The week before Christmas my dad was driving in east Austin checking on our properties under construction. He works for us part time 2-3 days a week and we are fully insured. An old lady from Cedar Park (a suburb of Austin) ran a red light and almost t-boned him. He managed to swerve and she clipped the front of the truck he was driving. Fortunately everyone in the accident was okay and nobody got hurt. The lady that hit him agreed that the accident was her fault and was insured.
We went through the process of filing a claim against her insurer. Today we took the truck to Allstate's preferred repair shop and they gave us a quote for roughly $1500 or so to repair the damage. I'm not a car expert, but this seems very low given the damage.
From here we plan to take the truck to a few third parties to get an estimate of repairs. Allstate is playing the fear game saying if the car gets opened up and new damage is found that we'd have to cover it somehow. I guess that they may claim that this is a tactic used by third party shops to retrade the business somehow. I can appreciate that, but I don't really trust their preferred shop. My inclination is to use a third party, but I want to minimize the hassle of everything too.
The truck is very old and we have intentionally used a beater for this work to avoid exposing the work truck to accidents. I was wondering if anyone had any helpful words of advice about how to handle the claim. I have used public adjusters for properties in the past, but given the size of this claim I am not sure it is worth messing with in this situation. Maybe it is. Given that we're not experts I just want the truck fixed correctly with good parts.
Note that this is a work truck so the duration to process the claim really doesn't matter a ton. We have other cars we can drive to wait things out and do it properly. I am sure there are games the insurers play to rush people into sub-optimal decisions. The timing really doesn't matter much for us as long as we don't pass some amount of time needed by law to get it fixed.
Any advice?