It’s a landlord’s worst nightmare to receive a call from the emergency services in the middle of the night about a rental property on fire. Sometimes, the news only gets worse, though. This was the case for two of our clients, who, in separate cases, discovered that fires at their residential and commercial lets had been caused by criminal gangs cultivating drugs.

These gangs often remove walls, install venting and interfere with energy supplies, all of which can have devastating effects on the structure of the building.

In each of these cases, our clients had no idea whether their insurers would respond to their significant damage claims. And if they did, what would be covered;

• The cost of repairing the alterations the criminals made to the buildings?
• The damage caused by the emergency services?
• The fire and smoke damage?
• The loss of rent?

In each case, we protected our clients through the insurers’ inevitably lengthy investigations. We facilitated reasonable questions to be asked and answered without allowing unreasonable and unnecessary intrusions into the owners’ business.

We arranged for the full cost of repairs to be determined, ensuring the appropriate professionals were engaged in all cases, and negotiated with the senior loss adjusters instructed by the insurers to guarantee that our clients received every benefit of cover that they were arguably entitled to.

Our clients, professional property owners in each case, had their own networks of contractors to progress repairs. They were very pleased to move forward with the settlements achieved in these cases, amounting to several hundreds of thousands of pounds.