Most water and fire damage claims in the Twin Cities are under-paid — not because insurance carriers are dishonest, but because the contractor on the homeowner’s side submitted a weaker case than the adjuster did. Two pieces of technology separate a paid-in-full claim from a picked-apart one: Xactimate, the estimating software adjusters use to price losses, and Matterport, the 3D scanning platform that turns a damaged room into a walkable digital record.
At Bedrock Restoration, every significant loss in Edina, Minnetonka, St. Louis Park, and the broader Minneapolis metro gets both. Our project managers write scopes in Xactimate. Our technicians scan the property with Matterport before demolition starts. The result: adjusters review the same evidence we saw, priced in the format they already use — and the scope doesn’t get trimmed in third-party review.
What Xactimate actually is (and why it runs the industry)
Xactimate is the estimating platform published by Verisk. It’s used by the vast majority of U.S. property insurance carriers to price repair scopes, which means nearly every claim in the country is effectively scored against the same line-item database. That database holds tens of thousands of repair activities — “remove and replace 1/2-inch drywall, 8-foot ceiling,” “detach and reset base cabinet, standard grade” — each with a regional price that updates quarterly based on local labor and material costs.
When an adjuster writes your scope, they select activities from that database and assign quantities. When a contractor writes a bid in a different format — a spreadsheet, a handwritten estimate, a Word document — the carrier has to translate it back into Xactimate to compare. In practice, that translation isn’t faithful. The carrier extracts the highlights, matches them against their own activities, and sends back a lower number.
A restoration company writing estimates in their own format is a restoration company that is missing out on rebuild scope and insurance-covered work for their customers.
What Xactimate fluency looks like on a claim
A fluent estimator does three things most crews don’t:
- Writes the scope in the same software and format the carrier uses, exported as an ESX file the adjuster can import directly — no translation gap.
- Knows which activities are included in others and which are line-item add-ons. Many standard repairs require five to eight separate activities to be fully priced. Leave one out and it doesn’t get covered.
- Uses the notes field on every ambiguous line to document why a specific activity is required. Adjusters can’t quietly remove a line when the justification is already written into the file they’re reviewing.
The practical effect: when we submit a 40-line scope and the carrier reviews it, 38 or 39 lines usually come back intact. When a non-fluent contractor submits a 22-line bid, the carrier returns 14 lines. The difference gets absorbed by the homeowner — or by the contractor cutting corners to stay on budget.
What Matterport is, and why restoration teams use it
Matterport is a 3D scanning platform originally built for real estate. A scanner — usually mounted on a tripod — captures a room across roughly 360-degree photo stops and stitches them into a “digital twin” you can walk through in any web browser. Room-by-room measurements to the quarter-inch, floor plans, and a dollhouse cutaway view all come out of the same scan.
For restoration, the scan serves a different purpose than it does for real estate. It’s not a marketing asset — it’s a time-stamped evidentiary record of the damage before any demolition or drying happens. The adjuster can walk the loss from their desk. A structural engineer, if one is needed, can review the scene without a second site visit. The homeowner, six months later, can prove exactly what was there before the walls came down.
Three things a Matterport scan solves that photos don’t
- Scope disputes. The most common denial language in a water damage claim is “the affected area does not extend to the baseboard / the adjacent wall / the cabinet toe-kick.” That argument loses the moment an adjuster walks the scan and sees water staining ten feet from the source. A photo shows one angle. A scan shows every angle.
- Pre-existing damage arguments. Carriers frequently argue that cracks, stains, or warping were pre-existing. A timestamped Matterport scan taken within 24 hours of the loss is hard to dispute — the scan’s metadata is location- and time-tagged, and the platform stores the file on its own cloud with its own audit trail.
- Contents inventory. After a fire or major water event, homeowners lose track of what was in a room. A scan captures every visible item. Six weeks later, when the contents list feels incomplete, the scan is a walkthrough-able memory aid — and a contents adjuster will usually accept it as supporting documentation.
How Bedrock documents a loss, start to finish
Every loss we run through an assessment gets the same documentation package.
Before demolition:
- Matterport 3D scan of every affected area and the immediately adjacent rooms
- Still photos with moisture meter readings written on the affected surface (pulled from a pinned moisture meter like the Wagner MMC220)
- Thermal imaging of every wet wall, floor, and ceiling with a FLIR-class camera
- Master Plumber’s cause-of-loss report stating whether the failure was sudden and accidental
During mitigation:
- Daily moisture logs showing dry-down progress by location
- Equipment runtime logs for every air mover and dehumidifier (required by most carriers to approve drying billing)
- Photos of any concealed damage revealed during selective demolition
At reconstruction hand-off:
- Xactimate scope with notes, exported as an ESX file the carrier can import directly
- A change-order tracker for any scope that shifts after demolition reveals hidden damage
Delivered digitally, that package is the difference between a carrier saying “approved as submitted” and “we need additional documentation” — which, on an insurance claim, is another word for a 30-day delay.
What a scope adjustment actually looks like
On a typical second-floor supply-line failure — the kind that saturates a kitchen ceiling, a dining-room wall, and the main-level floor below — a carrier’s first-pass scope often prices the repair at roughly half of what the loss actually is. The adjuster can’t see water migration into the wall cavities from photos alone, and many first-pass scopes leave out the decontamination activities required for a Category 2 loss under IICRC S500.
After a Matterport walk-through and a side-by-side Xactimate comparison, the carrier usually issues a supplemental payment that closes most of that gap. That is money and restoration scope that would have been left on the table if a “photos and a handwritten bid” contractor had run the claim.
We don’t win every supplement. But we win most of them, because the documentation is hard to argue with.
What this means for homeowners shopping restoration companies
If you’re evaluating restoration contractors in Minneapolis, St. Louis Park, Edina, Minnetonka, or anywhere in the southwest metro, three questions separate the tech-forward shops from the rest:
- “Do you write estimates directly in Xactimate?” If the answer is “we can convert our format to theirs,” it’s not fluency. It’s translation.
- “Do you 3D-scan significant losses as standard documentation?” If the answer is “we take photos,” you’re getting 2010-era documentation on a 2026 claim.
- “Who on your staff leads estimating, and are they Xactimate-certified?” Verisk runs a tiered Xactimate certification program. Credentials are verifiable.
Frequently asked questions
Does every water damage claim need a Matterport scan? No. Small single-room losses under roughly $5,000 rarely need one — photos and a clean Xactimate scope are enough. A 3D scan adds the most value on larger losses, fire claims, and any claim where there’s likely to be disagreement about the affected area.
Who pays for the 3D scan — the carrier or the homeowner? In most cases, neither. At Bedrock, 3D scanning is built into our documentation workflow for qualifying losses. We don’t bill it as a line item, and most carriers don’t price it separately in Xactimate.
Can I use a Matterport scan I already have? Yes. Real estate agents and some home inspectors capture scans during listings or pre-purchase inspections. If your home has a pre-loss scan on file, share it with your contractor — it’s the single best piece of evidence for documenting pre-existing conditions versus loss-related damage.
Is Xactimate the only estimating software carriers use? It’s the dominant platform, but not the only one. Symbility is the other major system, used primarily by Canadian carriers and a handful of U.S. ones. A full-service contractor should write in both when the carrier requires it.
How long does a Matterport scan take? For a typical affected area of 1,500 square feet or less, a scan runs 30 to 60 minutes on-site. Processing the scan into a walkable digital twin happens in the cloud and is usually ready within a few hours.
Call Bedrock at 612-834-1501 for a Truth-First Assessment
