Lead Qualification Criteria for Storm Restoration Roofing: A Field-Tested Scoring System

Most storm restoration companies do not have a lead problem. They have a qualification problem. After a hailstorm rolls through a metro, the phones light up, the door-knockers fan out, and within two weeks the average crew is sitting on a pile of "leads" that is really a mix of three things: real damage worth documenting, marginal damage that will never clear the carrier's threshold, and homeowners who are curious but were never going to sign anything. The companies that win the season are not the ones with the most leads. They are the ones who can tell those three piles apart in the first sixty seconds of contact, and who stop spending crew hours on the bottom two.

That sorting is what qualification is. It is a repeatable set of criteria, scored the same way by every rep, that answers one question before a ladder ever comes off the truck: is this roof likely to produce a documentable, fundable repair, and is this homeowner likely to let us do the work? Everything below is built to make that decision faster, more consistent across a team, and far less dependent on whichever rep happens to be standing on the porch.

A note up front, because it matters and it is where a lot of restoration outfits get themselves into trouble. A roofing contractor can inspect a roof, photograph and document damage, and write an accurate repair estimate for their own scope of work. The contractor hands that documentation and estimate to the homeowner. The homeowner is the one who files the claim, and the insurer is the one who decides coverage. A contractor cannot, for a fee, negotiate or "handle" the claim, interpret the homeowner's policy, promise a specific payout or approval, tell a homeowner their deductible will be waived or absorbed, or advertise a "free roof." Doing any of that is unlicensed public adjusting in most states and it is a fast way to lose a license and pick up a lawsuit. Good qualification keeps you on the right side of that line, because it focuses your reps on documenting facts and roofs rather than making promises about money.

Why qualification beats raw lead volume

Run the math on a single canvasser for one day. Say a rep knocks 80 doors in a productive afternoon. Maybe 25 answer. Of those, perhaps 10 will agree to a conversation, and historically 3 or 4 will agree to an inspection. If the rep treats all 3 or 4 as equal and the company sends a crew or a senior inspector to every one, the cost per inspection climbs fast: drive time, ladder time, a written estimate, the documentation package. Now suppose two of those four roofs were never going to produce a fundable repair, because the roof is four years old and the storm that hit was pea-sized hail with no wind. The rep felt good about "four leads." The company spent real money confirming two dead ends.

Qualification is the discipline of pushing that filter as early as possible, ideally before the inspection. The earlier a lead is disqualified, the cheaper the disqualification. A lead killed on the porch in two questions costs almost nothing. A lead killed after a full inspection and a written estimate costs you the most expensive hour your company sells. So the entire design goal is to move the kill decision left, toward first contact, without throwing away roofs that would have qualified.

There is a second, quieter reason qualification matters: rep morale and honesty. Reps who chase unqualified leads start fudging. They oversell marginal damage to justify the inspection they already drove to. They imply things about insurance they should not imply. A tight qualification model protects your reps from their own optimism, because it gives them permission to walk away from a door without feeling like they failed. "Not a fit" becomes a normal, frequent, blameless outcome.

The five qualification pillars

Every storm restoration lead can be scored on five independent pillars. Score each one, add them up, and route the lead based on the total. The five are deliberately ordered so that the cheapest-to-check, hardest-to-fake criteria come first.

1. Storm exposure — did a damaging event actually hit this exact roof, and how hard?
2. Roof age and material — is the roof old enough and the right material to show and hold documentable damage?
3. Ownership and decision authority — can the person you are talking to actually authorize work?
4. Roof and property characteristics — slope, height, layers, complexity, access.
5. Homeowner posture — are they reachable, responsive, and not already committed elsewhere?

The first two are about the roof. The last three are about the deal. A lead needs to clear both halves. A perfect roof owned by a renter who can authorize nothing is not a lead. A motivated, reachable homeowner with a five-year-old roof that took no real storm is not a lead either. The point system below forces you to weigh both.

Pillar one: storm exposure

This is the single most predictive criterion and the one most reps skip, because it requires data they do not carry on the porch. The question is not "was there a storm in the area." The question is "did a damaging event pass over this specific roof, and how severe was it at this address."

Hail and wind are intensely local. A hail core can drop golf-ball stones on one street and nothing two blocks north. Straight-line wind can peel one elevation of a subdivision and skip the next. "There was a storm in the county" is close to useless as a qualifier. "This roof sat under the swath of one-and-a-quarter-inch hail on the afternoon of the eleventh, with a peak gust around 60 miles per hour" is a qualification gold mine.

The size thresholds that matter, in plain terms:

• Hail under 1 inch (smaller than a quarter): rarely produces functional damage to asphalt shingles on its own. Cosmetic at most. Generally a disqualifier for the storm pillar unless the roof is old and brittle.
• Hail 1 inch to 1.25 inches (quarter to half-dollar): the gray zone. Can bruise mats and fracture older shingles, especially three-tab or aged architectural. Worth inspecting if other pillars are strong.
• Hail 1.25 inches and up: the zone where functional damage to most shingle roofs becomes likely. Strong storm-pillar score.
• Wind gusts: sustained or gust speeds in the 58 mph range and above are where the National Weather Service classifies a thunderstorm as severe, and where shingle creasing, lifting, and blow-off start showing up, particularly on older or poorly nailed roofs.

The NOAA Storm Prediction Center publishes severe weather reports, including hail size reports and wind reports, by date and location. The Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety has extensive published research on hail impact thresholds and roof performance. You do not have to guess. The data exists; the trick is mapping it to an exact address.

How to score the storm pillar

Give a lead 5 points if the address sat under a confirmed severe event (1.25 inch hail or 58 mph wind and up) within your claim-relevant window. Give 3 points for the gray zone (1 to 1.25 inch hail, or marginal wind). Give 0 points, and treat it as a near-automatic disqualifier, if the best available data shows the address took sub-threshold weather. If you genuinely cannot determine exposure for the address, that is itself a signal to inspect cautiously and lean on the roof-age pillar.

A worked example. A canvasser is working a neighborhood the day after a hail event. Before knocking, the team has a per-address read on which streets sat under the heaviest core. House A is on a street the data flags as 1.5 inch hail. House B, four streets over, shows 0.75 inch. Same age roofs, same subdivision. House A starts with 5 storm points and a real reason to inspect. House B starts with 0 and should not consume a senior inspector's afternoon unless something else is exceptional. Two houses that look identical from the truck are not identical leads, and only the storm data tells you that.

The claim-relevant window

There is a clock on storm work. Most property insurance policies require that a claim be filed within a defined period after the date of loss, and that window varies by state and by policy. Some states have tightened the timeline considerably. The practical upshot for qualification: if you cannot tie damage to a specific, recent, documentable storm date that falls inside a reasonable filing window, the lead weakens regardless of how bad the roof looks. Old, undated damage is a hard sell to a carrier and a documentation headache for you. Score storm exposure against a real date, not "sometime last year."

And to be explicit about the legal line again: your job is to identify and document that a storm of a given severity passed over the roof on a given date, and to document the physical damage you observe. Your job is not to tell the homeowner whether their policy will pay, whether they are inside their filing window as a coverage matter, or what their deductible will do. Those are questions for the homeowner, their policy documents, and their carrier. You provide facts and photographs. They provide the claim decision.

Pillar two: roof age and material

Storm severity tells you whether a damaging force hit. Roof age and material tell you whether that force was likely to leave damage the roof will actually show, and whether the roof is near enough to the end of its life that a repair conversation is realistic.

Why age matters physically: a brand-new asphalt shingle has a flexible, fully-bonded mat and fresh sealant strips. It can shrug off hail that would fracture the same shingle ten years later. As shingles age, they lose granules, the asphalt oxidizes and gets brittle, and sealant bonds weaken. The same one-inch stone that bounces off a two-year-old roof can bruise or crack a twelve-year-old roof. So roof age is more than a "is this worth replacing" question; it changes the probability that a given storm produced documentable damage.

The rough age bands that matter for qualification:

• 0 to 5 years: young roof. High bar for storm damage to be functional. Often a disqualifier unless the storm was severe. Also, the homeowner is less motivated; the roof looks fine to them.
• 6 to 14 years: the heart of the storm-restoration market. Old enough to be vulnerable, not so old that condition is the obvious primary cause. Strongest age score.
• 15 to 20 years: still very much in play, but expect more arguments about wear versus storm. Documentation has to be cleaner.
• 20+ years: the roof is at or past typical asphalt service life. There is real work here, but the conversation shifts toward age-related replacement, and storm causation is harder to isolate.

The trouble is that roofers historically guess roof age from the curb, or from county records that only show the year the house was built, not the year the roof was last done. A 1998 house could be on its original roof or its third. That guess is one of the largest sources of wasted inspections in the industry.

Scoring roof age when you do not know the install date

You almost never know the exact install date, and that is fine. Qualification does not need a date; it needs a range and a confidence level. "This roof is most likely 9 to 14 years old" is a perfectly usable qualifier. Score 4 points when the estimated age range lands in the 6-to-20-year sweet spot. Score 2 points for very new or very old roofs (there is still a deal in old roofs, just a different one). Score 0 when the roof is clearly newer than the last damaging storm — a roof installed after the storm cannot have storm damage from it, and that single check kills a surprising number of leads.

Material matters too. Score the storm-vulnerability of the covering honestly:

• Three-tab asphalt: shows hail readily, ages fast. Easy to document, common in the qualifying age bands.
• Architectural / dimensional asphalt: the bulk of the market. Documentable, well understood by carriers.
• Metal: dents are cosmetic far more often than functional. Hail rarely compromises the roof's job. Frequently a weaker restoration lead even after a real storm.
• Tile and slate: can crack under hail, but the repair economics and the inspection skill required are different. Specialty work; do not treat like asphalt.
• Wood shake: splits under hail, but a shrinking, regionally specific market.

Pillar three: ownership and decision authority

This pillar is unglamorous and it disqualifies more "good" leads than any other single check. The most beautiful storm-battered roof in the neighborhood is worthless to you if the person who answered the door cannot authorize the work.

The checks:

• Is it owner-occupied or a rental? Renters cannot authorize roof work and usually cannot file. A rental is not automatically dead, but it routes differently: you need the owner, who may be out of state and disengaged. Drop the priority.
• Is the person home the owner, or a spouse, adult child, tenant, house-sitter? You can have a great conversation with someone who cannot sign anything. Confirm early, politely: "Are you one of the homeowners, or should I make sure your husband or wife is part of the conversation too?"
• Single decision-maker or a couple? Roof decisions are usually joint. A signature from one spouse with the other absent and skeptical is a deal that falls apart at the kitchen table two days later. Identifying that both decision-makers need to be present is qualification, not an afterthought.
• Is the property in some complicated ownership — estate, trust, recently inherited, mid-sale, in foreclosure, HOA-controlled exterior? Each adds friction and authorization risk. Not disqualifiers by themselves, but each one lowers the score.

Scoring ownership

Give 3 points for confirmed owner-occupied with the decision-maker(s) reachable. Give 1 point for owner-occupied but only one of two decision-makers engaged. Give 0, and route to a low-effort follow-up rather than an inspection, for rentals, absentee owners, and tangled ownership where you cannot identify who can say yes.

Notice that this pillar costs almost nothing to check. It is two or three questions on the porch or one phone call. Skipping it is how companies end up writing a full estimate for a tenant who was just being friendly.

Pillar four: roof and property characteristics

This pillar is about the cost and feasibility of the work itself, independent of damage. Two roofs with identical storm damage can have wildly different profitability and risk based on their physical characteristics. Qualification should reflect that, because a marginal lead on a simple ranch is a better lead than a marginal one on a three-story cut-up Victorian.

The factors:

• Slope / pitch. Steep roofs (think 8/12 and above) need extra fall protection, slow the crew, and raise the safety stakes. OSHA's fall protection requirements for residential roofing are not optional, and steep work means more equipment, more time, and more exposure. A steep roof does not disqualify a lead, but it should change the math and, sometimes, the price.
• Stories / height. A single-story roof is faster and safer to inspect and replace than a three-story. Height affects ladder setup, staging, and risk on every visit, including the inspection.
• Number of layers. A roof with two or three existing layers means a heavier, costlier tear-off, and in many jurisdictions code limits you to a certain number of layers anyway. Layers raise cost and complicate the scope.
• Complexity. Hips, valleys, dormers, multiple penetrations, low-slope sections tied into steep — complexity drives labor and the odds of a missed detail. Simple gable roofs are cheaper to inspect, document, and replace accurately.
• Access. Can a crew stage materials? Is there a power line over the only ladder spot? Is the backyard fenced with a dog? Access problems are real cost and real risk.

Scoring property characteristics

This pillar is a modifier more than a gate. Give up to 3 points for a simple, single-story, moderate-slope, single-layer, easy-access roof. Give 1 to 2 points for moderate complexity. Give 0 points for roofs whose complexity, height, or access make them marginal — not because you can't do the work, but because a marginal-damage lead on a hard roof rarely pencils out. A strong-damage lead on a hard roof still qualifies; the points just reflect that you need the damage to carry it.

Pillar five: homeowner posture

The roof can be perfect and the owner can be the right person, and the lead can still be dead because the homeowner is unreachable, unresponsive, or already three weeks into a relationship with the company that knocked before you. Posture is the human-readiness pillar.

The signals:

• Reachability. Do you have a real phone number and email, and did they pick up or reply? A lead you cannot contact is not a lead; it is a hope.
• Responsiveness. How fast and how warmly did they respond to first contact? Quick, engaged responses correlate strongly with eventual conversion. A homeowner who took your card and said "maybe" is a different score than one who asked when you could come back.
• Prior commitment. Have they already signed with another contractor? Already had an inspection? Already filed? You are not the first knock after a storm, and a homeowner already in a contingency agreement with a competitor is, at minimum, a much harder and slower lead, and possibly off-limits.
• Realistic expectations. Is the homeowner asking sane questions about documentation and timelines, or are they fixated on "getting a free roof" and "making the insurance pay"? The second posture is a yellow flag. Not because those homeowners are bad people, but because the conversation has already drifted to the exact promises you cannot make. A homeowner anchored on a free roof is a homeowner who will be disappointed in you no matter what you do, and a homeowner you will be tempted to over-promise to. Score that down and reset expectations immediately.
• Urgency without panic. A homeowner with an active leak has real urgency and a real reason to move. That is a strong posture signal — and an interior leak after a storm is one of the cleaner documentation stories you will get.

Scoring posture

Give 3 points for reachable, responsive, uncommitted, realistic. Subtract toward 0 for unreachable, unresponsive, already-committed, or anchored on promises you can't make. Posture is the pillar most likely to change between contacts, so re-score it as the relationship develops.

Putting the score together

Add the five pillars. The maximum is 18: storm 5, age 4, ownership 3, property 3, posture 3. Here is the routing model that keeps crews pointed at the right doors.

Two hard rules sit on top of the totals, because some failures are categorical, not additive:

• A roof newer than the storm cannot qualify, period. If the roof was installed after the most recent damaging event, no amount of homeowner enthusiasm rescues it. Auto-disqualify.
• No authorizing decision-maker means no inspection yet. A great roof you cannot get authorized is a nurture lead, not an A lead, no matter the score on the other pillars.

A worked scoring example, end to end

A hail event drops 1.5 inch stones across the north half of a subdivision on a Tuesday. By Thursday a rep is working the streets the storm data flagged as hardest hit.

Lead 1. Single-story ranch, architectural shingles estimated at 11 to 15 years old, on a street confirmed under the 1.5 inch core. Owner-occupied, both spouses home and engaged, asking when you can get up there. Simple gable roof, single layer, easy access. Score: storm 5, age 4, ownership 3, property 3, posture 3 = 18. Tier A. Senior inspector goes today.

Lead 2. Two-story with cut-up roofline, dimensional shingles estimated at 8 to 12 years, same confirmed core street. Owner home but spouse is the co-decision-maker and is traveling for a week. Moderate complexity, single layer. Homeowner friendly but says a neighbor already mentioned another company. Score: storm 5, age 4, ownership 1, property 2, posture 2 = 14. Tier A by the number, but the ownership hard rule says: do not write the deal with one spouse and a competitor in the picture. Inspect and document, schedule the real conversation when both are home.

Lead 3. Single-story, shingles estimated at 3 years old, same core street. Owner-occupied and very interested. Here the roof-newer-than-storm logic bites: if the roof predates the storm by only three years and the storm was severe, there may be real damage, so this is not an automatic kill — but if records or the homeowner indicate the roof went on last year, after the storm, it is an auto-disqualify regardless of enthusiasm. Confirm the install timing before spending an inspection on it.

Lead 4. Beautiful 14-year-old roof, but the address sits on a street the storm data shows took 0.75 inch hail and light wind. Owner-occupied, engaged. Score: storm 0, age 4, ownership 3, property 3, posture 3 = 13. By raw total it looks like a B. But the storm pillar is near-zero, and storm restoration is, by definition, storm work. This is the lead that teaches reps the most: it feels qualified because the human is great and the roof is the right age, but the actual storm exposure is weak. Route it to nurture, not to a storm inspection. If this homeowner needs a roof, it is an age-and-condition replacement conversation, documented honestly as wear, not a storm claim.

Lead 4 is the whole reason the storm pillar comes first and weighs the most. Without per-address storm data, every rep on your team scores Lead 4 as an A, drives out, climbs up, finds wear and a couple of marginal marks, and then faces the temptation to call ordinary granule loss "storm damage" to justify the trip. The data prevents the wasted trip and protects the rep from the bad documentation.

Where roof-age and per-roof storm data change the model

Everything above works on paper. The problem in practice is that two of the five pillars — storm exposure and roof age — are exactly the two a rep cannot see well from the curb, and they are the two that carry the most weight. That gap is where most qualification breaks down, because reps default to guessing, and guessing on the two highest-weight pillars makes the whole score noise.

This is the natural place for address-level data, and it is where RoofPredict fits. RoofPredict reads aerial and satellite imagery to estimate a roof-age range for a given address — not an exact install date, which nobody can know from the air, but a defensible range like "most likely 9 to 13 years." And it models storm physics per roof, so instead of "the county got hail," you get a read on whether that specific roof sat under a damaging swath and how severe the event was at that point. Used as enrichment, it lets you score the storm pillar and the age pillar before a rep ever knocks, and it can enrich a list or CRM you already own so your canvassing routes are ordered by the roofs that are actually due — the ones a recent storm wore out, plus the ones simply aging out of their service life.

What that does to the workflow is straightforward. Instead of sending reps down every street equally, you order the route by pre-scored storm exposure and roof age, so the A-tier doors get knocked first while the damage is freshest and before competitors saturate the neighborhood. Instead of a rep guessing a roof is "around ten years," they start the porch conversation already knowing the range, which sharpens both the qualification and the documentation. And the C-tier nurture list stops being a graveyard, because when a new storm hits, you can re-run exposure against the addresses you already collected and surface the ones that just moved from C to A.

The honest limits matter, and saying them plainly is part of using the tool well. A roof-age estimate is a range with a confidence level, not a birth certificate; a roof recently replaced may still read older from oxidation and staining, and the range can be wide on roofs the imagery sees poorly. A storm model gives you odds, not proof — it tells you a roof likely took damaging hail, not that there is a hole over the kitchen. Neither replaces the physical inspection, which is still where functional damage gets confirmed and documented, and neither tells you anything about a homeowner's policy or whether a claim will be paid. Treat the data as a way to score the two hardest pillars cheaply and route crews intelligently, not as a verdict. The ladder still goes up. The data just makes sure it goes up on the right house.

The qualification conversation: scripts that score, not sell

A scoring model is only as good as the questions reps ask to populate it. The goal of the porch or phone conversation is to gather the five pillars' worth of facts as fast and as naturally as possible, without making promises. Here is a question set mapped to the pillars.

Open (posture + ownership): "Hi, I'm with [company]. We're documenting roofs in the neighborhood after Tuesday's hail — are you one of the homeowners?" This single line tests ownership and starts posture, and it anchors the visit to a specific storm date, which is honest and grounding.

Storm: "Did you notice the hail Tuesday afternoon? Some streets right around here took stones over an inch." You are confirming the homeowner's awareness and reinforcing the specific event, not inflating it.

Roof age: "Do you happen to know roughly when the roof was last replaced — before you bought, or while you've been here?" Even a vague answer narrows your range. If you walked up already knowing the estimated range, you can calibrate: a homeowner who says "oh, it's pretty new" against an aerial estimate of twelve years is a flag to dig in.

Property: mostly observed, not asked. You can see stories, slope, and complexity. Access and layers you confirm at inspection.

Posture / commitment: "Has anyone else already been out to look at it since the storm?" This surfaces competitor commitment without being adversarial, and it tells you how saturated the door is.

Notice what is absent from every one of those lines: any mention of insurance paying, deductibles, free roofs, or guaranteed approval. The conversation gathers facts and documents a roof. The moment a homeowner asks "will insurance cover this?" the honest answer is a version of: "What I can do is thoroughly document any damage and write you an accurate estimate to repair it. You'd file with your carrier, and they decide what's covered — that's their call and your policy, not mine." That answer qualifies and protects you at the same time, because it routes the money question back to the only people allowed to answer it.

The do-not-say list, as a qualification tool

Train every rep that the following phrases are banned on the porch, not only because they are compliance landmines, but because they attract the worst-fit leads — homeowners who anchor on a promise you cannot keep and become your hardest, angriest accounts:

• "We'll get your roof covered / approved." You cannot promise coverage; the carrier decides.
• "Your deductible is waived / we'll cover it / you won't pay anything." Promising to absorb or erase a deductible is illegal in many states and is insurance fraud framing.
• "Free roof." Never. It implies the outcome and the money, both of which are not yours to promise.
• "We'll handle the insurance company for you." Negotiating or handling the claim for a fee is unlicensed public adjusting.
• "This is definitely storm damage and they'll pay." You document what you observe; you do not adjudicate the claim or predict the payout.

What reps can say, all day, is the truth: we inspect, we photograph, we document, we write an accurate estimate, we hand it to you, and you and your insurer take it from there. A rep who lives inside that frame qualifies better, because they stop attracting the free-roof crowd and start attracting homeowners who value documentation and quality work.

The disqualifiers worth memorizing

Most of qualification is scoring shades of gray. But a handful of conditions are near-automatic disqualifiers for a storm restoration lead, and reps should know them cold so they can walk away in seconds:

1. Roof newer than the storm. A roof installed after the date of loss has no storm damage from that loss. Confirm timing; if the roof postdates the storm, stop.
2. Sub-threshold storm exposure. If the best available data shows the address took small hail and no real wind, the storm pillar is dead, and "storm restoration" has nothing to restore.
3. No authorizing decision-maker reachable. Renters, absentee owners, tangled estates with nobody empowered to say yes. Nurture, do not inspect.
4. Metal or specialty roof with cosmetic-only marking. Dents that do not compromise function are not a restoration scope on most metal roofs.
5. Homeowner anchored on a "free roof" who will not accept the honest frame. If the homeowner only wants the thing you cannot promise, and resets do not land, this lead will be miserable and risky. Disengage.
6. Active competitor commitment. A homeowner already under a signed agreement with another contractor is, at best, a slow and complicated lead and, depending on the agreement, off-limits.
7. The damage you can document does not support a real scope. If after inspection the honest documentation is "normal wear, a few cosmetic marks, no functional storm damage," the lead is disqualified — and forcing it is exactly the documentation dishonesty that gets companies in trouble.

Number seven is the most important and the most ignored. Qualification does not end at the porch. The inspection is the final qualifier, and a real inspection sometimes disqualifies a lead that scored as an A on paper. A company culture that treats "I went up and there's no real storm damage" as a normal, acceptable result is a company that documents honestly. A culture that punishes reps for unqualifying a roof after inspection is a culture that will eventually invent damage. Protect the inspection as a true qualification gate.

Documenting the roofs that do qualify

Once a lead clears qualification and the inspection confirms damage, the work shifts to documentation — and documentation quality is its own form of qualification, because a poorly documented real-damage roof can be just as dead as a no-damage roof when it reaches the carrier. The contractor's lane here is clear and clean: document thoroughly, write an accurate estimate, hand it over.

A documentation package that holds up generally includes:

• Dated, address-tagged photos of every damaged elevation, with wide shots establishing the location and tight shots showing the individual marks. Tie the photos to the storm date.
• Slope-by-slope notation of damage, including a test square (a marked-off area, often 10 feet by 10 feet) with the hits within it counted, which is how damage density is conventionally shown.
• Photos of collateral and soft-metal damage — gutters, downspouts, vents, flashing, AC condenser fins, gutter screens. Soft metals dent at lower thresholds than shingles and corroborate that a hail event of a given size occurred. This is some of the most persuasive documentation precisely because it is hard to fake and hard to attribute to wear.
• Interior documentation if there is any leak or staining, again dated and located.
• A clear, written, line-item repair estimate for your scope, ideally aligned to the standardized estimating line items the carrier's adjusters use, so the estimate speaks the same language the claim file does. Tools like Xactimate define those line items; writing to that structure reduces friction.
• Material and code notes — the manufacturer and product where identifiable, and any applicable building-code requirements that affect the repair scope, since current code can legitimately change what a proper repair includes.

The estimate is yours — your accurate price to do your scope of work. You hand it to the homeowner. You do not submit it as the homeowner's demand to the insurer, you do not negotiate it with the adjuster as the homeowner's representative, and you do not tell the homeowner what number the carrier "should" pay. You documented a roof and priced the repair. The homeowner files. The carrier decides. Staying inside that lane is more than compliance; it is also what keeps your documentation credible, because documentation written to win a negotiation looks different — and worse — than documentation written to record facts.

Building the model into your team

A scoring system that lives in one person's head is not a system. To make qualification actually change outcomes, it has to be built into the daily mechanics of the team.

Put the five pillars on the lead form. Every lead, whether it comes from canvassing, a call, or a referral, gets scored on the same five pillars in the same CRM fields. If the score is not captured, it did not happen. The act of forcing a number into each pillar is what stops reps from skipping the storm and ownership checks.

Pre-score before the route. Whatever your source of storm and roof-age data, score the two roof pillars at the address level before reps go out, and order canvassing routes by pre-score. This is the single biggest efficiency gain available, because it front-loads the highest-weight, hardest-to-see pillars and points crews at A-tier doors first.

Standardize the disqualifier list. Print the seven disqualifiers on a card. A rep who can recite them walks away from dead leads in seconds and spends the saved time on real ones. Disqualifying fast is a skill, and it is trainable.

Review the misses, not only the wins. In your weekly pipeline review, pull a few leads that scored A but died, and a few that scored C but converted, and ask why the model was wrong. Maybe your storm thresholds are off for your region. Maybe your age estimates skew young. The five-pillar model is a starting calibration; your own conversion data should tune the point values over a couple of seasons.

Separate the scorer from the closer where you can. The rep who qualifies has an incentive to inflate the score to justify their time. Where volume allows, having qualification reviewed — even a quick second read on A-tier inspections — keeps the scoring honest, the same way the inspection keeps the porch optimism honest.

Track cost per qualified inspection, not cost per lead. The vanity metric is leads generated. The metric that runs a profitable storm season is what it costs you to produce one inspection of a genuinely qualified roof. Qualification's entire job is to drive that number down, by killing dead leads before they consume an inspection.

A note on speed and the storm-season clock

Qualification has to be fast because storm restoration runs on a clock that competitors are also watching. After a damaging event, the neighborhood gets saturated within days. The roofs are freshest, the homeowners most receptive, and the competitive knock-rate highest in the first week to ten days. A qualification model that takes too long to apply loses to a faster competitor with a worse model.

This is the practical argument for pre-scoring the two roof pillars from data: it compresses qualification to the speed of a knock. A rep who walks up already knowing the storm exposure and the roof-age range only has to confirm ownership, read the property, and gauge posture — three fast checks — to complete a full five-pillar score on the porch. That speed is what lets a disciplined team knock the A-tier doors first, while the damage is fresh and before the street is saturated, instead of working the neighborhood randomly and arriving at the best roofs after a competitor already signed them.

Pulling it together

Storm restoration is not won by the company with the most leads. It is won by the company that can look at a street full of roofs and, before a single ladder comes off the truck, sort them into inspect-now, inspect-later, and walk-away — using criteria that every rep applies the same way. The five-pillar model gives you that: storm exposure and roof age to qualify the roof, ownership, property characteristics, and homeowner posture to qualify the deal, with a point total that routes crews and a short list of hard disqualifiers that let reps walk away in seconds.

The two pillars that decide most of the score — did a damaging storm actually hit this roof, and how old is it — are exactly the two reps can't see from the curb, which is why guessing them quietly wrecks most qualification. Address-level roof-age ranges and per-roof storm modeling, used as honest enrichment on the list and CRM you already own, close that gap: they let you pre-score the hard pillars, order your routes by the roofs that are genuinely due, and put crews on the right doors first. The data gives you odds and ranges, not certainties — the inspection still confirms the damage, and the homeowner and their insurer still own the claim. But qualification done this way keeps your crews efficient, your documentation honest, and your team firmly on the right side of the line between a roofing contractor and an unlicensed public adjuster.

If you want to see which roofs on your next route are most likely due — by estimated roof-age range and per-roof storm exposure — RoofPredict can enrich your list before your reps ever knock. Start with the streets your last storm actually wore out.

FAQ

What are the most important lead qualification criteria for storm restoration roofing?

The five that matter most are storm exposure (did a damaging hail or wind event actually hit this exact roof, and how severe), roof age and material (is the roof old enough and the right covering to hold documentable damage), ownership and decision authority (can the person you're talking to authorize work), roof and property characteristics (slope, height, layers, complexity, access), and homeowner posture (reachable, responsive, uncommitted, realistic). Storm exposure and roof age carry the most weight because they decide whether there is a fundable repair at all. The other three decide whether the deal is workable.

How do I qualify a hail damage lead before sending an inspector?

Score the two hardest pillars first using data rather than guesswork: confirm the address sat under damaging hail (generally 1.25 inches and up for functional damage to most asphalt shingles) on a specific recent date, and estimate the roof-age range. If the storm was sub-threshold or the roof was installed after the storm, you can disqualify before anyone climbs a ladder. Then confirm there's a reachable decision-maker. Only leads that clear all three on paper should consume a full inspection.

What hail size causes functional roof damage worth pursuing?

As a rule of thumb, hail under one inch rarely causes functional damage to asphalt shingles on its own and is usually cosmetic. One inch to 1.25 inches is a gray zone that can damage older or brittle roofs. Hail 1.25 inches and larger is where functional damage to most shingle roofs becomes likely. Roof age shifts these thresholds, because aged, brittle shingles fracture under smaller stones than new ones. The NOAA Storm Prediction Center publishes hail-size reports you can map to a date and area.

What roof age is best for storm restoration leads?

The 6-to-14-year band is the heart of the market: old enough to be vulnerable to storm damage and near enough to mid-life that a repair conversation is realistic, but not so old that age becomes the obvious cause. Fifteen-to-twenty-year roofs are still very much in play with cleaner documentation. Very new roofs (under five years) usually need a severe storm to qualify, and a roof installed after the storm cannot have damage from it. You almost never know the exact install date, so qualify on an estimated range, not a date.

Can a roofing contractor handle the insurance claim for the homeowner?

No. A contractor can inspect, document damage, and write an accurate repair estimate for their own scope, then hand that documentation to the homeowner. The homeowner files the claim and the insurer decides coverage. A contractor cannot, for a fee, negotiate or handle the claim, interpret the homeowner's policy, promise a specific payout or approval, or tell a homeowner their deductible will be waived or absorbed. Doing those things is unlicensed public adjusting in most states. Good qualification keeps reps focused on documenting roofs, not making promises about money.

Why is per-address storm data better than knowing the county got a storm?

Hail and wind are intensely local. A hail core can drop large stones on one street and nothing two blocks away, and straight-line wind can peel one elevation of a subdivision while skipping the next. 'The county got hail' is close to useless for qualification because it doesn't tell you whether this specific roof was hit or how hard. Per-roof storm modeling tells you whether the exact address sat under a damaging swath, which is the single most predictive qualification criterion and the one most reps skip because they don't carry the data on the porch.

How does RoofPredict fit into lead qualification?

RoofPredict reads aerial and satellite imagery to estimate a roof-age range per address and models storm physics per roof, so you can score the two highest-weight pillars (storm exposure and roof age) before a rep ever knocks. It enriches a list or CRM you already own, letting you order canvassing routes by the roofs most likely due. The honest limits: the age estimate is a range with a confidence level, not an install date, and the storm model gives odds, not proof. It doesn't replace the physical inspection, and it tells you nothing about a homeowner's policy or whether a claim will pay.

What are the fastest disqualifiers for a storm restoration lead?

Memorize these: a roof newer than the storm (no damage possible from that loss), sub-threshold storm exposure (small hail, no real wind), no reachable decision-maker (renters, absentee owners, tangled estates), metal or specialty roofs with cosmetic-only denting, homeowners anchored on a 'free roof' who reject the honest frame, an active signed commitment with a competitor, and — after inspection — documentation that shows only normal wear rather than functional storm damage. Knowing these cold lets reps walk away in seconds and spend the saved time on real leads.

How should a rep answer 'will my insurance cover this' on the porch?

Route the money question back to the only people allowed to answer it. A safe, honest answer is a version of: 'What I can do is thoroughly document any damage and write you an accurate estimate to repair it. You'd file with your carrier, and they decide what's covered — that's their call and your policy, not mine.' Never promise coverage, approval, a specific payout, a waived deductible, or a free roof. Those promises are compliance landmines and they attract the worst-fit, highest-conflict homeowners.

What belongs in a storm-damage documentation package?

Dated, address-tagged photos of every damaged elevation (wide shots for location, tight shots for individual marks), slope-by-slope damage notation including a marked test square with hits counted, photos of soft-metal and collateral damage (gutters, vents, flashing, AC fins) since soft metals dent at lower thresholds and corroborate hail size, interior leak or stain documentation if present, and a clear written line-item repair estimate aligned to standard estimating line items. Tie everything to the storm date. The estimate is your accurate price for your scope, which you hand to the homeowner — not a demand you negotiate with the carrier.