Restoration Company Red Flags for Anaheim Residents

9/7/2016 (Permalink)

Give SERVPRO of Anaheim West the first chance to help you because we won't need a second chance to keep your business.

SERVPRO of Anaheim West Point recently had the opportunity to go out to a job site in Newport Beach as a consultant for an insurance company. We arrived at the customer’s home to inspect the work of another restoration company that on been on site for several hours. The customer had a supply line to the toilet in the upstairs bathroom burst earlier that day. The water flooded the bathroom and a family room below. The carpet on both levels was soaking wet. The furniture was sitting on the soaking wet carpet.

 The restoration company (Service First Restoration) had not even bothered to extract the water from the carpet or move the furniture from the carpet itself. When I asked them why, the technician in charge on site stated that the extractor was too heavy for him to lift by himself.  They had sent over only one technician to the job site. I recommended to the customer to get extraction immediately. Then the story changed. The technician said he didn’t even have an extractor on his truck. He said he would use a “shop vac” to extract the water from the carpet. These "shop vacs" are cheap and inexpensive and never get the job done properly, especially for the large loss this customer was going through at this time. That should have been the first red flag for the insured. The “restoration company” didn’t even have the correct tools to correctly remove the water.

The customer also had an extensive collection of displayed Fine China and figurines worth thousands of dollars each. This is where the second red flag was waved. The restoration company didn’t do contents handling. They were going to call another company to handle it for them instead of having their own employees be trained and handle it right away.

Red Flag number three came as an extension to red flag #2; the “contents company” (Alpha) that was being brought on started talking about taking all the contents off site and wanted to bill thousands of dollars to store goods that the homeowner could have stored right on site. 

After all of these red flags the customer decided she had enough and asked the other restoration company to leave. SERVPRO of Anaheim West took over the project, started extraction of the moisture from the carpet straight away with the correct equipment.  Expertly packing the fine China and figurines and leaving them on site in the customer’s care and to the customer’s liking. We minimized the amount of damage and cost involved. Then we set up containment for drying and dust control and properly dried out the structure. Once this was complete, the restoration and repairs estimate was prepared and executed on time and on budget so as to benefit the customer entirely.

Give SERVPRO of Anaheim West a call at (714)-533-1989 or contact us online here. SERVPRO of Anaheim West will make it "Like it never even happened".