Storm Damage? Sell Your House Fast for Cash

Most people who want to sell a storm damaged house are not running from the repairs so much as from the waiting. The adjuster, the contractor, the second contractor, the mortgage company holding the money. It stacks up.

Damage here usually comes in three forms, and insurance treats each one differently. Wind and wind driven rain fall under your homeowners policy. Rising water from surge or rainfall is flooding, which a standard homeowners policy excludes and only a separate flood policy covers, usually through FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program.

Sort your damage before you price the house

• Wind and wind driven rain: your homeowners policy, subject to a separate hurricane deductible of 2, 5 or 10 percent of your dwelling limit once a hurricane warning is issued for any part of Florida.
• Surge, river and rainfall flooding: excluded from the homeowners policy, covered only by NFIP or private flood, and new flood policies usually carry a 30 day wait.
• Roof age and condition: drives the repair bill and whether the next owner can buy insurance on the house.
• Water that got behind the drywall: matters more to a buyer than anything visible from the street.

Where we fit and where we honestly do not

• A fit: a sound home, roughly 2002 or newer, with a damaged roof, soffit, siding, fence, or a few rooms that got wet.
• Usually a referral: studs exposed down the frame, surge through the first floor, or a substantial damage determination from the county.
• Either way we come look, tell you which one it is, and can put you in front of a renovation buyer we know if it is the second one.

Florida puts a hard clock on claims. Under section 627.70132, notice of a claim or a reopened claim has to reach the insurer within one year of the date of loss, and a supplemental claim within 18 months. After that, the damage is yours to deal with.

The insurer is on a clock too. Section 627.70131 gives it 7 days to acknowledge your claim, 30 days after your proof of loss statements to inspect the property, and 60 days to pay or deny. The state can extend those deadlines by up to 30 days after a declared emergency.

Even a paid claim rarely turns into cash you can spend. On a replacement cost dwelling policy the insurer pays at least actual cash value up front and releases the rest as the work is actually done, and if you have a mortgage the servicer is normally on the check and releases funds in draws after inspections.

Then there is the roof, which now decides whether the next owner can get insured at all. An insurer cannot refuse to write or renew a policy solely because a roof is under 15 years old. At 15 years or older you can pay for an inspection, and if it shows 5 or more years of useful life left, age alone is not a reason to refuse you.

If the house sits in a mapped flood zone, two things follow it into any sale. An elevation certificate is no longer required to buy NFIP coverage, but it can lower the premium. And in Escambia County, repairs that reach 50 percent of the structure's pre damage market value trigger substantial improvement rules that can require bringing the building up to current flood elevation.

Owners who want to sell a house fast after hurricane damage in Pensacola usually call us from the water first, and Gulf Breeze, Navarre and Perdido Key take the worst of it. We buy across Escambia and Santa Rosa counties, inland neighborhoods included, where the damage is more often a tree through the roof than surge.

Areas We Serve · We Buy Houses in Navarre · We Buy Houses in Gulf Breeze · We Buy Houses in Perdido Key