The #1 Best Way to Win Your Insurance Claim...

Aviva (00:00)
This week's Listener of the Week is Amanda Ashley Bratt. Amanda, thank you so much for leaving us a five star review and for those of you listening, if you leave us a five star review below, you might be next week's Listener of the Week. Week, week.

This week on Commercial Real Estate Secrets, we have Andy Gurczak, who is the founder and CEO of All City Adjusting. Andy, thank you so much for being on the show.

Andy Gurczak (00:30)
Aviva, thank you so much for having me out. It's a pleasure to be on.

Aviva (00:33)
It's a pleasure to have you. So tell us who you are, what you do, and how you got here.

Andy Gurczak (00:42)
Yeah, my name is Andy Gurczak All City Adjusting is a licensed public adjusting company. We service over 40 states. When we say public adjusting, meaning we're licensed public adjusters, we represent the insured with their claims. We help them negotiate, settle their claims in all types of coverages pertaining to a majority where we specialize in large loss. So about commercial, fire losses, large water losses, tornado, and stuff like that.

That's about it.

Aviva (01:12)
So can you explain in layman's terms what a public adjuster is?

Andy Gurczak (01:19)
Yeah, so the easiest way to look at it, it's a private adjuster. So if you have a lawsuit, you have a claim. It's a private adjuster, someone you would hire. We don't represent the insurance company. We can't work for the insurance company. We can only be hired. Our designation, our license per state, we can only be hired by the insured to represent that. So basically we're an attorney. We're acting as a representative as an attorney. Obviously we aren't given legal advice or anything, but it's a representative against their own insurance.

Aviva (01:48)
How did you get into the business?

Andy Gurczak (01:51)
I kind of fell into everything. I was in construction, was doing restoration work, and I met a PA that was 40 years under his belt in Chicago here. And then he took me under his wing and for three years kind of taught me the entire industry, the entire business, and then I was able to kind of go on my own and start All City.

Aviva (02:13)
So what type of services do you offer generally?

Andy Gurczak (02:16)
Okay, so there's, yeah, so when we take on a claim, we'll help with negotiating and settling the structure part of the building, let's say it's a fire, when there's personal properties. So let's say you had a fire and all your contents personal property burnt down, we actually go in and dig through everything, inventory it, price it out, age it presented to the insurance company. We handle lots of business income, business interruption losses, pretty much anything in the in the policy. When it comes to commercial, we handle for the insurance.

So we basically take all the stress out. We're the representative, they can take back, live their life, go on with everything while we negotiate and handle the entire claim. Excuse me.

Aviva (02:56)
How long does this take out of curiosity?

Andy Gurczak (02:59)
It depends on the claim, it depends on the insurance. There's so many different variables. There's never like, that's the question we get a lot. How long does my claim take? It depends. Who's the insurance on the other side? And if that insurance, if it's, let's just say, like the blue insurance company, well, which adjuster is it? Because this one works with us all the time and it takes him a month to take our paperwork and settle it. This other one takes four months. So with the same insurance company, it can be a different adjuster. So it depends on the claim process. You know, we like to say 30 to 90 days.

is a good timetable if it's a new claim, right? Let's say you just hired us as soon as most of the clients, like our repeat clients, our investors, they'll call us, like we're the first ones they call as soon as something happens. The claim goes really quick. But let's say you had a fire or you had a water pipe break and you called us three, four months after the loss, well then it's hard, you know, then it takes a little bit longer, additional, because now we're going back and trying to investigate what happened the last four months. Why have you been low-balled? Why has the insurance company tried to deny you or delay the claim? There's a little...

longer process then.

Aviva (03:59)
Interesting. So...

What inspired you to get into this business? I know you said you fell into it, but what about it made you go all in?

Andy Gurczak (04:08)
Mm-hmm.

You know what, when I met the gentleman I met was Herb. When I met Herb, I just thought what he was doing, we were doing the work, I was so intrigued in the fact that he was the one working with the insured and he was the one that actually got him the money to rebuild the home and got him all this money for this. And it kind of intrigued me what he was doing. So then I started talking to the boss I was working at, he gave me the information to him and then I started kind of looking it up, what is this like public adjuster thing, what is this? Because no one ever talks about it, right?

Unless something happens to you, you don't know, because it's not like, oh, like a doctor, like everyone knows what a doctor is or this, this profession or this, or a public adjuster, unless you actually have a claim happen, you don't know about it. So once I started looking into it, it really got me intrigued. And since I had a construction background, it made things easier, because when we're estimating, when you're going to a building and estimating damages from whatever kind of claim it is, knowing...

Aviva (04:41)
I'm sorry.

Andy Gurczak (05:08)
construction, knowing commercial construction, knowing all that just helps you settle claims, helps you, you know, it just gives you the credibility to go and settle a loss for higher amounts and give more to the insured.

Aviva (05:26)
Not to just go straight for the meat and potatoes. How do you get paid? What's the pay, how does that work? Right?

Andy Gurczak (05:33)
Can you ask that on the show? No, I'm just kidding. It's super easy. We're contingency based. So we work almost, I think, in 40 states now. It's not close to it. It's 10%. Our usual general fee starts at 10%. So if you had a fire, you called us, it's 10% of whatever we recover for the client. So if we recover 100,000, 200, it's 10% of that. That gets paid once our client gets paid. So it's not like they're paying out of pocket. Once their claim is paid, that's when they're paying us.

Aviva (05:54)
Wow.

Andy Gurczak (06:01)
If we were to come in, let's say, after six months into a claim and the insurance maybe been paid something and now we're trying to go and get more, it might be a higher fee, but based on anything extra we would get for that client. So it depends when we come in the claim process, but it starts at 10%.

Aviva (06:17)
Okay, so I had a crazy situation happen and when I was doing my research on who you were and what you do before the show, I was like very selfishly excited because I could pick your brain on this situation. So we're commercial brokers here in town. We got called on behalf of an ownership group to sell three buildings of theirs. They have three buildings on five acres.

We go under contract on a Monday, and the following Monday, one of the buildings burns to the ground. Yeah, I know. These are the things you couldn't make up. Part two of the things you couldn't make up in this story, both of the tenants don't have insurance.

So, and the insurance that the landlord had on the properties, it's essentially incorrect. So they are looking like they're going to be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result of this fire. And we don't know what started the fire, but we have an idea that it was an accident on behalf of one of the uninsured tenants.

So is this a situation where you guys would come in and help my client?

Andy Gurczak (07:44)
We definitely would, 100%. Now, the tenant stuff, anything that was inside the building, your landlord, the landlord's policy is not gonna cover it. Most of the time, his policy is gonna cover the building, it's gonna cover his loss of business income. There's other endorsements in there that will cover debris removal and such. But the tenants are on their own. You know, as an investor myself, and me and my wife invest in properties and commercial and residential, we always...

Aviva (08:06)
Sure.

Andy Gurczak (08:13)
Always, always we tell and explain to our tenants, please, you know, we can't force you. But because I see it happen on the time where fires happen and stuff happens. And it's then they go look at the landlord, the tenants look at the landlord as, hey, you owe me now. Listen, I don't owe you anything. I, I'm sorry you lost everything and you have nowhere to go, but that's not, that none has none do with us. It's an act of God. So in this, in this, in this situation, I'm curious what kind of policy the landlord had, but that's a, that's a perfect claim that we would go in and help.

Aviva (08:22)
Yeah.

You know, we lease and manage 110 industrial units. Our one rule besides we need first month and security deposit, our one rule is we need your COI before we give you the keys because, you know, a lot of people just don't.

So, you know, there's sophistication levels of landlords, right? You know, some people are full-time landlords and that's their jobs, right? That's what we do for a living. If you have a construction business and, uh, being a landlord, you know, you wound up with a building and tenants and being a landlord is not what you do for a living, I don't knock you for not knowing that you need to do that, uh, to make sure that your tenants are fully insured.

But we're in this situation now where it's like, holy smokes, you didn't have proper representation on the front end and we're looking, an issue we're having now with the insurance company is that they're saying, well, and this leads me to my next question with you, it sounds like on the property there are three buildings.

They essentially have swapped two of the buildings and said that the smaller building burned down, but it was really the bigger building that burned down. So there's the argument with the insurance company, they're saying that the landlord was inaccurate in their policy. My question for you is whose job is it?

Andy Gurczak (10:26)
So they're going to say misrepresentation. He might have misrepresented the policy. Listen, they're going to look at every, in today's age, they're looking at every angle to deny it, to ultimately delay. They'll delay every claim as long as they can. Trust me, we see it every day. And then ultimately deny it. Whatever they can, wherever they weigh, they can spin it. If the landlord went into the agent and said, hey, these are my three properties, and that's it.

then it's on the agent's due diligence to look at the properties and ensure them the right way. Now, if he explained that, like, he said something in the policy or he put something on paper the wrong way, then it's on him. You know, so there is that. Now, the agents do hold air and emission policy, so the agent didn't mess up or there's something. They would have to go after the agent's policy as well. But I'm not sure we would have to see that because that gets very interesting, right? Yeah.

Aviva (11:18)
I know, I recognize we're going into the weeds, but like I said, we're just dealing with this. You know, I've been in the business for like 10 years and we had two big fires this year on third party, one on a property we manage, a homeless guy kind of broke in and started doing drugs in the house and burnt half of it down.

Andy Gurczak (11:22)
Yeah.

Aviva (11:42)
And then this situation where both are acts of God, but there are new situations when it comes to management and insurance and it's kind of the wild west out there when it comes to insurance.

Andy Gurczak (11:58)
Can I give you a scenario? We have one, this one actually had to go to an attorney, but they denied a claim because the insured couple that owned their primary residence had a rental across the street, literally across, they would walk, and they rented it to their son. Well, they put the house up for sale. And so they took maybe 50% of the stuff they took out of the house to their sons, and then they went to live with their son, right? Because they wanted it to be ready to sell.

Their claim, they had a fight, their claim got denied because they said that this wasn't their primary residence no more.

Aviva (12:33)
Wow. And so that's when they called you, you come in and you fight it.

Andy Gurczak (12:38)
Yes, and we did everything and we brought it to the attorney. The attorney was like, of course I'll take it. He had all the details we gave him. So that makes it easy because we work with attorneys. But if we went in from day one, this would have been avoided because the way we would have presented it would never happen that this was not their primary residence. But what happens with the insured, right, when you call a fire or you call a claimant, your instinct is to say everything, right? You want to tell them your whole life story and they record everything.

whether it's true or not, they'll take what they want to take and use it against you. So when we take over a claim and we're handling claim, it goes through us. So any question, we make sure that it's the right answer. Because even if you're not, we would never propose to lie to insurance. You don't want to lie. You want to tell them and be true. You want to just say what needs to be said and nothing else.

Aviva (13:32)
They say that in the court of law, right? You don't wanna lie, you wanna be honest and ethical, but what you say will be used against you. So, but you know, an industry like yours where people generally don't know it even exists.

Andy Gurczak (13:36)
Correct.

That's it. Yeah, and then we see it all the time.

Aviva (13:51)
How do you get people to know your business and understand that this is an option in these acts of God times or these times where they're dealing with probably one of the bigger emergencies in their life?

Andy Gurczak (14:06)
It's so hard to get to those people. So our goal is to try to get people as quickly as possible, right? Because the quicker we can get to them and tell them what we do and how we can help, the quicker they can be in a better place. But unfortunately, people don't know. When they file a claim, they know there's a restoration company, there's the adjuster on the insurance company. And again, when they're like, well, the adjuster that's coming from the insurance is coming to, you know, write an estimate, he's really nice, you have to remember, everyone works for the insurance company.

the adjuster, the desk adjuster, the contractors, the mitigation company, everyone works and gets paid by the insurance company. So how can they be looking out for the insurance company, representing their interests, but also be looking at your interest? They can't, right? It's like an attorney representing two parties. He's there to represent the insurance and he gets incentives and he gets guidelines of what they shouldn't be paying for and how a claim is handled. So, you know, we wanna get to them as quickly as possible. So we've done a lot in education, online,

Aviva (14:45)
Bye.

Andy Gurczak (15:03)
online marketing, and we have other mailers, other stuff that we're trying to get to owners as quickly as possible.

Aviva (15:10)
Wow. It's a really interesting point you made about how the insurance company is playing both sides of the field. But what's...

Andy Gurczak (15:20)
No one ever thinks about that though. No one ever looks at it that way, like, hey, that guy's coming out, these contractors, all these people that this adjuster said, hey, Aviva, I have, do you wanna use our vendors? Do you wanna use our, oh yeah, sure. And then all these parties come out and you're like, wait, everyone's working for the insurance company. Who's working actually for me? No one.

Aviva (15:39)
Do you have any faith in insurance companies?

Andy Gurczak (15:42)
Not much, no. There, and again, they're in a business. They're in a business to collect premiums and that's fine. They collect premiums and then when there's a claim, it, I mean, there's studies, there's books written on this. There's, there's case studies where they, they want to under pay delay and deny claims. It's just, but again, it's their business model. So it is, you know, it, it creates an industry for us and it creates a business for us. So, I mean, and they've been doing this for years. So.

Aviva (16:09)
Sure. Well, you hear about it a lot recently with big disasters. You hear about with the hurricanes in Florida or here in Colorado, they had that massive fire and like a couple thousand houses got burned down in like an hour and everybody was improperly insured. Do you think that...

there's regulation or anything that will be able to tighten up the insurance coming because of all these natural disasters and just...

Andy Gurczak (16:48)
I think there's always been natural disasters. Look in the back, I think there's always been hurricanes, there's always been fires. You have to look, there's just more houses. People are building houses on the water where houses shouldn't be. There's probably locations where homes shouldn't be and elevations that shouldn't be, but they put them on. So then, you know, when you have a hurricane like in Florida, well, all these houses got knocked down. Well, yeah, they were on stilts on the water. They probably shouldn't be there, first of all. But there is more disasters, it looks like, you know, happening and stuff like that.

So when it comes to like now you have insurance companies pulling out of states, state farms pulling out of California and other states are pulling out of Florida, right? It's harder to get insurance, the premiums are going up and the regulations, you have to think, the insurance company is a billion dollar industry, trillion, who knows where they're at these days, but the laws and statutes favor them in pretty much every state because they have the lobbyists. So you're going not only against the insurance company, you're going against statutes and everything else in the state. So everything's in favor of the insurance company.

Aviva (17:47)
So how do you all find the edge and win out of curiosity?

Andy Gurczak (17:52)
Yeah, so we've built a great team. I can't speak for other PA firms. We've built a great team. Our head estimator was 20 years with one of the largest carriers. Spent doing fires in California all the way to New York. He basically did all their large loss. So he's been part of our team for now four or five years. And that's just one example, right? We also, we all have experience in building, construction. And we have our own forensic accountant.

We have our own team in-house, so we don't have to send it anywhere. So when we get a claim, we're able to review it in-house, make the best judgment calls, and we can put the whole claim file in-house, send it in, and move a claim quickly. Right? We're not subbing it out. We're not sending it to anyone else to help us with that claim.

Aviva (18:38)
Wow, that's so fascinating.

Andy Gurczak (18:41)
But it really comes down to being able to experience and knowing, kind of knowing construction, knowing what it takes for contents, if they're burnt down or if they're water damaged, if they can be brought back, having those experts as well on your side that can back up your story, right? Because we can, you know, you hired us for that example that fire and we say, hey, you owe him a million dollars, why? Right, you have to have supportive documents to say why that's needed, why this has to be done this way.

Aviva (19:09)
It's so interesting. So in your day to day, is every single day different or are you able to start to find similarities?

Andy Gurczak (19:16)
No, there's no conflict. There's no, we always think about like, you wanna build a business and you wanna build structures, this day this happens. When it comes to maybe if you were just doing like, no, this PA, most majority of PA firms do smaller losses. They do hail a wind, right? You see that a lot, get your free roof or get your claim paid. Colorado, you see them a lot. And most PAs do wind and hail small losses. With our firm, because we do 40 states and we specialize in large loss.

there's never been a constant. We've never had a claim, two claims that are the same. Every claim is different. Whether it's the same insurance, I mean, we deal with like one insurance company, like, you know, 10 claims a week. And it's every claim, it could be the same like laws, but the adjuster is different. And all of a sudden, everything else is different. So there's never a constant. Like every day you hear, we talk about a claim in the office and we're like, how are we gonna do this? Or how do we attack this? Because it's just a different scenario. Which is fun, because it definitely keeps.

There's never really a dull day

Aviva (20:15)
Do you have any transactions that you can talk about that stand out to you in your time as an adjuster?

Andy Gurczak (20:24)
Yeah, so my favorite, so there's a bunch. The one that comes to my mind, I've mentioned this one people lately, it was a church claim. It was actually not far from us. It was about 15 minutes from our office. It was a church that burned down. It was Brother Elijah, they were offered, he was offered 780, almost 800,000, the original adjuster that came out. When he called us because someone recommended him to us, I walked through that, I was like, okay, this is about 1.5.

two million is where I was looking. Then we actually did an inspection, went through it in depth. We ended up settling that at three million. So I'm just so, I don't know if you're, so 800,000 was the initial offer where we finished with three million dollars. So, and that's on the large scale. So then, yeah, you can, I mean, we had a loss, it was a big investor actually, I'm probably, I won't use his name, but it was a big investor that now a client of ours.

Aviva (21:11)
That's unbelievable.

Andy Gurczak (21:22)
It was, I think, 16 unit in Memphis and he had his claim denied. We ended up going in, proving the claim wrong, that they had it actually wrong. The wordage they used was wrong. We got that overturn that settled for almost $80,000. So he went from denied getting nothing to almost $80,000.

Aviva (21:38)
Well...

So working with you all is literally nothing but upside.

Andy Gurczak (21:46)
There's upside. There's nothing, if we charge our clients 40%, they would walk out in a better situation anyways. So at a 10% it's discounting. Sometimes we'll get people to call and say, oh, 10% is away, if I do the math, man, you're gonna charge us 10%? I'm like, crack. But if I get you $200,000 extra, who cares if I charge you 50? It's $100,000 more that you wouldn't have. But a lot of people calculate and think about what they have to pay instead of what they're actually getting back. And sometimes,

Aviva (21:53)
Yeah.

Andy Gurczak (22:15)
The money is one thing, but the amount of time you save, your claim actually gets paid. We take all the stress off you so you can focus on everything. So your business, your work, whatever, if you're an investor, you're investing in other things. So there's just so much upside.

Aviva (22:24)
Sure.

It's like paying taxes. It's like, well, I'd rather pay more taxes than less taxes because that means you're making more money. But some people don't see it that way.

Andy Gurczak (22:40)
Did you make him win? No, no.

Aviva (22:44)
So it reminds me, there's a book I read called The Gap and the Gain, and it's like, do you live in the gap where you're like, but I'm paying you $500,000, or I'm paying you $50,000, or do you live in the gain where it's like, well, you're making, you know, I'll get 150,000 that I never would have seen otherwise. So live in the game.

Andy Gurczak (23:07)
Yeah. And again, we try to explain to everyone, you know, hey, the money is one thing, but we'll actually get this process quickly and we'll actually make sure it's not delayed. And ultimately it's not denied because that's where most claims are going now. And if you want to get denied and then go to an attorney, then our 10% will be nothing compared to the 33 or 40% that an attorney is taking. So you take your, you know.

Aviva (23:29)
Sure. So do you all not take on claims if you think you won't be able to ultimately win them?

Andy Gurczak (23:38)
Yeah, yeah, we, so I mean, we review, I don't know how many claims we review every day that we look at to see if we can even bring value. Because, you know, when people first, most of the time when we come, when like, Aviva, you probably would call us, you know, you just find out about it. So if we got involved in this claim, it's, you know, weeks or months after claims happen, right? But then, so now we'd have to actually look into this.

I would have you send the file and just kind of look over, make sure that we can bring value, that we can overturn it, because I might look at it and say, you know, Aviva, it might have to go straight to an attorney or this is, you know, you might not need us here, right? But in the future, because you know, you would call us right away. So there's nothing to review, we'll just take the claim on right away. Now let's say you said you had a pipe burst in the basement. I would say, Aviva, you know what, send me a couple of pictures or let me know the address. I'll send one of our, you know, PAs to go out and look at it. And we might look at it and say, Aviva,

in this scenario, don't file a claim, your deductible is $25,000, the damage is $20,000, there's no reason for you to file a claim and have this on your, and put this on your claim history. So we, you know, all the clients and investors we have and real estate investors and people that hold real estate, we look at all their claims and inspect all their claims before they file their claims, right? Unless it's a fire, well then you know it's a large loss. But if it's something smaller, we'll always take a look to make sure we're going to file

Aviva (24:39)
Sure.

Andy Gurczak (24:58)
that it's financially make sense for them.

Aviva (25:01)
Wow, fascinating. You're like the superheroes of insurance. They're just like, oh, I'm going to get a job. I'm going to get a job.

Andy Gurczak (25:07)
We like to think that way. The insurance companies don't, they don't like that. We like to think that way, but they don't.

Aviva (25:15)
It's like you said, they're trillion dollar industries.

Andy Gurczak (25:18)
And the best part is, one of my favorite words that I hear when we get a client sign, we send our letter of representation to the insurance and adjust their calls, we get this once in a while, and they'll call and they'll say, why did they hire you? We already paid them a lot or they got enough or they don't need you. That is usually the best. That's usually those claims that end up being the most money.

Aviva (25:40)
That's interesting. It's funny when you spot those trends. I found with a tenant, because we do a lot of leasing, if they come in and they say, we're gonna be the best tenant you've ever had, always the worst tenant. Red flag showing, no, I'm just kidding, but it's those trends. Yeah, they. So Andy, this has been really, really interesting.

Andy Gurczak (25:52)
They're the worst at it ever.

Yeah, there's just science, certain science. Yeah. I know.

Aviva (26:06)
selfishly for my own purposes, but I know this will bring value to our listeners. I've got one last question, and then I want you to tell everybody where they can find you online. What currently is making you happy with what you do in the world of adjusting?

Andy Gurczak (26:24)
You know what? Growing our presence. Literally growing our presence into every state and being able to help more and more people in each state.

Aviva (26:34)
You don't have to explain that to me. It's one of my favorite parts about what we do. And I think we live in the most opportunistic time ever. And there's a lot of opportunity and the world is abundant. So Andy, thank you.

Andy Gurczak (26:44)
Yeah.

And I'm 100% with you. There's so much more, there's so much things out there for people, I think just people are looking at stuff the wrong way.

Aviva (26:58)
Yeah. Andy, where can people find you online? Where can they find your company? And where do you rumble off the most?

Andy Gurczak (27:09)
I'm pretty, I keep everything to myself. I know there's videos of me online and stuff. I try to, they tell me I have to do them. If I wouldn't have to, I probably wouldn't even put my face anywhere. But for your listeners, I'll leave them with my phone number. If anyone of your listeners wants to call or text or has questions about even policies that they signed or buildings that they have and have questions, we review policies all the time. They can reach me at 708.

Aviva (27:19)
You do.

Andy Gurczak (27:38)
655-4186, so that's 708-655-4186. They can check us out on our website, allc If they type in Andy Gurchak, All City Adjusting, I mean, there's tons of information. We have PDFs of books, we have videos. I mean, there's a lot of material online for people, for whether it's other PAs trying to get into the industry or investors and landlords or anyone that has a claim. Excuse me.

Aviva (28:07)
straight to work. I appreciate and respect that. Thank you so much for being on the show and for everybody listening. We'll see you next week.