Issues With Processing Hail Damage In The PDR Business (Part Two)
In Part One, we discussed the problems involving state regulations and PDR teams coming in from out of state. According to Autobody News, John Yoswick, during the Collision Industry Conference, panelists were asked to explain how repair shops need to handle supplements on cat claim estimates that have been prepared by PDR businesses or insurer cat teams.
Chris Andreoli from Progressive Insurance said, “On all of our estimates, you will see an appraiser name and phone number, so that’s usually who we’re looking to be the contact for that car.”
However, another panelist, Bo Opansyuk from Hi-Tech PDR stated that his company prioritizes listing an estimator name and supplement direction on the estimate.
He continued on and said, “If we wrote the estimate, we would handle that supplement internally. We have an internal supplement division, and if there’s one staff still out in the field, they will do the follow-up visit to the shop to oversee that supplement from the beginning to the end.”
Michael Morrison from Catastrophe Solutions International responded and discussed how hail claim PDR can be very subjective depending on the providers’ capabilities and standards, which results in many unnecessary supplements.
Morrison further elaborated that “it shouldn’t be a debate. It’s a dime-sized dent, so you write it for a dime. You don’t write it for a nickel or a quarter.”
He continued with an example from his own experience. During the initial process of working with a particular insurer, he brought in two seasoned adjusters to analyze a vehicle with hail damage.
“These were 20-year guys, but before they even started writing the sheet, they both looked at each other and were saying, ‘What do you see? Are those nickels? Are they quarters? It was a debate, and it shouldn’t be.”
