. The problem is, policies have become more more difficult to understand and understand what you have coverage for. I mean, during the last couple of hurricanes here in Texas and in Florida, I had clients who thought they had a $250,000 deductible. They had a 5 % deductible, which was $3 million.We’re in Florida because of an
named storm, they had a 10 % deductible on their umbrella policy, which meant they had a $50 million deductible. And so imagine you have one property that gets damaged from a hurricane, but yet you have an umbrella policy across the entire state of all your properties at $500 million. And if a storm event happens, that umbrella policy kicks in and the deductible for all the properties.
Dylan Silver (11:00)
my god.Ron Snouffer (11:20)
happens. So now you have a $50 million deductible versus that single site deductible. You don’t have coverage. And if you remember during 2021, we had all the floods here in Texas. After the flooding, a lot of insurance carriers went to a minimum coverage on water damage, which means you may not have the coverage you think you have for your apartment or yourDylan Silver (11:29)
You don’t.Ron Snouffer (11:48)
single family that you had before, could have $10,000 in coverage and have $100,000 in damage. That’ll bankrupt a lot of investors.Dylan Silver (11:56)
Now, I’ve spoken with some other public adjusters on this show, but none who have the scope of work that you’ve done from being a realtor to a contractor investor. Should investors be looking at talking with maybe a public adjuster before they buy their policy so that they can have someone review it in the case that something goes wrong?Ron Snouffer (12:17)
Yes, depending on what state you’re in, you really need to have somebody other than the agent advising you on what coverage you do have. You know, there’s a lot of good agents out there, but unfortunately a lot of agents are also just marketing and sales reps, which means all they’re doing is selling you a policy that they think you need, not knowing what coverage is you’re going to be missing out on as an investor. And it is about cashflow, but it’s also about the ability toretain that asset if something devastating were to happen. I had another client who didn’t realize they didn’t have coverage if ⁓ the tenant caused the fire. Million dollar fire. Lady decides ⁓ she’s going to commit suicide by fire in her apartment complex. She sets her curtains on fire, goes to the bedroom, takes sleeping pills, burns down the complex. They had no coverage because
in the policy, was an exclusion for ⁓ arson by the tenant.
Dylan Silver (13:14)
that’ll devastate any investor. ⁓ Do you, in your experience, when folks are taking out these policies, are they looking at all into this deep into it, or are they really looking at it like, well, I need to have this because I own the property, and it’s like a limited thought in their mind. They’re not thinking about the worst case scenario.Ron Snouffer (13:15)
and that’s it.So I’m going to, I’m going to share two aspects. One of my clients, uh, has close to a thousand residential properties and then a few hundred multifamily and out of those thousand, he has about 300 that has no insurance on it whatsoever because it’s cheaper for him not to have insurance and self-insure those 300 properties because the likelihood of them catching fire is very nominal. And so.
He doesn’t have to worry about it. He’s also an attorney. He’s not just a real estate investor. But the reason why I bring him up is he understands policies. He’s an attorney. He can read them and goes through the entire process of it. But he still has me review the policies that he has because of the fact that as an attorney, he specializes in real estate law. He doesn’t specialize in insurance law. As a financial adjuster,
Dylan Silver (14:26)
Yeah.Ron Snouffer (14:27)
We’re familiar with what’s going on with these policies. We understand what the exclusions, the addendums, what the endorsements say and each threshold on what changes. And you have to understand that insurance, what used to be easy to read and understand now is very complex. An attorney out of Tampa, Chip Merlin just did an article about you need a law degree to read your insurance policy. It’s very enlightening.Dylan Silver (14:54)
Yeah.You know, when we talk about when these situations happen to it, and I hate to say this, but in many cases, it’s going to be the first time that someone’s really taken a look at their policy. So, hey, what’s my deductible? What’s the coverage? And you don’t want that. I do want to pivot here though, Ron, and ask you about what the situation looks like after something drastic happens. In the case of a single family home, Home burns down, right?
Ron Snouffer (15:39)
ThankDylan Silver (16:04)
In some other states, I’ve heard this idea of there’ll be a bunch of people kind of showing up to your door, and many will be public adjusters. Does that happen in Texas as well? What’s the typical scene like? What’s the process like?Ron Snouffer (16:15)
You know, ⁓ there’s not that many public adjusters in the state of Texas. I hear that happening a lot in Florida as far as public adjusters showing up right after a storm event, because there’s almost 10 times as many public adjusters there as there are in Texas. And then other states, I I’m licensed in several states where there’s less than 50 of us in the entire state. So.That should tell you a little bit about how few and far between public adjusters are. A lot of times people don’t know what we are. But with that being said, the duties after a loss now all fall on a property owner. You used to think that you call your insurance company, they’re going to come out and take care of everything. No, it actually changed about 10 years ago so that you’re responsible for everything, proving your claim to the insurance company before they owe you anything.
That wasn’t a fact five to 10 years ago.
Dylan Silver (17:11)
So the burden of proofis on the homeowner before it is on like any type of fiduciary responsibility by the insurance company.
Ron Snouffer (17:18)
Yeah, if you look at a policy that was written 10 years ago, the duties after a loss on the carrier were about two pages. Now it’s flipped and those two pages are all on the property owner and the duties after a loss are about a paragraph for the insurance company.Dylan Silver (17:34)
Wow. ⁓ I guess, of course, you want to make sure that you’ve reviewed your policy before anything like this does happen. But in the case that something drastic does happen, is there anything that people can do if theydon’t have the covers that they thought they did? Like I’ve heard this happening. And to use a famous example, and like the LA fires, right, where a bunch of people didn’t have certain types of coverage. Are these people just, you know, at a loss? Is there anything that can be done?
Ron Snouffer (18:06)
SOL. ⁓ They’re out of luck in a lot of cases. Some of the fire guys in ⁓ California are getting ⁓ low interest or no interest loans to rebuild from the federal government and or the state. But in most cases, they’re not getting anything. I mean, FEMA will only pay a certain amount. You may have a$3,000, $4,000,000 fire loss and FEMA is going to pay you $250,000.
Next.
Dylan Silver (18:38)
Yeah, that’s, that’s devastating. ⁓ When I when I think about one of the things that goes understated, it is this area of insurance, because like I said, it’s something that sometimes you might think of as, as I’m not going to put too much effort into this, I just kind of need it. But then when you when you need to actually take a look at your insurance, when something drastic happens, you’re probably going to wish that you had put some more effort into it upfront.We are coming up on time here though, Ron, where can folks go? Where can our audience go if they’re interested in reaching out to you? Maybe they’re an investor themselves and would like a second opinion on how their policy looks, or maybe they have ⁓ some concerns about what their policy is looking like right now.
Ron Snouffer (19:21)
So we do free policy review or advise anybody on what their policy states. You can go to www.nationalclaimsnegotiators.com and plug in there for us to do a policy review on whatever policy you have. We work with single family homeowners. We work with large asset managers and everybody in between. Currently have 18 active.claims across the country in different states. So we are pretty mobile. ⁓ And then you can always find me on Facebook or LinkedIn under Ron Snouffer So I’m pretty active on both of those. Appreciate it. It was fun.
Dylan Silver (20:02)
Ron, thank you so much for coming on show today.
