Should I Send a Rep to This Address? A Roofer's Decision Framework

A rep's day has a fixed number of good hours in it. Subtract drive time, lunch, the long conversation with the retired guy who just wants to talk, and the houses where nobody's home, and a strong canvasser might get fifteen to twenty real conversations between nine and dark. That's the budget. Every address you point them at spends a piece of it. So the question on the whiteboard isn't really "is this a lead?" It's narrower and more useful: should I send a rep to this address, today, ahead of the next one on the list?

Most shops never answer that question on purpose. They buy a list, draw a polygon on a map, and turn the crew loose to work the street top to bottom. The math of that approach is brutal and quiet. If a neighborhood is forty percent newer roofs, you've already decided to burn forty percent of your reps' hours on doors that can't convert, however good the pitch is. Nobody sees it because the wasted knocks don't show up on a report — they just show up as a rep who quit in week six because "door knocking doesn't work."

Deciding which address is a skill, and it's learnable. What follows is the framework experienced sales managers actually use: the signals that move the needle, a scoring rubric you can run on any address in under a minute, the workflow to turn that into a route a rep walks, the edge cases that trip up even good shops, and a clear line on the storm and insurance side. The claims material stays strictly on the part a roofing contractor is allowed to operate on — documenting condition and writing an accurate estimate — and never touches the claim itself, because that distinction is the difference between a clean operation and an unlicensed-adjusting complaint.

What "send a rep" actually costs you

Before the signals, get honest about the number you're optimizing against, because the whole framework only matters if a knock is expensive. It is.

Run the arithmetic for a single base-plus-commission canvasser. Say you're into them for a $400/week base draw plus fuel and a phone, and they put in roughly 30 productive door hours a week across the area. That's somewhere north of $15 in fully-loaded cost per productive hour before you've paid a dime of commission — and productive hours are the optimistic count, since the clock is also running during drive time and dead doors. At fifteen to twenty conversations a day, you're spending real money for each genuine at-the-door conversation. Point that conversation at a roof that was replaced four years ago and the money is simply gone. You don't get a partial refund for a polite no.

Stack a few of those wasted knocks per day across a five-person crew across a season and the leak is enormous, and it's invisible on every report you run. Your CRM shows you contacts made and deals closed. It does not show you the conversations you spent on roofs that could never have closed. That hidden denominator is where most canvassing operations quietly bleed.

Then there's the cost nobody books: rep morale. Door knocking has one of the highest turnover rates of any sales role, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks sales-occupation separation rates that bear that out year after year. A green rep who knocks a street full of new roofs gets thirty no's in a row, decides the job is impossible, and is gone before they ever found out it was the list that was impossible. Replacing that rep costs you the recruiting time, the ride-alongs, the ramp — and it costs you again when the next hire inherits the same bad list and quits the same way. Sending people to bad addresses is far more than wasted gas. It's the single biggest driver of the churn that makes shops believe they "can't keep canvassers."

So set the bar for "yes, send a rep" high. You're not looking for a house that might need a roof someday. You're looking for an address where the odds of a real, fundable job are good enough to justify spending one of a finite number of human conversations on it. Hold every signal below to that standard.

The seven signals that decide it

There are seven things worth knowing about an address before you send someone. Rank them in roughly this order of weight. Notice that the pitch — the thing most training obsesses over — isn't on the list. The pitch matters only after the address has earned the visit. A perfect doorstep script delivered to the wrong door is still a loss.

1. Roof age (as a range, not a guess from the curb)

This is the master signal and most shops get their roof-age data from exactly the wrong place. Zillow, the county assessor, and Google all show you year the house was built. That is not the age of the roof. A 1996 house has almost certainly been re-roofed at least once, maybe twice, and the public record won't show it unless a permit was pulled and digitized — which, for re-roofs, it frequently wasn't. So "year built" systematically points your reps at the oldest houses, which are exactly the ones most likely to have a newer roof on top of them. It's an inverted signal masquerading as a useful one, and a shop that sorts its list by build date is paying to send reps to the wrong doors with great confidence.

What you actually want is the age of the current covering. An asphalt shingle roof in most of the country has a practical service life in the 15-to-25-year band depending on the product (three-tab runs short, architectural and the better laminated products run longer) and on climate and exposure. The National Roofing Contractors Association's guidance on service life and the manufacturers' own warranty bands put most residential asphalt in that window. The International Residential Code's roof-covering provisions shape what's on the deck and how many layers can legally be there, which matters because a roof already carrying a second layer is both nearer the end and a bigger tear-off. The addresses that earn a visit are the ones whose current roof is plausibly 15-plus years old — and you almost never get that from a build date.

You get it from the imagery. Granule loss, the dark streaking of algae, patched sections, the slight unevenness of a deck that's starting to go, the contrast between a sun-baked south slope and a shaded north one, curling or cupping at the edges where you can resolve it — these read from good aerial and oblique imagery, and they tell you about the covering rather than the house. The practical move is to treat roof age as a range ("this roof is most likely 16 to 21 years old") and let the width of that range tell you how confident to be. A tight old range is a strong yes. A wide range that straddles the replacement line is a maybe you verify with a closer look before you spend a rep on it.

One more reason the range framing matters: it keeps your reps honest at the door. A rep who's been told "this roof is 18 years old, period" will say that to a homeowner, get corrected ("we re-did it five years ago"), and lose all credibility for the rest of the conversation. A rep who's been told "this roof reads like it's in the back half of its life" is making an observation the homeowner can't easily contradict, because it's framed as a read, not a claim. The honest version of the data is also the more persuasive version.

2. Storm exposure on that specific roof

Hail and wind are the second master signal, and here is where shops conflate two very different things. A hail swath map — the kind NOAA's Storm Prediction Center and the National Weather Service publish, and the kind reconstructed from the NOAA Storm Events Database — tells you where it hailed. It does not tell you which roofs the hail actually wore out. Two houses on the same block can take wildly different impacts: orientation to the storm track, the pitch and aspect of each slope, tree cover, the age and brittleness of the existing shingle, and the actual stone size that fell on that parcel rather than the radar-estimated maximum for the whole cell.

The Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety has done the impact-testing work that makes this concrete: shingle damage from hail is a function of stone size, density, and impact angle meeting a specific roof's material and condition. A small, soft stone bounces off a fresh impact-rated shingle and shatters a brittle twenty-year-old three-tab on the same street. A radar map can't see any of that. So "the whole ZIP got hail" is the beginning of the question, not the answer. The address-level question is: given where this roof sits, how it's oriented, and how old and brittle its covering already was, did this storm plausibly do functional damage?

When you can answer that per-roof, your storm canvassing stops being "work the whole hail polygon" and becomes "work the roofs the storm actually had a shot at breaking." That's a dramatically smaller, dramatically better list — and it's the list that keeps your reps out of the houses where they'd waste a conversation insisting on damage a homeowner can't see and an inspector won't find.

There's a timing dimension too. Wind and hail damage have a documentation window — the longer you wait, the more the "is this storm-related or just age?" question muddies, and the harder honest documentation gets. So among storm-exposed roofs, the freshly-hit ones move up the route relative to ones from a storm two seasons back. The age signal is patient; the storm signal has a clock on it.

3. Ownership and tenure

An owner-occupant who's been in the house eight years is a different prospect than a rental, an absentee landlord, or a house that sold ninety days ago. Owner-occupants make the decision and live with the roof; they convert. Rentals route the decision to an off-site owner who may or may not care, and the on-site person can't say yes no matter how good the roof read is. A house that just sold cuts both ways: it may have had the roof done as a condition of sale (dead lead) or may have a brand-new owner with no relationship to any contractor and a punch list of deferred maintenance the inspection flagged (live lead). The recent-sale flag needs the roof-age read to break the tie.

County parcel and assessor data, public in most jurisdictions, gives you owner-occupied vs. non-owner-occupied status and often a last-sale date. The U.S. Census Bureau's American Housing Survey is useful background for understanding the age and ownership mix of a market, but the parcel record is what you act on per address. It's worth pulling because it's a cheap way to deprioritize a chunk of doors that look fine on age but won't convert at the door — a long-tenure owner-occupant with an old roof is the homeowner most likely to say yes, sign, and pay.

4. Whether the roof is even in your wheelhouse

Obvious, but skipped constantly. If you're an asphalt-shingle residential shop, a flat-roof commercial building or a standing-seam metal house is not your address even if it's a hundred years old. Oblique imagery tells you roof type and rough complexity. Cut-up roofs with lots of valleys, hips, dormers, and steep pitch are bigger, more profitable jobs — and also the ones a green rep should not be trying to eyeball or measure from the ground, and the ones where OSHA fall-protection requirements make the eventual production job more involved and more expensive to do right. Match the address to what your crews actually install and price well, and match the complexity to the rep who's going to knock it.

5. Recency of any prior contact

Your own CRM is the most under-mined signal in the building. A homeowner you bid two years ago and lost, a past customer whose neighbor you're now knocking, a storm-canvass "not interested" from before the last storm — these are warmer than any cold address on age alone, because there's already a thread to pull. The lost bid from two years ago may have been a "not yet"; the roof has aged two more years and the last storm may have changed the math. Before you send a rep down a new street, cross-reference it against your book. An address you've touched before, with a roof that's now aged into the window, is close to the highest-value door you can knock — and you already paid to acquire that relationship once, so working it again is nearly free.

6. Neighborhood pattern

Roofs in a tract subdivision tend to age together because the houses went up in the same eighteen-month window with the same builder-grade shingle, took the same sun, and saw the same storms. If you've confirmed three roofs on a street are 18-to-22 years old and failing, the rest of that street is a strong bet — same vintage, same product, same exposure. This is why a single confirmed sale on a block is worth canvassing the block: the cohort is the signal, and a sold-and-installed job is your strongest social proof at every other door within sight of it. The flip side: a street where you can see varied re-roof dates (some bright new sections, some old and worn) won't cluster, and you should work it address-by-address rather than wholesale.

7. Access and timing reality

Last and lightest, but real. HOA-heavy enclaves with gate codes, long private drives, and "no soliciting" enforcement burn more rep time per knock and carry their own etiquette and ordinance rules you should know before you send anyone. Steep terrain and big setbacks slow a canvasser down. None of this disqualifies an address, but it factors into routing — you don't want your best three age-qualified doors separated by a forty-minute drive each, with a locked gate at two of them.

A one-minute scoring rubric

Here's how to turn those seven signals into a yes/no/maybe you can apply at speed. Score each address 0–100. You're not aiming for precision; you're aiming for a consistent way to rank one address against the next so the route writes itself and two different sales managers would build roughly the same list.

Then read the total like this:

• 75–100: Send a rep, prioritized. Roof is old or storm-hit, owner's home, it's your kind of roof. This is the top of the route, knocked first while reps are fresh.
• 50–74: Send a rep, normal priority. One strong signal, the rest neutral. Worth a knock when you're already in the area.
• 30–49: Drive-by / soft-touch only. Maybe a door hanger or a mailer, not a rep's live conversation. Re-score after the next storm or in a year.
• Under 30: Skip. New roof, wrong type, or a rental with a fresh covering. Sending a rep here is how you lose the rep.

The weighting is deliberately top-heavy on roof age and storm because those two signals are what actually correlate with a fundable job. Everything below them is a tie-breaker. A shop that scored only age and storm and ignored the rest would still beat a shop that knocks top-to-bottom. The other five signals are how you choose between two roofs that both read old — they sharpen a good list; they don't make a bad list good.

One rule overrides the total: the wheelhouse signal is a veto, not merely a weight. A roof that scores 90 on everything else but is a roof type you don't install is a zero, full stop. Don't let a high age-and-storm score talk you into sending a shingle rep to sell a flat roof.

A worked example

Three addresses on the same canvass day:

412 Maple. Built 2003. From imagery the roof shows heavy granule loss, algae streaking, and a patched section over the garage — range reads 17–22 years on the current covering. County data shows owner-occupied since 2011. A moderate hail event crossed this grid fourteen months ago and the roof's orientation faced the cell. Architectural asphalt, simple gable — your bread and butter. Score: roof age 35, storm 22, ownership 15, wheelhouse 10, no CRM hit 0, cohort 5, access 2 = 89. Top of the route, knock it first, rep briefed that the roof reads old and faced the spring hail.

88 Birch. Built 1974 — the oldest house on the list. But the imagery shows a uniform, dark, clean roof with no streaking and crisp ridgelines: this is a re-roof, probably three to five years old. The build date screamed "old," the roof says "new." Score: roof age 4, storm 8 (the event crossed but the shingle is fresh), ownership 15, wheelhouse 10, CRM 0, cohort 0, access 2 = 39. Skip the live knock; it's a drive-by at most. This is the exact address top-to-bottom canvassing would have wasted a conversation on, purely because the house is old.

1500 Cedar. Roof range 16–20 years, clearly worn — strong age signal, and a hail event touched it. But oblique imagery shows it's a low-slope membrane roof, and you're a steep-slope shingle shop. Score: roof age 35, storm 18, ownership unknown, wheelhouse 0. Even though the raw total lands in the fifties, the wheelhouse zero is a hard veto. Don't send your shingle rep to sell a roof you don't install — refer it to a flat-roof contractor you trade with, or skip it.

The point of running the rubric isn't the exact numbers. It's that 412 and 88 look identical to a list that sorts by year built — 88 is even "older" — and the rubric correctly sends the rep to 412 and parks 88, while the wheelhouse veto keeps the rep off Cedar entirely. Those reversals, repeated across a route, are the whole game.

The workflow: from a polygon to a route a rep actually walks

Scoring one address is easy. Doing it for the two thousand parcels in a canvass area, fast enough to matter, is the real work. Here's the sequence that holds up.

1. Draw the area, then immediately cut it. Start with the polygon you'd normally turn a crew loose on. Before anyone knocks, pull roof-age reads on every parcel in it and drop everything that scores under 30. In a typical mixed-age neighborhood this alone removes 30–50% of the doors. You've just given every rep hour back to the addresses that can convert, before spending a single one.
2. Layer storm on top. For any recent dated hail or wind event over the area, re-score the survivors for per-roof exposure. The roofs that were both aging and in the storm's actual path jump to the top of the route, with the freshest events ranked highest because of the documentation clock.
3. Cross-reference your CRM. Flag every address in the cut list that matches a past bid, past customer, or warm neighbor. These get a tailored opener instead of a cold one — "we bid your neighbor at 410 last spring" beats a stranger's knock every time.
4. Cluster for routing. Sort the 75-plus addresses geographically so a rep walks tight loops, not a scatter plot. Tight clusters mean more conversations per hour, which is the entire point of cutting the list in the first place. A great list spread across a sprawling drive gives the time back you just saved.
5. Brief the rep per address, not per street. Hand the canvasser the why for each door: "this roof reads 18–22, faced the April hail, owner's been here since 2012." A rep who walks up already knowing the roof is old knocks with calm authority instead of a generic spray-and-pray pitch. Green reps especially sound like veterans when the data does the qualifying for them — which is precisely how you keep a green rep from quitting in week six.
6. Capture the result and feed it back. Every knock outcome — old roof confirmed, brand new, not home, callback, documented damage — goes back into the list so the next pass is sharper. A "new roof" confirmation should permanently demote that address; a "callback" should promote it; a "not home" should reschedule, not retire.

That loop is the difference between canvassing as a numbers game and canvassing as a targeting operation. Same reps, same pitch, but pointed at several times the density of real prospects — and a list that gets smarter every time a rep walks it.

What good looks like, in numbers

To make the payoff concrete, compare two crews working the same 2,000-home area for a week.

Crew A works it top to bottom. With roughly 40% of the homes carrying roofs too new to convert, almost half of every rep's conversations are dead on arrival before a word is said. The reps don't know which half, so they pitch hard at every door, hear a wall of no's, and end the week demoralized and behind on appointments.

Crew B cuts the list first. The under-30 scores come out, leaving the 1,000-or-so addresses with a real shot, then storm and CRM signals push the best 300 to the top. The reps walk tight clusters of old-and-hit roofs, briefed per door. Same number of knocks, but the conversations land on roofs that can convert, so the no's are softer, the appointment rate climbs, and the reps end the week believing the job works — because for them, this week, it did.

Crew B didn't have better reps or a better pitch. It had a better list. That's the entire thesis, and it's why the targeting work belongs upstream of every script you'll ever write.

Who should knock each tier

The score tells you whether to send a rep; the roof tells you which rep. Pair the two and the same headcount produces more.

Put your most experienced closers on the 75-plus cluster, especially the storm-hit doors where the conversation moves quickly from a good read to documentation and an estimate, and where a fumbled compliance line costs you. Put newer reps on the clean, simple, age-driven doors in the 50–74 band — old roofs on plain gables where the data has already done the qualifying and the rep mostly needs to be present, honest, and book the inspection. Reserve the cut-up, steep, high-complexity roofs for whoever can actually scope them; a green rep guessing at a multi-valley roof from the driveway either lowballs it or over-promises, and both cost you on the back end.

This is also how you ramp new hires without breaking them. A green rep handed a tight loop of old, simple, owner-occupied roofs gets real conversations and early wins, builds belief in the job, and graduates to harder doors. The same rep dropped on a mixed street to "figure it out" collects no's and quits. Tiering the route by rep is the quiet half of the retention story the targeting starts.

Where RoofPredict fits

Everything above assumes you can actually get a roof-age range and per-roof storm read on every parcel in an area, quickly. Doing it by hand — eyeballing aerials one address at a time — works for a dozen houses and falls apart at neighborhood scale. That's the specific gap RoofPredict is built to close.

RoofPredict takes aerial imagery plus weather history for an area and returns, house by house, a roof-age range, a per-roof storm read (the hail and wind that specific roof actually took, modeled on the roof rather than read off a swath map), and a risk score that combines them — so the list arrives already ranked the way the rubric above ranks it. A hail map shows you where it hailed; this shows which roofs it likely wore out. You can run it across a polygon and get the cut list directly, or hand it your own mailing list or CRM export and have those addresses enriched with roof-age and storm signals against the doors you already own. It is not a lead service and it doesn't sell you anyone's contact information; it sharpens the outbound you're already doing by telling you which of your doors are worth a rep's hour.

Honest limits, because a tight trade compares notes. Roof age comes back as a range, not a date — imagery tells you the covering is probably 16–21 years old, not that it was installed on a Tuesday in 2007. The storm read is odds, not proof: it tells you this roof was very likely worn by that hail, which is a reason to send a rep to document, not a guarantee of damage and certainly not a prediction of anything an insurer will do. And it doesn't measure the roof or identify the exact shingle product — for measurements you'll still pull an EagleView, a HOVER, or get a crew on the roof. What it does is answer the one question on the whiteboard: of all these addresses, which ones earn the visit. That's the part that was costing you reps.

The payoff lines up with the cost section at the top. Cut the dead doors before the crew rolls, point the saved hours at clustered old-and-storm-hit roofs, and the same canvasser has more real conversations, hears fewer flat no's, makes more money, and stays. The targeting is the retention play as much as the revenue play — and for a shop that "can't keep canvassers," fixing the list is usually the fix.

Storm and insurance: stay on your side of the line

A lot of "should I send a rep to this address" questions are really storm questions — a hail event rolled through and you're deciding which doors to work. The targeting half is covered above. The conversation that happens after the rep is at the door is where roofers get themselves in legal trouble, so here is the line, drawn clearly. Knowing it cold is part of qualifying the visit, because a rep who crosses it turns a good address into a liability.

What a roofing contractor can do: get on the roof, inspect it, document the condition thoroughly with dated photos, and write an accurate, itemized repair estimate aligned to standard estimating practice — correct measurements, correct quantities, line items a carrier's estimator would recognize. You can state plain facts about the scope of your work and hand that documentation to the homeowner. That's contracting, and you're fully entitled to do it, and to do it well enough that the homeowner has a clear, professional record of their roof's condition.

What a roofing contractor cannot do — and what crosses into unlicensed public adjusting in essentially every state — is, for a fee, negotiate or "handle" the homeowner's claim, interpret their policy or what's covered, promise a specific payout or that the claim will be approved, promise the deductible will be waived or absorbed or "taken care of," advertise a "free roof," or represent the homeowner against their insurer. State Departments of Insurance treat that as adjusting, and adjusting requires a license your roofing registration is not. The Texas Department of Insurance's public-adjuster guidance is a well-documented example, and the National Association of Insurance Commissioners' material on public adjusters shows the same line drawn across states.

Teach your reps the do-not-say list explicitly, because the violations are usually accidental and friendly — a rep trying to be helpful talks themselves and the company into a complaint:

• Don't say "we'll handle the insurance for you" or "we deal with the adjuster." Say "we'll document everything and give you and your insurer a detailed estimate."
• Don't say "we'll waive," "eat," or "cover" the deductible. Say nothing about the deductible except that it's the homeowner's to pay per their policy.
• Don't say "this'll be a free roof" or "insurance will definitely approve this." Say "there's visible storm wear here worth documenting; whether it's covered is between you and your carrier."
• Don't interpret coverage. The homeowner files; the insurer decides. Your job is the photos and the estimate.

Framed this way, the storm-canvass workflow is clean: the data tells you which roofs the storm likely wore out, the rep goes and documents those roofs and writes an honest estimate, the homeowner files their own claim, and the insurer decides coverage. You never touch the claim, and you never make a promise that isn't yours to make. The Federal Trade Commission's guidance on truthful advertising and the state DOI rules point the same direction: substantiate what you say, and don't say the things on that list. A shop that drills this turns storm season into clean, defensible volume instead of a stack of regulatory exposure.

Building the documentation packet at the door

Since "send a rep to a storm-hit roof" really means "send a rep to document," it's worth spelling out what a clean packet looks like, because a rep who knows the deliverable knocks with more confidence and leaves the homeowner with something genuinely useful.

A defensible documentation packet has five parts. First, dated, geo-tagged photos: wide shots establishing the whole roof and each slope, then close-ups of specific conditions with a chalk circle and a coin or hail gauge for scale where it helps. Second, slope-by-slope notes on what's visible — granule loss, mat exposure, bruising, displaced or creased shingles, damaged metals and vents — described as observations, not verdicts. Third, an accurate measurement and an itemized estimate to repair your scope, with line items, quantities, and pricing a carrier's estimator would recognize. Fourth, the storm reference: the date and type of the event you're documenting against, sourced to the public record rather than asserted. Fifth, a plain cover note to the homeowner stating what the packet is — a contractor's inspection and repair estimate they can provide to their insurer — and what it is not, which is any kind of coverage determination.

That last note is your compliance backstop. It puts in writing that you documented and estimated, and that the filing and the coverage decision belong to the homeowner and the insurer. Reps who build this packet the same way every time stay cleanly on the contracting side of the line without having to think about it in the moment, and the homeowner walks away with a professional record whether or not anything is ever covered.

What pros get wrong

Even shops that buy into targeting make a predictable set of mistakes. Avoiding these is most of the edge.

Treating year-built as roof age. This is the number-one error and it's worth repeating because it doesn't merely fail to help — it actively inverts your targeting, sending reps to the oldest houses that most often carry the newest roofs. Every list sorted by build date is quietly working against itself.

Working the whole hail polygon. A storm map is a starting filter, not a route. Reps who knock every door inside the swath spend most of the day on roofs the hail didn't actually break, get worn down by the no's, and miss the genuinely damaged roofs two streets over that fell just inside the cell's worst band. The polygon tells you the storm's general footprint; the per-roof read tells you the route.

Ignoring the CRM. Shops spend thousands acquiring cold doors while their warmest prospects — past bids, past customers, old storm "maybes" — sit unmined in a database they already paid for. Before you score a single cold address, run your own book against the area. The cheapest qualified door you'll knock all year is one you already know.

Sending green reps to the hardest roofs. The cut-up, steep, dormered, multi-valley roofs are the biggest jobs, but they're also where an inexperienced rep makes promises they can't keep or misjudges the scope. Match rep experience to roof complexity, and never let a green rep estimate a roof they read off the ground.

Letting the list go stale. A target list is a living thing. Roofs get replaced, houses sell, storms hit. A list you scored eight months ago has drifted, and it's now steering reps to doors that have quietly changed. Re-score after every significant storm and at least seasonally, and feed every knock result back in.

Confusing measurement tools with targeting tools. EagleView, HOVER, and Roofr measure and price a roof you've already decided to bid. They answer "how big is this roof," not "which roof should I knock." They're the next step, not this one. Buying a measurement tool and expecting it to tell you where to send reps is a category error that leaves the actual targeting problem unsolved.

Optimizing the pitch before the list. Sales training pours hours into the doorstep script. The script matters — but the best script on earth, delivered to a street of four-year-old roofs, loses. The list is upstream of the pitch and dwarfs it. Fix the list first; then the script has something to work with.

Pulling reps off targeting to chase volume. When the calendar gets tight, the temptation is to drop the qualifying step and "just knock more doors." That feels like progress and is the opposite. More knocks at lower quality is exactly the pattern that burns reps out and inflates your cost per appointment. The discipline is to keep cutting the list even — especially — when you're busy.

A quick field checklist

Tape this to the truck. Before any rep rolls, every address on the route should clear these:

• Roof-age range read from imagery (not build date), and it's past roughly 15 years
• If storm-driven: dated event confirmed and plausible impact on this specific roof, not merely "the ZIP got hail"
• Roof type and complexity match what your crews install and price — and the wheelhouse veto is respected
• Ownership checked — owner-occupied beats rental; recent sale flagged and tie-broken on roof age
• CRM cross-referenced for any prior thread
• Address clusters with other 75-plus scores for efficient routing
• Rep briefed on the why for this door, not handed a bare street
• If it's a storm/claims conversation, the rep knows the do-not-say list cold

Clear all eight and the answer to "should I send a rep to this address" is yes — and it's a yes you can defend to your own P&L. Miss roof age or storm specificity, and you're back to spending your most expensive, most finite resource — a rep's good hours — on doors that were never going to convert.

The shops that win the next few years won't be the ones with the best pitch or the biggest list. They'll be the ones who decided, address by address, where their reps' time was actually worth spending — and then sent them only there.

FAQ

How do I tell roof age from an address without climbing on the roof?

Not from the build date — that's the most common mistake. Year built (from Zillow, the county, or Google) ignores re-roofs, so the oldest houses often have the newest roofs. Read the current covering from aerial and oblique imagery instead: granule loss, algae streaking, patched sections, deck unevenness, and sun-vs-shade contrast between slopes all indicate the shingle's age. Treat the result as a range (e.g., 16–21 years), not an exact date, and let the tightness of that range tell you how confident to be.

Should I knock every door inside a hail swath after a storm?

No. A hail map shows where it hailed, not which roofs were actually worn out. Two houses on one block can take very different impacts depending on orientation to the storm track, slope and pitch, tree cover, stone size at that parcel, and how old and brittle the existing shingle already was. Use the swath as a first filter, then prioritize the roofs that were both aging and in the storm's actual path. That's a far smaller, far higher-converting list than the whole polygon.

What's the real cost of sending a rep to the wrong address?

Two costs. The visible one is fully-loaded rep time — base draw, fuel, and phone work out to real dollars per productive door hour, and a strong canvasser only gets 15–20 genuine conversations a day, so each one is expensive. The hidden, larger cost is turnover: a green rep who knocks a street of new roofs racks up flat no's, decides the job is impossible, and quits — when it was the list, not the job, that failed. Bad targeting is the top driver of canvasser churn.

How is RoofPredict different from EagleView, HOVER, or Roofr?

Different category. EagleView, HOVER, and Roofr measure and price a roof you've already decided to bid — they answer 'how big is this roof.' RoofPredict answers the upstream question, 'which of these roofs should I send a rep to,' by returning a roof-age range, a per-roof storm read, and a risk score across an area or your own list. You'd use RoofPredict to build the route, then a measurement tool on the roofs you decide to bid. They're sequential steps, not competitors.

Can a roofer handle the homeowner's insurance claim?

No. A roofer can inspect, document condition with dated photos, and write an accurate itemized repair estimate, then hand that to the homeowner. A roofer cannot, for a fee, negotiate or handle the claim, interpret the policy or coverage, promise a payout or approval, waive or absorb the deductible, advertise a 'free roof,' or represent the homeowner against the insurer — that's unlicensed public adjusting in essentially every state. The homeowner files; the insurer decides coverage; the roofer documents and estimates.

What should reps avoid saying during a storm-damage conversation?

Drill the do-not-say list: don't say 'we'll handle the insurance' or 'deal with the adjuster' (say 'we'll document everything and provide a detailed estimate'); don't say you'll waive, eat, or cover the deductible (say nothing about it beyond that it's the homeowner's per their policy); don't promise a 'free roof' or that the claim will be approved (say there's visible storm wear worth documenting and coverage is between them and their carrier); and never interpret coverage. Document and estimate — that's the lane.

Is it worth knocking a whole street if I confirm one or two failing roofs on it?

Often yes, in tract subdivisions. Houses built in the same 18-month window with the same builder-grade shingle age together, so three confirmed 18–22-year failing roofs make the rest of that block a strong cohort bet. The exception is streets with visibly varied re-roof dates — bright new sections next to old ones — where the roofs won't cluster and you should work it address-by-address instead of wholesale.

How do I use my own CRM to decide where to send reps?

Cross-reference every cold address against your book before anyone rolls. Past bids you lost, past customers, and old storm 'not interested' answers from before the last storm are all warmer than any cold door on age alone, because there's an existing thread. An address you've touched before whose roof has now aged into the replacement window is close to the highest-value door you can knock — and you already paid to acquire it once.

How often should I re-score a target list?

Re-score after every significant storm and at least seasonally. Target lists drift: roofs get replaced, houses sell, and storms change per-roof exposure. Feed every knock result back in too — a confirmed 'new roof' should permanently demote that address, and a 'callback' or 'documented damage' should promote it. A list scored eight months ago and never updated is quietly steering reps to stale doors.

What single change improves canvassing results the most?

Cut the dead doors before the crew rolls. In a typical mixed-age neighborhood, dropping every address whose current roof reads under ~15 years removes 30–50% of the doors and gives those rep hours back to addresses that can actually convert. The pitch matters, but it's downstream of the list — the best script delivered to a street of new roofs still loses. Fix the targeting first; it dwarfs every doorstep-script improvement.