A Property-Damage Claim: Basis and Architecture
Damage to property — the result of a road accident, fire, water damage, a construction error or another person's careless act — is legally the subject of a tort claim: a person who causes damage to another by an unlawful intentional or negligent act is obliged to compensate that damage. This simple formula requires establishing all three elements: the unlawfulness of the act, fault and damage — and each of them depends on evidence.
The architecture of the claim is as follows: first the fact and scale of the damage are fixed, then the person causing it and the connection of its act with the damage are established, and finally the compensable amount is computed. At every stage documentation — photographic material, expertise, assessment acts, valuations of repair — is the mainstay of the claim.
Which Damage Is Compensated
The law limits the scope of compensation: only such damage is subject to compensation as was foreseeable for the debtor in advance and represents the direct consequence of the act causing the damage. These filters — foreseeability and directness — in practice exclude excessively remote and secondary losses, but at the same time leave the circle of foreseeable damage broad where the person causing it could have imagined it.
Determining the Amount of Damage
In determining the amount of damage, the interest of the creditor regarding due performance of the obligation is taken into account; for establishing the amount, the time and place of performance of the contract must be considered. In the practice of property damage this means the valuation is tied to a concrete time and place: with the prices of the same market and the same period — not with a later emotionally inflated assessment.
Restoration Instead of Money
The first form of compensation is restoration: the person obliged to compensate damage must restore the condition that would have existed had the circumstance giving rise to the obligation not occurred. In the property context this often describes full compensation through repair or the supply of an analogous item; monetary compensation remains for the case of impossibility or disproportion of restoration.
In cases of bodily injury and damage to health the law gives additional instruments as well: where working capacity is lost or reduced and needs increase, the damage is compensated by payment of a monthly allowance, the costs of treatment are claimed in advance, and instead of the allowance a one-off compensation may be received where a significant ground exists.