In the beginning, roofers were busy and couldn’t find professionals, but now many homeowners are running out of time to repair their roof. Because 1,100 hail damage claims from June 2021 are still open, the Upper Austrian Insurance gave customers a final deadline. The damage expires at the end of the year.
“There is a lot going on in our claims department at the moment,” Othmar Nagl, general manager of Oberösterreichische Versicherung, said at a press conference on Wednesday morning.
Together with CEO Kathrin Kühtreib-Leitner, he presented the figures of the Linz-based insurer, which once again achieved good results this year. With a profit before tax of 38.1 million euros, 2024 went just as well as the year before.
2024 was a “year of fire”
And this despite the fact that this year was a real ‘fire year’, as Nagl emphasized. The sawmill fire caused the largest fire damage in the company’s history, as well as seven other major agricultural fires. “We used to talk about a big loss of around 300,000 euros, but today there is no such thing as less than a million euros,” says Nagl. In total, damage in the fire brigade sector amounted to 42.8 million euros. However, battery fires in scooters have no impact at all, it is more of a home contents insurance problem and is said not to have much impact here either.
The total hail damage amounted to 160 million euros
Upper Austrian Versicherung is still struggling to come to terms with the damage from June 2021. Three and a half years ago, the storm ‘Volker’ left a trail of destruction, and Upper Austrian customers alone suffered hail damage amounting to 160 million euros .
You have until the end of the year to submit an invoice or order agreement
“There are still around 1,100 claims outstanding with an amount of 9.4 million euros,” says Nagl. These claims, which were determined by experts and released by the insurer, are in fact already time-barred. As a gesture of goodwill, the deadline was extended from three years to the end of the year. But now there is no more leniency: those who have not submitted at least the standing order or even the invoice by the end of the year will miss out on the insurance payment.
“Some reasons are not clear to us”
Why do some people still complete the damage? “We assume that some people wanted to take the opportunity to make renovations,” says Nagl, “but we don’t understand some of the reasons.”
Source: Krone
I’m Ben Stock, a journalist and author at Today Times Live. I specialize in economic news and have been working in the news industry for over five years. My experience spans from local journalism to international business reporting. In my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview some of the world’s leading economists and financial experts, giving me an insight into global trends that is unique among journalists.
