After a major weather event in Gwinnett, Barrow or Hall County, homeowners get door-knocked, cold-called and served ads within about seventy-two hours. Some of those companies are excellent. Some are a call center in another state that will sell your job to whoever bids on it, then disappear when the drying does not go well.
You are making this decision under stress, usually with water on the floor. These are the questions that cut through it fastest.
Seven questions to ask before you sign
Ask them on the phone, before anyone comes out. A legitimate contractor answers all seven without hesitation.
- Are your technicians IICRC certified, and in which categories — WRT, ASD, AMRT?
- Are you performing the work yourselves, or subcontracting it?
- Where are you physically located, and what is your realistic arrival time?
- Will I get daily moisture readings and a written scope of work?
- Do you bill my insurance directly, and will you meet my adjuster on site?
- What exactly am I signing — is this an authorization to perform emergency services or an assignment of my insurance benefits?
- Who is my point of contact for the whole job?
Understand what you are signing
An emergency services authorization lets a contractor start mitigation and bill for the work performed. An assignment of benefits transfers your rights under your insurance policy to the contractor. Those are very different documents. AOB agreements are legal in Georgia and are not automatically predatory, but you should never sign one on a hood of a truck at 11 p.m. without reading it.
If anyone pressures you to sign immediately, that is your answer.
Local matters more than the brand on the truck
A national name usually means a locally owned franchise anyway — the question is which local operator. A crew based in Dacula reaches Buford, Lawrenceville, Suwanee or Braselton in well under an hour. A crew dispatched from the south side of Atlanta in storm traffic does not, and the first four hours are when mitigation actually changes the outcome.
Local also means accountability. We live here, our kids go to school here, and our reputation on Nextdoor and Google is the entire business. That is a meaningfully different incentive than a crew working a storm circuit.
Red flags worth walking away from
Be cautious with any company that demands full payment up front, cannot produce a certificate of insurance, refuses to put a scope in writing, guarantees your deductible will be waived (that is insurance fraud in Georgia), or gives you a firm total price for a water loss before any moisture mapping has been done. Nobody can price a drying job accurately before they know how far the water traveled.
Dealing with this in Gwinnett County right now?
Liberty Water & Fire Restoration answers the phone 24 hours a day and dispatches IICRC certified crews across Gwinnett, Barrow and Hall counties.
(404) 805-0228