Insurance appraisals

When you need one

Five situations that call for it

• You are scheduling art, silver, jewelry, furniture or a collection on a policy
• Your carrier or broker has asked for supporting documentation
• Your last appraisal is more than five years old
• You have recently inherited or acquired something significant
• You are moving, lending to an exhibition or shipping abroad

Updating

Three years or five

Most carriers want appraisals refreshed every three to five years. In fast-moving categories such as post-war and contemporary art, mid-century design and wristwatches, three years is already stale; in flat categories, five is adequate.

The practice will tell you which applies to your collection, and re-appraises its own reports within five years at half the original per-item fee, since the descriptive work is already done and only the market research needs refreshing.

At claim time

What the report is actually for

An insurance appraisal earns its fee on one day, and it is not the day it is written. A current, itemized report means the adjuster is working from a description, a photograph and a market figure prepared before anyone had an interest in the answer. Without one, the burden of proving what the object was, and what it was worth, falls on the person who has just lost it.

Three things decide how a claim goes. Whether the item was scheduled individually or sat inside a contents limit. Whether the description is specific enough to identify what was lost, which is where a snapshot on a phone fails and a measured, marked, photographed entry does not. And whether the value reflects the market at the time of loss rather than the market at the time of purchase.

Where a loss has already happened and no appraisal exists, the practice prepares retrospective valuations from photographs, invoices, prior schedules and comparable market evidence, and states plainly in the report what could and could not be established. See damage, loss and diminution in value.

Scope

What usually needs scheduling, and what does not

Most homeowner's policies carry a contents limit that covers ordinary household goods adequately and named categories badly. Fine art, silver, jewelry, watches, firearms and collectibles are typically capped well below their value unless listed individually, and the cap often applies per loss rather than per item.

The practical test is whether losing the object would be a financial event rather than an inconvenience. In most collections that is a minority of the objects: the pictures, the signed silver, the clocks, the pieces that were bought deliberately. The rest can sit inside the contents limit where it belongs, and an appraiser who schedules everything is adding cost rather than protection.

Where a broker requires a particular schedule format, send it and the report will match it. Where a carrier requires updates on a fixed cycle, the practice tracks the date and will tell you when it comes due.