The part where everyone else hands you off.

What a contractor can do, and what one cannot.

There is a line in Arizona between contracting and public adjusting, and plenty of companies blur it in their marketing. It is worth knowing where it sits, because a contractor who promises to fight your insurer is telling you something about how they operate.

What we do

• Document from the first visit. Photographs before anything moves, daily moisture logs, a contents record, and a written scope. This is the evidence your adjuster approves work from.
• Estimate in your carrier's format. Line-item detail in the form adjusters expect, which means fewer rounds of questions and faster approval.
• Coordinate directly with your adjuster. Site meetings, scope questions, supplements for what gets discovered behind a wall. You should not be relaying messages between two industries.
• Rebuild it. The reason to have one company on the whole loss.

What we do not do

• We do not negotiate your settlement. Negotiating a claim on a policyholder's behalf is public adjusting and requires a separate license in Arizona. Any contractor offering to do it is either unlicensed for it or being loose with language.
• We do not make promises about what your policy will pay. We have not read it and neither has anyone else quoting you a number at your front door.
• We do not start work without a written scope you have seen. Not on an emergency, not on a rebuild.

Two payments, not one.

This is the single most common surprise on a property claim, and it is not a mistake or a lowball. Many policies are written to pay actual cash value first, which is the replacement cost minus depreciation for age and wear, and then release the remaining recoverable depreciation once the work is actually completed and invoiced.

So the first check frequently looks too small to do the job, because it is. The balance is contingent on the work being done and documented. Homeowners who do not know this sometimes take the first payment, do a partial repair, and leave the rest of the entitlement on the table.

The practical consequence is that completion documentation is worth money. Final invoices, photographs, and a clean scope record are what release the second payment, which is another reason having one contractor across mitigation and rebuild is simpler than having two.

This is a general description of how policies are commonly written. Yours is the authority on yours, and your adjuster is the person to confirm it with.