Homeowner claim guide

How to document property damage for an insurance claim

Updated August 5, 2026 · Havn.ai

The first 48 hours

Documentation is the one part of a claim entirely within your control, and it's decided almost entirely in the first two days — because that's when the evidence still exists. Cleanup destroys it. Mitigation, which your policy generally requires you to do, destroys it fastest of all.

So the order matters:

Make it safe. Nothing here is worth an injury or an electrical fire.
Photograph everything, before you move anything. Wide shots first.
Report the loss to your carrier and write down the claim number, the date, and who you spoke to.
Then mitigate — stop the water, board the window, get fans running — photographing as you go.
Keep every receipt from the mitigation itself. Emergency work is usually reimbursable and is routinely left unclaimed.

Don't throw damaged property away until the adjuster has seen it or told you in writing that you can. If it must go for health or safety reasons, photograph it thoroughly first — every side, with something for scale.

How to photograph damage

Adjusters look at thousands of photos. The ones that work answer a question without a caption.

Wide, then medium, then close. Establish the room, then the damaged area, then the detail. A close-up of stained drywall with no context could be any house.
Every room, including undamaged ones. A photo of a dry room proves the extent as surely as a photo of a wet one.
Include scale. A tape measure, a dollar bill, a ruler in the frame.
Get the source. The burst fitting, the missing shingles, the point of entry — not just the resulting mess.
Shoot serial numbers and model plates on appliances and electronics.
Video walkthroughs help. A slow narrated walk through each room captures things a still misses.
Leave the timestamps alone. Photos carry capture time in their metadata; don't strip it, and don't reorganize files in ways that lose it.
Take more than feels reasonable. Hundreds is normal. Nobody has ever regretted the extra shot.

Five stages worth photographing

A claim is a sequence, and a pile of photos with no order forces the reader to reconstruct it. Think in stages:

Before the loss. Old photos — birthdays, listing photos, anything showing rooms intact. Adjusters ask for pre-loss condition constantly and almost nobody has it. Look through your camera roll before you need it.
Damage. The loss itself, before anything is touched.
Emergency work. Water extraction, tarps, board-up, drying equipment. This is your duty to protect the property, it's separately reimbursable, and proving you did it matters if anyone later argues the damage got worse.
In progress. Demolition and rebuild as they happen — including what's behind the walls once they're open.
Repaired. The finished work, which closes the sequence and supports the final payment.

The contents inventory

The contents list is the part everyone underestimates. A modest household holds thousands of items, and an inventory that reads “clothing — $2,000” gets sent back.

Work room by room and record, per item: what it is, brand and model where you know it, quantity, roughly how old it is, condition before the loss, and what it would cost to replace today. Open drawers and closets and photograph the contents — you will not remember what was in them.

For replacement cost, a current price for the same or a comparable item is what you want, dated and sourced. Note that most policies pay actual cash value (replacement cost minus depreciation) up front, and release the rest once you've actually replaced the item and shown the receipt. That is why keeping the replacement receipts matters as much as the original inventory.

The paper trail

Everything that arrives about the claim is evidence: the policy and declarations page, the acknowledgment letter, the adjuster's estimate, your contractor's estimate, any denial or partial-payment letter, every check and its explanation, invoices from mitigation and repair, and receipts for living expenses.

Keep them in one place, named so you can find them a year later, and keep the envelopes or emails — the date something arrived can decide whether a deadline was met.

Recording phone calls and visits

Most of a claim happens on the phone, and none of it is written down unless you write it down. After each call, note the date and time, who you spoke to, what was discussed, anything they committed to, and any date they gave you. Do the same after each inspection: who came, what they looked at, what they said, and photograph what they photographed.

Follow up in writing when something matters — a short email saying “confirming what we discussed today” turns a memory into a record. Recording an actual call has legal requirements that vary by state; a written summary avoids the question entirely.

How Havn.ai helps

Upload photos and documents however they arrive; Havn.ai reads each one, identifies what it is, and files it into the right part of your claim. Photos can be tagged by stage — before, damage, emergency work, in progress, repaired. Photograph a damaged room and it proposes the belongings it sees for you to confirm, then looks up replacement prices. Calls get a structured log with commitments and next steps, and everything lands in a dated timeline that goes into the report packet.

This is general information, not legal or insurance advice. Every policy is different, and only your own policy and your state's rules decide your claim. For advice, talk to your adjuster, a licensed public adjuster, or an attorney.