A Florida appeals court has revived a mold contractor's assignment-of-benefits claim against Universal Property and Casualty over allegedly defective AOB paperwork.
The decision, issued May 6, 2026, by the First District Court of Appeal, sends the dispute back to the county court for further proceedings. For property insurers operating in Florida's hurricane-exposed market, the ruling adds to a growing line of appellate decisions signaling that courts will read AOB documentation in a practical, rather than hyper-literal, way.
The dispute traces back to September 2020, when Hurricane Sally damaged a home in Escambia County belonging to Karen Roshell. The homeowner hired Super Green Air Control to test the property for mold and, if any was found, to clear it. She signed an assignment of benefits authorizing the contractor to do the work and bill Universal Property directly. When the insurer declined to pay, the contractor sued.
At the heart of the case is section 627.7152 of the Florida Statutes, which lays out what an AOB agreement has to look like to be enforceable. The statute requires the agreement to be in writing, executed by both the homeowner and the contractor, and to include a written, itemized, per-unit cost estimate of the services to be performed. If those boxes are not ticked, the statute deems the assignment invalid and unenforceable.
Universal Property argued that the paperwork in this case did not pass muster. A separate invoice, dated the same day as the AOB, listed two line items. The first, called Protocol, covered limited visual observations, multi-location environmental sampling, and a report, priced at $995, with a note that any additional samples would run $95 each. The second, labeled Clearance, repeated the same environmental-testing description and was priced at $795. The combined total came to $1,790.
The trial court agreed with the insurer that the invoice was facially invalid under the statute. The descriptions were too vague, the carrier argued, and the paperwork failed to specify the number of units involved.
The appeals court saw it differently. Reading the AOB and the invoice together, since both were dated the same day and referenced the same insurance claim number and property address, the court found that the documents adequately described the work and the costs. The Protocol line item explained that the contractor would search, sample, and test for problems across multiple areas of the home as needed. The Clearance line item, while repetitive in its wording, contemplated the next step in context: clearing any problems identified during testing.
As for the missing per-unit breakdown, the court noted there was no evidence the property contained multiple units. With a single-family home, there was no reason for the paperwork to itemize per-unit work, a fact the court said would be well known to the insurer.
The court leaned on a growing body of Florida appellate precedent, including decisions from the Second, Third, and Fourth District Courts of Appeal, that have taken a similar approach. Those rulings have framed the AOB statute as protecting a contractor's ability to receive fair compensation for its work under an otherwise valid assignment. The court acknowledged that two teams of lawyers drafting the documents in advance might have produced something tidier, but that is not the standard for an ad-hoc repair agreement between a homeowner and a contractor, particularly where the homeowner is not challenging the deal.
The case now heads back to the county court, where Super Green Air Control can press its claim on remand.
For Florida property insurers, the takeaway is familiar but worth noting. Appellate courts continue to apply section 627.7152 with an eye toward substance over form, and documentation-based challenges to AOB claims may face increasingly skeptical treatment on appeal. The decision is not yet final and remains subject to any timely rehearing motions.
