Approve your vendors before the emergency

The worst time to onboard a contractor is at two in the morning with water coming through a ceiling. Every piece of paperwork that would normally take a few days takes days you no longer have, and the practical result is that the building waits, or somebody approves a vendor without checking anything.

What takes time, and therefore has to happen first

• Certificates of insurance. Ask for the building named as additional insured, and confirm the limits your policy, lease, or board actually requires. Getting a COI reissued with correct language takes a day or two through a broker, and always longer than you want.
• W-9 and vendor onboarding. Whatever your accounts process needs before an invoice can be paid.
• Building alteration agreements. Covers any house rules governing contractor access, work hours, and protection of common space.
• Board approval. Needed where the building requires it. This is frequently the longest lead time of all, and it does not compress because there is an emergency.

Questions worth asking while nothing is wrong

Does the same company do the mitigation and the rebuild? If not, you will be managing a handoff during the worst week of the year. The gap between a drying vendor who leaves and a contractor who arrives weeks later, working from a scope they did not write, is where most property claims lose time.

Do they hold the licenses for the work you would actually call them for? Restoration spans several trades and some of them are separately licensed. Mold is the clearest example: in New York, assessment and remediation are licensed separately and one company may not do both on the same project.

Who answers the phone at three in the morning? There is a real difference between a dispatcher who can send a crew and an answering service taking a message for the morning.

What documentation comes as standard? Photographs, moisture readings, daily logs and an itemized scope should be part of the job rather than an upgrade.

Do it once, across the portfolio

If you manage several buildings, approving a contractor once for all of them rather than per property is worth the hour. It also means scoping stays consistent, which makes losses comparable across a portfolio instead of each one being its own format.

Getting set up with us

Call the office and we will send certificates of insurance, licensing, our NYS MWBE certification for supplier diversity reporting, a W-9, and whatever else your building or management company requires. It is an hour of paperwork on a normal day, against doing it at two in the morning while a building takes on water.