ChantillyExpat.com

Property Owners - Beware of Plumbers and Check your Home Insurance

After having been through this grueling experience, I thought I should share some advice for homeowners, particularly for new foreigners or even non French speaking homeowners. If you think it could be useful, you may wish to have it published in the APARC bulletin:


Are You a Homeowner? Tips and precautions to take via your Insurance Company if you detect water damage in your home.


If you are a homeowner in France you will have home insurance, with big companies like AXA or EuropeAssistance. These companies will eagerly assure you that all risks and damages are taken into account when you sign up with them - including things like damages in your home if you have a burst water pipe or water seeping into your foundations etc.


However, as they say, read the fine print before signing. Or ask questions - all kinds of questions and be specific. They don't like it, but it is necessary. Here is a scenario:


We own a property in Le Lys, there is a 3000 sq. metre garden in front of the house. We obviously have home insurance which we thought (and were told) covered every scenario imaginable.


We detected water seeping into the floor of our ground floor loo, and then damp circles appearing on the stone floor.
Since the dampest part showed up on the inside at the bottom of the wall that is also an external wall, and we have a stone terrace surounding the house, we thought it was coming from a cracked pipe under the terrace. What we couldn't understand is why dampness increased even when it was not raining.


We called up our insurance company, registered the "dégâts des eaux". Now here is where you have to be very careful. The attendant on the line will start drilling you on what it is: what does it look like? On which wall? occasionally or frequently? When did you notice? Were you absent for a period lately? etc. Be assured that they register all your responses on computer, then give you a "numéro de sinistre". Now, in our case, we answered all their questions; that is when they start talking - essentially to tell you the "conditions" that enable you to access your claim. For example, unless you take out a specific additional insurance your house insurance will NOT cover any internal damages from evacuation water pipe that goes from your house to the road - or any sceptic tank or other. Consequently, in such a case they neither cover the cost of a plumber finding the leak, nor do they provide any funds for repairing damaged paint, tiles, insulation, wallpaper, electricity, pipes.


Know that whatever the origin of the leak (internal or external), your insurance company will not cover the costs of reparing the leak.


Now, if the leak is internal; if you had originally told them that you thought it was "external" you will have great difficulty in persuading them that it is now internal - so better refrain from giving out your thoughts on the origin;


If the leak is internal - do NOT call any plumber yourself. The insurance company has signed agreements with companies all around France. Demand that they provide you with the name of plumber listed with them.


Note that the insurance company will in the mean time send you a letter with the "numéro de sinistre".


Call the mandated company. They will then take your name, address and number of the "sinistre". They will then call your Insurance Company to request that they be "missioner" to come to your place to find the origin of the leak.


This is very important - because if, as in our case, it is a broken pipe between two floors that is completely incased, finding the leak can cost up to 1000 euros. Here is another very important piece of information (that I had to wrangle out of the bureaucrat on the line): if your sanitary pipes are all "encastré": as of last year the legislation is the following: in such a case, if the plumber can "plug" the broken pipe, then he can do a "mise en apparence", which is essentially installing a new visible pipe for water flow. You must yourself ask the plumber to do that if it is possible. If you do not, and the plumber "breaks" walls, tiles, etc. to fix the original broken pipe (when a mise en apparence could have done the trick) your Insurance company will NOT cover the costs of repairing the damage done by the plumber. Note that dishonest plumbers will sometimes do that because they get extra money. However you will be the one stuck with the bill for repairing the damage that he will do.


On the bill that the plumber has to send to the Insurance company you must insist that he detail the costs of the following:
the cost of the déplacement
the cost of finding the leak (fuite)
the cost of a "mise en apparence" (installation of a new pipe)
the cost of any damages done if a "mise en apparence " was not possible (and that has to be stated on the bill by the plumber)


A separate bill for repairing the leak (which is at your own cost, in any case)


A detailed account of damages made by the leak (tiles, paint, dashboards, wood, wallpaper, electricity, etc) with an estimation of the cost of repair.


If your insurance covers the damage - you will have a franchise to pay (as in automobile reparation).


If you do have water or sewage pipes on your property that run from the house to your garden - you should call your Insurance to tell them that you wish to have compementary coverage. Europe Assistance is pretty good - but note that you have a 48 day "period" of wait before you can declare any "sinistre" to them, as of the day you take out your coverage.


A last word of caution: do not, in any case, listen to the person on the line who will tell you "take any plumber and have him send us the bill". That does NOT work. Insist on obtaining a company in the region with which they have an agreement and get them to "missioner" that company for your sinistre. And when registering it, particularly if it is water damage, provide the least information possible and do not venture an uninformed opinion that the cause may be external.


Insurance companies: can't live without them; can't live with them.

Nadia Auriat-Bontemps, Le Lys
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I am Canadian with a canadian 6 year old daughter who will attend the Montessori school in Presle as of Sept. I wish to meet members of APARC so please do not hesitate to contact me.

_________________
Geoffrey AUCKLAND

Dear Geoffrey Auckland,

Thank you for this very informative, enjoyable, occasionally defensive response. Allow me to also note that If only our insurance company, the name which I shall of course not provide, had such informed, co-operative agents as yourself who appreciate and even encourage honest questioning by their clients, we would not be in this current mess.

Let me provide you with a few salient facts:

The insurance company we have is one of the biggest and well known in France;

Our house does not have worn-out plumbing, a fact known by the Insurance company; Neither does it have falling shingles, an overflowing sceptic tank, overgrown grass, crumbling façades, unraked fallen leaves, reaking manure heaps from our beloved equine or horrid things of the sort. Our neighbours are very content with the state of our property, the upkeep of which we take pride in maintaining.

We took out the most expensive coverage offered by this huge Insurance company (with the exception of coverage of pipes leading from the street to our house, buried under the garden). That is our fault. We shall rectify this by taking out complementary insurance with another company.

Your emphasis on " naughty people who like to try and fiddle the insurers" which unfortunately comes through as an undercurrent throughout your response, subsequently stripping from it a tad of objectivity, seems understandable coming from your position but only tends to strengthen my point about insurance companies:

I subsequently understand that this is how you view either a majority, minority or perhaps average number of your paying clients. It is legitimate to be cautious and even perhaps wary; however while the burden of understanding the "fine print" as I mentioned seems in your view to be on the shoulders of the client, my point which I continue to make and underscore, is that Insurance brokers, when informed of a "sinistre" have the obligation to assist us ill-informed clients in properly understanding the conditions that suddenly appear in the open when money becomes an issue - for the insurance company to pay out, I mean. It is blatantly untrue that the questioning on the other end of the line is in the good faith of properly understanding the cause. You see, we say this, because while you, as the plaintiff, are responding to well-trained professionals grilling you with specific questions - responses to YOUR specific questions such as "conditions under which certain leaks, their reparation, and/or the "remise en état" remain shrouded in an opaque cloud of obscurity.

As one retired Professional Insurance agent told me: the agents you get at the end of the line are trained in the above: obtaining from you a maximum of information - and sharing with you very little. They are like Real Estate agents: very eager to "get you as a client", (and I beg to differ - they DO promise the moon in terms of insurance coverage, just le RE Agents who promise to get you your asking price for your home) , but when it comes to selling your house once they get it in the Agency - a sad and very different story emerges.

Since you refer to the stock exchange, allow me to joggle your memory about a recent event - the economic crises?

And the role of "brokers" and "traders" who were, how shall I put it, less than honest (dishonesty comes also through omitting the sharing of relevant information) with their "clients"?

Your response to my message regarding Insurers suggests that the onus is on the clients who "do not ask enough questions" (you are wary of those....) or "are somehow responsible for the lack of communication".

Well, luckily, the US Justice system did not view this through your lens in their condemnation of the infamous billionaire who ripped off even his brightest, most informed clients who had access to the most competent, expensive advisers in the business - I am sure you know to who I am referring.

Let me correct you on yet another point: it is not true that the companies that Insurance Agencies work with are 'the cheapest on the market". The name of the Plumbing company that I finally managed to wrangle from our Insurance Company is VERY expensive - simply because they are extremely well-equipped and specialized only in searching for water leaks.

For our interested readers, their equipment very much resembles medical equipment used in fibroscopies - including the flexible 6 metre tube with a tiny camera on the end, a small TV type screen that reflects the images transmitted by the camera that is also capable of taking pictures on the simple press of a button by the handler. Since I am curious by nature, I asked the plumber the cost of such equipment: 140,000 euros. And he assured me that contrary to the affirmation made by one of the agents who responded to our calls "certainly not every plumber is equipped with such expensive material. In fact, very few are". It is sort of like saying that every bureaucrat worthy of the name writes with a limited edition Mont Blanc Fountain Pen.

So good luck to those home owners, unable to easily obtain the name of a properly equipped plumbing company from their Insurance Company, or who prefer not to, or just seek names through google, yellow pages or other means. Its like playing Russian Roulette. And remember - if you take a plumber who unfortunately cannot find the leak" faute de l'équipement nécessaire" - the bill is yours to shoe.

What you don't understand here Mr. Auckland, is the red herring: the Insurance company does not want to mandate or "missioner" a plumbing company because they say that they do not know the origin of the leak. We know: we called. And that was the response. Texto.

Yet, when you, as a home owner, call the Plumbing Company yourself (the one that was finally suggested to us by our Agency, for example) the response is - or the response we received is: "call the Insurance company so that they can fax us a mandate and we will then call you to make an appointment. They do it all the time."

Isn't that amusing?

I suppose it is for someone who has much time to waste. For normal honest clients this is frustrating, irritating, discouraging and provides one with a sense of futility and helplessness.

To continue so that you fully understand OUR experience, (which I sincerely will not occur to others, which is why I took the time to write this in the first place), we subsequently called BACK the Insurance company, explaining the response from the Plumbing company that they had recommended.

After minutes of evasive responses on their part - NOT helpful communication, - it finally became clear that "since the Insurance company does not know the origin of the leak (of course they don't, we didn't have a plumber who could find it, that is precisely what we were trying to do), they prefer to NOT mandate a company by fax because if they do AND the leak is somehow not covered in the policy (again that fine print - we should have used a magnifying glass or as you say turned to a helpful professional such as yourself) they are obligated to pay the company themselves. And naughty owners such as ourselves get off scott free, after having used and abused of the jolly good intent of our Insurers.

For your further information, Insurance Companies now have an unwritten rule to mandate only in the case of leaks in buildings owned by "Corporations" or as they put it "des Entreprises et non pas des particuliers".

Therefore, and the picture begins to become clear - their policy (written or unwritten but real) is that the owner pay the company directly (I indicate here that the minimal cost of an intervention with the above described equipment is 650 euros), subsequently send the bill to the Insurance Company , pray that he/she does not fall into the "abusive, naughty and fraudulent client category" that you describe, and...wait for a response.

I am thoroughly amused by your remark "My own home insurance does not impose this on me and I can only think that this is part of a cheaper deal you may have got when taking out the insurance."

Now how did you put it? Oh yes, "Any ideas anyone?"

I have one ! : has it occured to you that this is perhaps because...lo and behold...you ARE, as you put it an " INSURANCE ADVISER".?

I would be very grateful for any information you may find about the mise en apparence. You may then be in a better position to judge what is or is not askew in my former message.

I do suggest you be careful in returning compliments - particularly to people you do not know:

Little makes me shiver more at this point than what you, as a self-professed insurance adviser print as your closing flair - and I quote (with dismay, may I add) : "We can’t live without our clients but, oh boy, if only we could…!"

Oh dear ...time to look for another profession?

My best wishes,

Nadia Auriat Bontemps

ps: to homeowners: although I will not reveal the name of our Insurance Company, I am available to provide the name of the efficient Plumbing Company in the Region who specialises in seeking the origin of water leaks in your home - and despite appearing to my respondent as a "cheapscate, potentially naughty, undesirable and fraudulent cllient"...I'll do it happily for free.






_________________
I am Canadian with a canadian 6 year old daughter who will attend the Montessori school in Presle as of Sept. I wish to meet members of APARC so please do not hesitate to contact me.

_________________
Geoffrey AUCKLAND