Top of Form

Property damage in New Jersey personal injury cases has been treated as an afterthought: something resolved with a repair estimate and a rental receipt, followed by utilizing the property damage file’s photographs to highlight the seriousness of a crash.

However, if your client owns the vehicle involved, or even if they financed it, they have standing to assert a diminished value claim as well against the at-fault driver.

The Appellate Division recently made clear that a vehicle does not fully recover its value simply because it has been repaired. Instead, the stigma of an accident history—the so-called “scarlet letter”—is real, measurable, and compensable. Think about it – two identical vehicles, one with an accident history and one without, do not command the same price. The law has upheld, but now recently reaffirmed, that reality. See: Fin. Servs. Vehicle Trust v. Panter, 458 N.J.Super. 244 (App. Div. 2019)

For practitioners, the takeaway is straightforward: if your case has the right set of facts (a clean accident history for your client’s vehicle, and the vehicle is valuable enough such that pursuing this claim makes economic sense), then you should strongly consider pursuing this claim, even if it is resolved before litigation surrounding your client’s physical injuries begins. These claims are another way to help try to make your client whole again.  

The defense bar will continue to frame diminished value as conjectural, but we know that diminished value claims are no longer novel—they are proof-driven. The real issue is evidentiary alone: can you prove the value differential of the vehicle before and after the crash, even if it's restored to its pre-crash condition?

Diminished value claims require us to move beyond a repair-centric mindset and toward a market-based understanding of the economic damages our clients face as the result of someone else’s negligence.

Asserting a diminished value claim has implications:

►Evaluate diminished value early—before the case is informally “resolved” on property damage alone to determine if this claim should be litigated along with the injury claims or not.

►Retain qualified appraisal experts.

►Use these claims strategically to add leverage in cases where bodily injury damages may be limited or nonexistent. 

These claims are not about expanding liability—they are about aligning recovery with the full reality of what someone has lost after a crash. The modern marketplace places a premium on accident‑free vehicles, and the accident record follows the vehicle. Potential buyers can easily review a car’s accident history through widely advertised services such as CarFax. The damages we seek should reflect just that.

The Appellate Division has made sure that the door stays wide open. It is now up to us to walk through it.

Mitchell H. Portnoi is a principal of Portnoi & Reed, P.C. and a Certified Civil Trial Attorney with over forty years of experience in civil litigation and personal injury law, including numerous diminished‑value cases tried to verdict. Kyle S. Reed, also an attorney at Portnoi & Reed, P.C., has eight years of experience in personal injury, workers’ compensation, and diminished‑value matters. Mitchell and Kyle can be reached by email at mportnoi@portnoilaw.com and kreed@portnoilaw.com.