Stop Losing Insurance Money: Why Every Property Owner Needs a Commercial Adjuster on Their Side

Share via:

• Facebook
• X (Twitter)
• LinkedIn
• More

Subscribe via:

Show Summary

In this conversation, Gary Allen, Executive Vice President at Continental Adjusters, shares his journey into the real estate and insurance advocacy space. He discusses the importance of mentorship, the role of commercial adjusters in maximizing insurance claims, and the common pitfalls property owners face when dealing with insurance companies. Gary emphasizes the need for property owners to engage commercial adjusters early in the claims process to avoid leaving money on the table. He also highlights the accessibility of their services for businesses of all sizes and the potential for significant financial recovery.

Resources and Links from this show:

• • • Investor Fuel Real Estate Mastermind
    • Investor Machine Real Estate Lead Generation
    • Mike on Facebook
    • Mike on Instagram
    • Mike on LinkedIn
    • Gary Allen’s Website
    • Gary Allen on LinkedIn
    • Gary Allen on LinkedIn
    • Gary Allen’s Email Address: [email protected]
    • Gary Allen’s Phone Number: (972) 878-4473

  Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode

  Investor Fuel Show Transcript:

  Gary Allen-Senior Adjuster (00:00)
  No, mean, we after I think it was Hurricane Wilma that hit Puerto Rico and decimated the Ritz-Carlton in Puerto Rico. mean, it was been almost a year gone by, I think somewhere out of that time frame. And they called us and they said, we’ve got a problem. What’s the problem? Well, the insurance company has offered us $17 million. We go, wow, that seems kind of small for, you know, for a Ritz-Carlton.

  So we went down and looked at

  So when it was all said and done, we ended up settling out for them at $250 million.

  Dylan Silver (02:15)
  Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest is Gary Allen, Executive Vice President at Continental Adjusters, a recognized name in both real estate and insurance advocacy spaces, also Navy veteran. Gary, welcome to the show.

  Gary Allen-Senior Adjuster (02:32)
  Thank you for having me and I’m honored to be here.

  Dylan Silver (02:36)
  Gary, thank you for coming on here today. I always like to start off at the top by asking guests how they got into the real estate space and in your case, the adjuster space.

  Gary Allen-Senior Adjuster (02:48)
  So that’s a good question. I got my degree in real estate and finance from SMU. So I started off early in the commercial real estate realm. And as time went on, the two founders of this company who have been doing this each 36 years, and this company is well established, asked me to come on with the relationships that I know and also the understanding of how to do this business.

  It was just a good fit. So between the relationships and the understanding of really what it takes for an insurance claim to be successful for an owner, but it also what that owner can do with the additional funds that come in that really they deserve for that property. that’s really how it, in a thumbnail, that’s how I came to fruition doing this.

  Dylan Silver (03:43)
  I want to ask you before we get into commercial adjusting and what that is for folks who may be curious, I want to get in a little bit more into your background. Studying real estate in school, did you know that you were passionate about real estate at a young age? Were you thinking you were going to go into commercial residential? Or were you thinking, just really like real estate, we’ll see where this goes?

  Gary Allen-Senior Adjuster (04:07)
  Yeah, I come from a school that’s really, know, Dallas SMU is probably one of the most ⁓ prolific business schools that also has a very deep background in real estate. And I was just real fortunate that when I got into ⁓ school, there was a lot of people that I knew that were Dallas real estate, you old Dallas money that were in real estate. And I said, wow, I want to do this. So that’s kind of how my

  started off on my path and then I worked for a family office in Dallas and from that point

  got my feet wet very quickly and just began to go down the road and buying and selling real estate. Then I got in to be a broker with Marcus and Millichap and while I was at Marcus and Millichap I built a little system that helped me to market and transact real estate and I turned that business plan into a company now called

  real capital markets. And if you look at it on site, it’s rcm1.com, the number one. And, you know, to date, I think we’ve done almost $4 trillion in transactions. We’ve done, you know, from ⁓ Trump’s headquarters to the Pritzker apartment portfolio to, you know, Willis Tower, which is what’s then was Sears Tower. So just

  Dylan Silver (06:17)
  Yeah.

  Gary Allen-Senior Adjuster (06:17)
  very big deals and just got to know everybody. My investors in that were people like Sam Zell, Neil Bloom, the guys over at Related Capital. I mean, just who’s who of real estate and it just really gave me an opportunity and a blessing to be able to build a great company through those relationships. as time went on, the two…

  ⁓ co-founders of this business, Steve Mayer and Doug Morris, who we’ve known each other for over 40 years. ⁓ They’ve built just a very respectful, large public adjusting business, which represents exclusively property owners when they have an insurance claim, and they’ve done very well. ⁓ what’s happened is when, ⁓ the last couple of years, I slowed down little bit and they said, hey, you need to get back moving again.

  ⁓ is right after COVID and they said, hey, you want to come over? want to help grow this business because we’re growing quickly. said, sure. So that’s really how I got involved. It’s very, being very passionate about it. ⁓ We’ve got people, we’ve got great staff here and plus we’ve got great relationships in the insurance. mean, in the commercial real estate business, both locally and nationally. And so it’s just.

  Dylan Silver (07:38)
  Before I hop

  into the commercial adjustment space, I want to ask you one final question about your background. So, real capital markets, Scaling that business, you talk about the size of some of the deals that you did. For folks who may be, let’s say, about to graduate or have graduated recently and are thinking about following a similar path, right? What is one piece of advice that you would give folks maybe early on in their careers that served you well?

  Gary Allen-Senior Adjuster (08:09)
  best thing that I could advise is find a great mentor. That mentor ⁓ can be just a valuable ⁓ keystone for growth because you learn from them, not only that, ⁓ their relationships, you become… ⁓

  knowledgeable with those or friendly with those relationships. And that’s what helped me in college. I worked for a guy by the name of Hugh Prather, old Dallas money. His dad built a pilot park village, developed most of pilot park and university park and knew everybody. And I was just very blessed that he introduced me to some of his friends at the time were starting to dispose of their.

  very, very flagship properties. And I was just very fortunate to be in the middle of those and be part of those transactions. And that was a learning experience that I took forward and to this day still have a lot of the persona that was embedded in me with that relationship.

  Dylan Silver (09:14)
  Yeah, those strategic relationships can make the world of difference. I’ve heard that from multiple guests. I do want to now pivot and get into the commercial adjuster space. Folks may have heard this term before, but they may not be acutely aware of what this all entails. When I think of the commercial space, I’m thinking of everything from, you know, high-rise buildings to medical office, maybe even industrial. I’m also thinking of, you know, ⁓ commercial residential apartment complexes, perhaps.

  What is all entailed within the commercial adjuster space?

  Gary Allen-Senior Adjuster (10:24)
  Well, let’s look at what happens when, let’s just say you own an apartment complex and you had a major hail storm come in and damage it. First thing you do is you obviously want to try to make sure everything, everybody’s safe and then also that your building is secure. But then the next call you make is your insurance agent or your insurance company and file a claim. Well, that insurance company will send out either their staff adjuster or a third party adjuster.

  to now start writing estimates. Well, the unfortunate thing about that, those estimates aren’t really as detailed as they should be, or are they as… ⁓

  financially beneficial to the owner. It’s financially beneficial to the insurance company because typically they’re in the underpayment mode rather than the overpayment mode. And where we come in, we’re licensed insurance adjusters and a lot of us used to work for the insurance companies and know all the different tricks of the trade that try to delay and underpay claims. Now they’ll say, well,

  We want to be fair. And there’s quite a few adjusters we work with. They’ll never say, we want to underpay this. That’s not how it works. But the reality to it is that our responsibility is strictly to the policy owner or the owner. And we come in and do all the estimates just like the adjusters do. We come in and look at the policies. We’re policy strategists. We look at all the different buckets of money.

  that are in these policies and utilize those as a strategy to be able to maximize the recovery for the owners. And this is very, very important to owners that ⁓ don’t understand what we do because many owners have gone through a claim before. go, well, we got paid. But what they don’t understand is how much money that was left on the table because they didn’t have their side represented.

  And I’ll give you an example of this. We did a laundry service here not too long ago, just a month ago. And the insurance company came forth with their estimate. We came forth with our estimate. Well, the insurance company, had what’s called, their estimate was based on a percentage, or they had a deductible based on a percentage of what the value of their building was. And the insurance company had that value.

  Dylan Silver (12:50)
  Thank

  Gary Allen-Senior Adjuster (13:04)
  Well, we started looking at the value of that building and then guess what? That value of that building, the last valuation was done in 2015. was 10 years ago. Do you think that the value of that building went up or down? Probably went up. ⁓ And so as we looked at it, we said, well, let’s please derive a new value or come up with a recent value so we can look at that to see what the difference is. Well, when they provided that,

  Dylan Silver (13:12)
  Thank

  Yeah.

  Gary Allen-Senior Adjuster (13:32)
  That was $1 million in difference that we found. That was a million dollars extra. Now, as a business owner, you’re going, wow, you just brought me an additional million dollars that I would have never even known. So that’s just one of many, many cases.

  Dylan Silver (13:48)
  Peace.

  This begs the question, how often is it, when I think of the commercial space, I tend to think you have property managers and you have partners and you have lots of moving pieces, you’ve got insurance, but how often is it that folks do not have a commercial adjuster that they call, that their first call is to their insurance company?

  Gary Allen-Senior Adjuster (14:12)
  ⁓ my gosh, it’s probably in the 90 percentile, easy. most don’t even know we exist unless we make the call to them on a lead. If they’ve had a fire, they’re getting a call from us. Now, many a times they’ll say, well, I’ll just wait till my insurance company comes up with their estimate. And if I need you, I’ll call you. Well, they…

  Really at the end, if they have enough money to reconstruct, they go, well, I’m fine. I don’t need you. But what they didn’t understand is they probably left a minimum

  40 % of money on the table. But we’re finding that that’s higher than 70 % up to maybe 100 to 200%. And I mean, we’ve got testimonial letters. I think I shared some of those with you. We just did one where they were expecting that, you know, it was a little fire on a, know, a 70s vintage apartment complex.

  You know, they were expecting a $200,000 recovery. Well, we ended up when it was all said and done, we recovered for them a million and then found additional damage from storm and got them an additional million on top of that. And they were going, wow, we would have never even known about it. So.

  Dylan Silver (16:05)
  Yeah, that’s

  huge. mean, when people are going through these ⁓ disasters, like it can be a black swan event, if you will. And when you talk about who’s involved, right, it’s not like it’s one investor. Most of the times these are syndications. are groups of people coming together. And so something like this, I would imagine, again, from my level of a thousand foot view looking down, you would think, well, if it’s

  going to save us a million dollars or find additional money that we didn’t know was there, it is a no-brainer. But the old way of doing things is you call the insurance first. So I’m sure there are many cases, ⁓ including floods that have happened, fires that have happened recently all over the country, where folks are not making that call and instead just going straight to their insurance.

  Gary Allen-Senior Adjuster (16:57)
  Yeah, it’s funny that we talk about this and it’s really not funny. It’s kind of sad because so many people that we’ve done business with in the past, there may be a 10 year or 15 year span of when we had done ⁓ a claim for them and then they have another claim and they forget about us. And it’s because a lot of times you’ll have a change in leadership or you’ll have a change in

  Dylan Silver (17:20)
  Yeah.

  Gary Allen-Senior Adjuster (17:26)
  responsibilities that that person may have gone someplace else that they wouldn’t even know. And it’s really about getting about getting our name and getting the service out of for, you know, for people to know that we’re out there, this service is available. And, you know, part of these doing these podcasts and videos is to get people where they can say, wow, I didn’t know that. And here’s here’s an example. We just did ⁓

  We just finalized a claim on a big fire that was here in Dallas. And I would say almost all of their joint venture equity partners, they own properties too. And almost every one of them we’ve done claims for in the past. that was a very good support for us to be able to be engaged on that deal. It was like a $42 million claim. I mean, it was a big size claim.

  Dylan Silver (18:25)
  I do want to ask you maybe a granular question here, give away some of the gold but not necessarily the whole gold bar if you will. know, if folks are dealing with catastrophic damage, whether flood, hail, ⁓ fire, right? And let’s say it’s a small multifamily apartment complex, right? So they’re really needing to have some kind of quick relief and they’re thinking, well, I’m going to go to my insurance company because

  This will be solved faster for me. Is there any type of time frame as a commercial adjuster where you can give folks where you could say, hey, you I know it’s this with your insurance. If you go through us, we can still facilitate this quickly or is it a longer process?

  Gary Allen-Senior Adjuster (19:09)
  Well, that’s kind of a double-edged sword because sometimes people may be in the delay mode. The insurance company have delayed them and we can get in six months, seven months later and get it moving. And there’s other times where ⁓ they’ve already made a lot of mistakes and those mistakes, they can be undone, it just takes time to do them. But we’ve been called a year later when the

  claim is still going on to be brought in to right the ship supposed to speak or right so to speak, right the ship and get it back on track and then move that claim recovery dollars up.

  Dylan Silver (19:52)
  So even if, I you’re mentioning a year later, I’m not sure how common that is, but if folks are dealing with delay and let’s say they’re thinking, well, you know, this is, you know, six months later, this is a year later, I feel like I’ve already kind of, you know, dug my, hole that I’m in. Is it not too late for them to reach out to a commercial adjuster at that point?

  Gary Allen-Senior Adjuster (20:03)
  Hmm.

  No, mean, we after I think it was Hurricane Wilma that hit Puerto Rico and decimated the Ritz-Carlton in Puerto Rico. mean, it was been almost a year gone by, I think somewhere out of that time frame. And they called us and they said, we’ve got a problem. What’s the problem? Well, the insurance company has offered us $17 million. We go, wow, that seems kind of small for, you know, for a Ritz-Carlton.

  So we went down and looked at it and there was just so much that was involved in that, but mold had set in and just all sorts of things structurally that had to be rectified and the insurance company wasn’t having it. They were just trying to band-aid it and move on. So when it was all said and done, we ended up settling out for them at $250 million.

  Dylan Silver (20:50)
  Yeah.

  Gary Allen-Senior Adjuster (21:06)
  And so these are things that a lot of people say, well, I’ll wait till my insurance company

  makes their offer and I’ll see if it’s worthwhile. And I tell people, listen, let me just take a look at what the insurance company’s done. If they’re good, you don’t need us. But if there’s a lot of stuff that’s left off, let’s move it on.

  Dylan Silver (21:26)
  I want to ask you about the scale of business. We are coming up on time here. I’m a Texas licensed realtor. live outside of the country, but I have lot of connections to Texas in particular. I know you’re out there in Frisco yourself. What’s the scale of the businesses that you work with? I know you work with a lot of larger, you mentioned Ritz-Carlton. If someone has several quadplexes or if they have a small apartment complex community, would they still be able to reach out to you if something were to happen?

  Gary Allen-Senior Adjuster (21:30)
  Okay.

  Absolutely, absolutely.

  We won’t turn anybody away unless we can’t help them.

  But we’ll look at and ⁓ analyze their policy. The most important part in the very beginning is analyzing their policy to see what can be done and what can’t be done. Once that analysis is done, and then we look at if they’ve already got a claim going on, we’ll look at what’s been documented and see if anything’s been left off or miscoded. And if we can see that we can give them some additional help, we’ll do it. We work on contingency. So we only.

  charge a percentage of what we recover. So it’s not like if we don’t recover anything, guess what? We get zero, even though we’ve outlaid the cash and the dollars to be able to go in and bring people out and look at it.

  Dylan Silver (22:32)
  Hmm.

  Yeah, there’s no harm in reaching out. It can only be a positive. Where can folks go to reach out to you? How can folks get in contact with you?

  Gary Allen-Senior Adjuster (22:45)
  Yeah.

  So

  I’ve got a couple of places my email is [email protected] or you can just call me 972-878-4473 or you can go to our website continentaladjusters.com

  Dylan Silver (23:05)
  Gary.

  Gary, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.