Your House Burned. Here’s What Your Fire Insurance Claim Is Supposed to Pay For.
Some wildfire claims start with smoke damage to a house that’s still standing. This one starts differently: a wall is gone, part of the roof is gone, maybe a whole floor is gone. The fire reached the structure. Nobody is arguing about whether this counts as a loss. The argument is about the number.
What Does a Wildfire Insurance Claim Actually Cover?
A wildfire or fire insurance claim on a structural loss typically covers three things: the dwelling itself, your contents inside it, and additional living expenses while you can’t live there. That’s the standard shape of coverage described in insurance industry guidance, including IBC.ca, for a fire peril under a BC homeowners or business policy. The dwelling portion is meant to rebuild what burned. The contents portion replaces what was inside. The living-expenses portion, sometimes called ALE, covers temporary housing and related costs for a period that varies by policy, not a fixed number every insurer uses. That’s the theory. In practice, the first number an adjuster puts in front of you rarely matches what a contractor would actually charge to rebuild.
Why the Payout Almost Never Matches the Rebuild Cost
Rebuilding costs aren’t a fixed number. It’s an estimate, and estimates carry real grey area. Two contractors can walk the same fire scene and land on different scopes and prices, both defensible on paper.
Insurers typically retain a building consultant to produce that estimate, often the same consultants file after file, and those consultants earn most of their work from insurers. None of that requires anyone to act improperly. It’s simply what repeat business does to a judgment call: where a scope or a price has room to move, the grey area tends to resolve in the insurer’s favour more often than against it. Those scopes and prices are usually generated by estimating software, and that software isn’t always up-to-date. Its labour and material data can lag well behind what a rebuild actually costs, and it lags hardest in rural and remote BC communities, where a crew and its materials may have to travel hours to reach the site.
None of this changes the situation: your policy limit caps what the coverage itself pays out, and the fight is over the number underneath it.
Plus, wildfire seasons arrive in waves and when several communities evacuate at once, adjusters carry more open files than they can move quickly, and the complicated ones sit longest. A public adjuster or lawyer on the file can press the adjuster to prioritize it rather than let it sit.
Why an Adjuster and a Lawyer Need to Be on the Same File
Pushing that estimate number up, and pushing the file along, takes two different skill sets, and most people end up hiring them separately, at the worst possible time.
A public adjuster’s job is to build and defend the actual dollar value of your loss: up-to-date rebuild pricing, contents inventory, ALE documentation, a number the insurer has to respond to on the merits. A lawyer’s job starts the moment the insurer won’t move on that number, stalls past a reasonable timeline, or handles the file in bad faith.
Pythe Navis is the only firm in BC licensed as both an insurance law firm and a public adjusting company. The person who built your valuation is the same person who can escalate it, with full knowledge of the file, no re-explaining the fire, the timeline, or the damage to a new set of eyes.
For a business property specifically, that’s also where a denied or underpaid commercial claim tends to get resolved fastest: one team, one file, from the valuation fight straight into the legal one if it comes to that.
What to Do Before You Sign Anything
Get the number checked before you accept it. Request a free review of your claim, and we’ll tell you plainly whether the offer on the table reflects the real cost of the work your policy covers.