Joe G. Gutierrez – State Farm Insurance Agent

Let me start by commending the office staff — they are extremely courteous and helpful to the extent that they can. If you never intend to have any claims with this company then this might be the place to bring your business. Unfortunately, after 30 years of combined driving with no accidents between us, a driver who had been in multiple accidents insured by GEICO ran a stop sign and totaled my wife’s car. We were expecting the «good neighbor» treatment from our insurer — you know the so-​called «Remarkable» service that we pay a premium for. Instead, we are now four months into the process of dealing with uncooperative, unhelpful claims associates that lack the competence to answer basic questions about the process. Shortly after being told our vehicle was in very good shape with just a few small issues, we were sent a Mitchell report asserting that our single-​owner, no-​prior accident, dealer maintained vehicle with a clean maintenance history was (according to them) in below-​average condition. We were told a variety of conflicting stories about the process and it took the better part of four months to discover how this rating process works. State Farm takes pictures of the loss vehicle and sends them to their third party «Mitchell» to evaluate. Mitchell then deducts for every perceivable flaw in a variety of categories, most of these superficial that have nothing to do with the pristine mechanical condition of the vehicle. Do they then compare this score to the average score for the large number of cars in their database that they have similarly evaluated? No — of course not. They compare with the score bought from an auction company that evaluates vehicles that are sitting in front of them. So we are asked to believe that State Farm /​Mitchell who have financial incentives to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to grade vehicles more harshly are grading in the same manner as an auction company that may not have these same incentives? As part of the report, Mitchell issues a «condition adjustment» dollar value. If the process is fair, then over the thousands of vehicles evaluated, these positive and negative adjustments should balance out to zero. Seems like a pretty easy thing to find out for someone with the data and a spreadsheet. However — due to claims of «trade secrets», nobody was prepared to run this analysis and even provide a summary of the results … seems pretty fishy to me. California law requires the condition rating to compare to the average and there is no evidence that they are adhering to the law here. Next the report uses «comparable vehicles» to determine a baseline vehicle valuation. We were provided with 6 «comparables». According to the report 3 of them were supposed to be available at dealerships … in actuality only 1 was, and this vehicle was at a 1-​star Unilocal rated dealer who was unwilling to share the CarFax with me unless I drove 4 hours round trip to see him (a bit hard if your family is down a car) … oh yeah, shortly after the initial lowball offer came the «rental car allowance» period was terminated, despite our not even having started to use this feature that we paid extra for in our premiums. We requested several times to replace comparables with single-​owner, no accident vehicles, just like our car. These requests were repeatedly denied. They show no urgency in responding to your requests … We have been through a half dozen representatives, often only available through a generic email dropbox — to which they rarely respond … then after a period of time they switch you to another representative who is similarly clueless and «feels» the valuation is fair even though they don’t understand the details of the valuation process, where the data comes from, and believe that there is no fair market value impact of a single-​owner, no accident vehicle … funny because this is the same group that would deduct value if the loss vehicle had been in a prior accident, but they don’t feel the need to make the reverse adjustment if the comparables have been in accidents or sold in auctions 3 times over the past 6 months. Our efforts to get different comparables have been resisted over four months, and despite all of the original comparables now being beyond the 90-​days (from the final settlement offer) that California law allows, they refuse to re-​run the report. All of this over a claim that all parties agree is the GEICO driver’s fault and will be subject to subrogation, resulting in minimal cost to State Farm. Our disagreement is less than what we have been paying in premiums each year. Doesn’t seem logical to me — but this has been par for the course when dealing with their claims adjusters. Fortunately, when we switch, we will make up the difference quickly as we have discovered through this process that other insurers are only charging half of the premium.

My family has been with State Farm forever. I started using State Farm back in 1998. This office to be exact. They have always been really good to my family. My mother got into a fender bender this past summer and Joe and his associates took care of everything and State Farm never argued or questioned my mother. I think they are great.