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In Massachusetts it is illegal for an insurance company to steer people to body shops. The insurance company is required to give you a list of all the “registered shops” in your county. A registered shop is one that has a licensed appraiser on premises, and thus can compel the insurance company to negotiate 
with it in good faith to determine the proper price of a repair, and can compel the insurance company to arbitrate any disagreements. As such, the person getting their car fixed after a collision can be assured that the repair will be done completely and, with few exceptions such as deductibles, the damage, at the sole expense of the insurance company.
The insurance company is not allowed to tell you which shop on that list you should go to. That is called “steering” and it is illegal. However, the insurance companies have found a way around the law. They have created something called “preferred shops”. The name by itself should be a giveaway. It is fair to ask, “preferred by whom?”. Obviously, the shops are preferred by the insurance companies. They tell you that there are advantages to going to a preferred shop. A preferred shop is allowed by the insurance company to write its own appraisal or supplement, and that does streamline the process. However, a goodly amount of business is steered, I’m sorry I should not use that word, directed to the preferred shop, so that the preferred shops are not very aggressive in the appraisals and supplements that they write. In fact, there is a body shop in Lowell that I used to refer clients to but stopped after it became a preferred shop. I noticed that that body shop essentially stopped writing supplements once it became a preferred shop.
My suspicions regarding preferred shops were recently confirmed when a potential client contacted me. He had been involved in a collision and had his vehicle repaired at a preferred shop. After the repair was completed, the car looked good on the outside. He nevertheless paid to have another shop do a post-repair analysis of his vehicle. The results were staggering.
There were a number of items that were damaged in the collision that the preferred shop did not address at all. There were several areas in which the preferred shop wrote up a repair estimate, and did the repair, but the item should have been replaced. There was even an incidence where a repair was written up and paid for, but not performed.This particular body shop is not in Lowell and not one that I have had any particular experience with. However, I am not surprised by this result. A good registered shop will look for every bit of damage caused by the accident and will go toe-to-toe with the insurance appraiser to get that repair paid for. One of the most important skills of a good body shop is that it is very good at fighting for its own money. But keep in mind, it is fighting with the insurance company and not with you. The second quality of a good body shop is that they then do the work that they are paid for and do it well. Of course, if the body shop has accepted payment for the work, it would be a criminal act purposefully not to do it and could cost them their license even if they could convince everyone that the failure to make the repair was somehow inadvertent. One of the reasons that I am so fond of body shops that are very good at fighting for their money is that an essential element of a good repair is that it be a complete repair. A body shop may do a perfect job of fixing what is on the insurance company’s appraisal, but if other items are still damaged and unrepaired, then the client is not going to be happy. This is one reason why it is so important to avoid body shops that are not on the registered repair shop list. Since they cannot compel the insurance company to pay for a complete repair, they have to repair the damage for the price on the original insurance company appraisal, no matter how much Bondo they must use to get it done. The only way that they can do a complete repair is to cut corners. Unfortunately, the preferred shop might as well be an unregistered shop if it is not prepared to go toe-to-toe with the insurance company, and why should it? In the traditional registered shop, its business is dependent upon its reputation in the community and among lawyers such as myself. For the preferred shop, its business is dependent upon its status with the insurance company as a preferred shop. The insurance company is the hand that feeds it, and a preferred shop is not going to bite it. As such, you should always avoid the preferred shop, because you may be the one getting bit.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]