Progress of Litigation
First, from the Insurance Company�s standpoint, they clearly had excluded the barn from coverage, about a year after it was built. The problem is that I purchased the policy in 2001 from an agent. One reason why I bought this particular policy was because both and agent and the Insurance Company promoted the value of their product by saying I had an agent, who would look out for me. It still states this on the opening page of the policy.

I did not catch the change, and the agent simply continued to collect his commission, apparently without reading the changes. On several occasions I asked the agent if the buildings were covered, and he assured me they were. Once I went to a Horse Expo and met an insurance company that wanted my business and when I talked to my agent, he said I had good coverage. When the house and property were refinanced I talked about the policy and he assured me that the higher coverage was needed for the increased mortgage, but never mentioned the need to cover the buildings.

As a licensed insurance agent, he has a duty to understand and inform me of what is in my policy, not to mislead me. As an agent of the insurance company, what he sold and how he represented the policy was binding to the insurance company. There is legal standing to recover from both the agent and the company.

However, neither of these positions are clear-cut and easy to defend. I have not found an attorney who will take the case on a contingency basis and the legal fees will be as much as it would be to rebuild the barn. And it will take years to get through the courts. I don�t have years. The cost and the time is one thing the insurance companies count on when they deny claims. They understand that they will only have to actually go to court and pay on a small percentage of denied claims, even if they are in the wrong.

Second, the builder (who is also the manufacturer) is a concern. You can hardly drive anywhere without seeing carports with signs on them that this building is available for �Only $599� or some other small number. When you contact the dealer, you are given a wide range of uses for these buildings. You�ll be given a brochure that says you can use it for a carport, a garage, a boat cover, RV covers, A farm equipment cover, a workshop, an industrial building, an industrial size cover, etc. They actively look for agents who will develop new markets for these buildings such as Airplane Hangers, and Small Business facilities. Some of these buildings will run up into $30-$50,000.

The building manufacturer represents these structures as meeting all codes and being engineered to meet snow and wind forces. When you inquire about a building, they send you a blueprint like drawing and talk about the buildings being engineered. Without that, no one would buy them. Why would anyone buy a building and put something valuable in it if they believed it would fall down in the first snow storm? Isn�t that a grossly misleading sales technique? But when it came down, they simply said that they didn�t offer a guarantee!

There is no written guarantee when you buy the building, only an order form. Their brochures say, �The Strongest Deluxe Carport!� and �Wind and Snow Bracing available for all Buildings.� We added to our order form �Bldg guaranteed for 30 PSF Live and Snow Load. Bldg guaranteed for 120 mph wind gusts.�

When presented with the contract, they simply ignore it and fall back on the statement that they offer no guarantee. Obviously these buildings do NOT meet codes, as code for any location would be adequate to cover snow loads well past what the average snowfall would be.

Again, the fact that they will not stand behind the buildings means that we will have to file a lawsuit. Again, that is a lot of expense in legal fees and experts. This is what they count on.

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