Roof Insurance Claims in Aurora, IL

What a Roofer May Legally Do in Illinois

Document the damage. Photograph it with scale references, measure the roof properly, identify each damaged component and what it will take to put right, and write that up in a format an adjuster can work from.

Meet your adjuster on the roof. This is the single most useful thing a contractor does in a claim, and it costs nothing: two people looking at the same slope at the same time reach agreement far more often than two reports written a fortnight apart.

Submit supplements. When the initial scope misses something, drip edge, ice and water shield required by Aurora code, a second layer nobody accounted for, ridge vent, we document it and submit it with evidence. This is normal and carriers expect it.

Build the roof to code once the claim settles, and show you exactly which line items the settlement covered and which it did not.

What a Roofer May Not Do

Negotiate your claim. Adjusting a claim on behalf of a policyholder, interpreting your policy for you, arguing coverage or settlement value with the carrier, all of that is public adjusting. It is licensed separately in Illinois under Article XLV of the Illinois Insurance Code and it is reserved to licensed public adjusters and to attorneys. A roofing contractor doing it is acting without a licence.

This is why "we will handle the insurance company for you" should make you pause rather than relax. The contractor is either describing something they are not allowed to do, or they are describing documentation work in language designed to sound like more than it is.

Touch your deductible. Public Act 96-1113 bars a roofer from paying, waiving, rebating, crediting or absorbing a homeowner's deductible on insurance-funded roofing work. And the usual mechanism for hiding it, inflating the claim by the deductible amount so the settlement covers the whole job, is insurance fraud under 215 ILCS 5/155.51. Both parties are exposed, not just the contractor.

The other version of the same trick is quieter: the contractor does not inflate anything, they just do the work for less than the settlement and pocket the difference as your "waived" deductible. Which means cheaper materials, a shortened ice and water shield run, or a crew doing it faster than it should be done. You paid nothing and you got exactly that.

If You Do Want Someone Negotiating For You

Hire a licensed public adjuster. They are a real profession, they are licensed by the Illinois Department of Insurance, and on a large or contested claim they can be worth their percentage. They typically work on a fee of the settlement, so the arithmetic makes sense on big claims and much less sense on small ones.

We do not take referral fees from public adjusters and we do not have one we push people toward, because that arrangement is precisely the thing that makes the whole area murky. Look one up through the Department of Insurance and check their licence the same way you would check ours.

The Practical Sequence, Start to Finish

1. Get an independent inspection and written documentation before you file. If the damage will not clear your deductible, filing achieves nothing.
2. File with your carrier, with your photographs and the date of the weather event.
3. The adjuster schedules an inspection. Ask us to be there. Same roof, same time.
4. You receive a scope and a settlement, usually in two parts: actual cash value now, recoverable depreciation after the work is done and invoiced.
5. Missing items get supplemented with documentation.
6. Work happens, we invoice, you send the invoice to the carrier and the recoverable depreciation releases.
7. You pay your deductible. All of it. That is what it is for.