How to Triage Post-Storm Inspections by Likely Claim Payout

The week after a hailstorm rolls through your territory, your problem is never a shortage of roofs. It's the opposite. You've got fifty signed inspection requests, a canvassing team adding twenty a day, a couple of crews who can each physically get on six or eight roofs between sunup and the afternoon storms, and an adjuster backlog that's already stretching to three weeks. Somewhere in that pile are the roofs that will get approved, fund a full replacement, and pay your team well. And somewhere in that same pile are the roofs that will eat a half-day of inspection time, get a partial or a denial, and leave a homeowner angry at you for raising their hopes.

The contractors who win storm season aren't the ones who knock the most doors. They're the ones who climb the right roofs first, while the damage is fresh, while the homeowner is motivated, and while the storm is still the obvious cause. Everyone else is doing first-come-first-served and burning their best crews on roofs that were never going to pay.

What follows is a triage system, the same idea an ER uses, applied to a board full of inspection requests. The goal is to sort every roof into a queue by likely claim outcome before you decide who climbs what, so your limited crew-hours land on the roofs with the highest combination of real damage, clean storm causation, and a homeowner who'll actually file. None of this is about gaming an insurer or promising an outcome you can't control. The adjuster decides coverage and the homeowner owns the claim. Your job is to document conditions honestly and to spend your inspection capacity where the honest documentation is most likely to hold up.

Why "first come, first served" quietly kills your storm-season margin

Most shops run their post-storm board chronologically. A request comes in, it goes on the calendar, a tech climbs it in the order it arrived. It feels fair and it's easy to schedule. It's also the single biggest source of wasted capacity in restoration.

Here's the math that nobody puts on a whiteboard. Say a crew can complete six full inspections a day, each one running 45 to 75 minutes once you count setup, the climb, photo documentation, the test squares, and the kitchen-table conversation afterward. Over a 12-day fresh-damage window that's roughly 72 inspections per crew. If your approval-and-sign rate on a random chronological pull is 30 percent, you net about 22 jobs. If a triage system lets you front-load the roofs that convert at 55 to 65 percent during that same fresh window, the same crew nets 40-plus jobs from the same hours. You didn't work harder. You changed the order.

The reason order matters so much is that storm restoration has a brutal time-decay curve baked into it on three separate axes:

• Damage freshness. Hail bruising and the spatter marks that corroborate it are most legible right after impact. Soft metals oxidize, mats settle, and the visual story gets muddier by the week. The cleaner the evidence, the smoother the inspection and the adjuster meeting.
• Homeowner motivation. The day after a loud storm, a homeowner will let a stranger on their roof. Three weeks later, with no visible leak, that same homeowner has moved on, gotten busy, or talked to a neighbor whose claim got denied. Your close rate decays with their attention.
• Causation clarity. The longer you wait, the more competing events and normal wear muddy the question of what actually caused the condition. Adjusters and their desk reviewers lean on causation and date-of-loss. Documenting early keeps the storm as the obvious explanation.

First-come-first-served ignores all three curves. It treats the roof that called Tuesday and the roof that called Wednesday as equally urgent, when one might be a 20-year-old three-tab in the dead center of the hail core and the other a six-year-old architectural shingle on the storm's ragged edge. Triage exists to stop spending your steepest part of the decay curve on roofs that were marginal to begin with.

The mental model: sort the board into four lanes before anyone climbs

Borrow the ER metaphor and run with it. Every inspection request lands in one of four lanes the moment it hits your board. You'll refine the lane after the climb, but the initial sort is what controls crew routing for the next two weeks.

Lane 1 — Climb now, fresh window critical

High probability of substantial, storm-caused damage on a roof old enough that the damage is meaningful, with a motivated homeowner. These are your replacement-grade roofs in the heart of the storm path. They get your best documenter, they get climbed in the first 72 hours, and they get scheduled around the weather so you're never racing a thunderstorm off a steep roof.

Lane 2 — Climb soon, strong but needs verification

Good storm exposure and a roof in the age band where hail does real damage, but one or more unknowns: you're not certain on the storm intensity at that exact address, the roof material is hail-tolerant, or the homeowner is lukewarm. These get climbed in days four through eight. Many graduate to Lane 1 after a quick verification step; some drop to Lane 3.

Lane 3 — Inspect on a batched route, low expected value per visit

Marginal exposure, a young roof, an impact-resistant product, or a homeowner who's clearly shopping multiple contractors and hasn't committed. You don't ignore these, you batch them. When a crew is already in that subdivision for a Lane 1 job, they pick off the Lane 3s next door. The cost of the inspection is near zero because you were already there.

Lane 4 — Decline to inspect or hand off, do not deploy a crew

New roof outside any realistic damage window, no meaningful storm exposure at that address, a homeowner asking you to "find something" so they can get a free roof, or any situation that smells like you'd be manufacturing a claim. Declining these protects your reputation with carriers and keeps you out of fraud territory. Be polite, be honest about why, and move on.

The entire workflow below is about getting requests into the right lane quickly and cheaply, using data you can pull before a single boot touches a ladder.

The five triage inputs, ranked by signal strength

You triage on five inputs. Each one is a piece of evidence about likely claim outcome, and they're listed roughly in order of how much weight they deserve. The art is combining them, because any single one in isolation will mislead you.

Input 1 — Storm exposure at the specific address (highest signal)

The single best predictor of whether a roof has a fundable claim is whether real damaging hail or wind actually hit that roof, not the city, not the ZIP code, the roof. Hail cores are notoriously narrow and patchy. It's completely normal for one side of a street to take 1.75-inch stones and the other side to get pea-sized hail that does nothing. A storm that the news called "golf-ball hail in the metro" might have dropped that size over a two-mile-wide swath and nothing of consequence three blocks away.

This is why ZIP-code-level storm thinking wrecks triage. If you treat every roof in an affected ZIP as equal, you'll send crews to the calm edges and skip the core. The inputs that actually matter here:

• Estimated maximum hail size at the address. Damage potential to asphalt shingles climbs steeply once stones get past roughly one inch, and the relationship isn't linear. The jump from 1 inch to 1.5 inches is a much bigger deal than the jump from 0.5 to 1.
• Wind gusts at the address. Wind claims live or die on whether gusts crossed the threshold where shingles lift, crease, or blow off. Creasing along the sealant line tells a clean wind story.
• Storm direction and duration. Direction predicts which slopes took the worst of it, which tells your tech where to concentrate the test squares.

National outlets like NOAA's Storm Prediction Center publish storm reports, and the National Weather Service issues warnings and does damage surveys, but those are coarse. They confirm a region got hit; they don't tell you that the roof at 412 Maple took 1.5-inch stones while 418 Maple took half an inch. The closer your storm data gets to the individual address, the sharper your triage.

Input 2 — Roof age, expressed as a range

Age is the second-strongest input, and it's the one contractors most often get wrong by chasing false precision. You do not need, and usually cannot get, the exact install date of a roof you've never worked on. What you need is a defensible range: "this roof reads as 14 to 18 years old" is far more useful and honest than "this roof is 16 years old."

Why age matters so much for triage:

• Young roofs (0 to about 7 years) rarely produce a full-replacement claim from a single typical hail event unless the storm was severe. The mat is still flexible, granules are intact, and an adjuster will often see a roof that has plenty of life left. These trend Lane 3 or 4 unless the hail was genuinely large.
• Mid-life roofs (roughly 8 to 16 years) are the sweet spot. They've lost enough granule cover and mat flexibility that hail leaves clear, documentable bruising, but they're not so old that you're fighting a "wear and tear" or "deferred maintenance" argument. This band is where most clean approvals live.
• Aging-out roofs (17-plus years) have real damage easily, but you'll fight causation harder. The adjuster may attribute conditions to age, mechanical wear, or prior storms. These can still be excellent jobs, but the documentation bar is higher and you should know that going in.

The practical move is to get an age range on every address before you climb, so it can feed the lane sort. Aerial imagery history, the visible style and profile of the shingle, granule loss visible even from good imagery, and public records all contribute to that range. You're not certifying an install date; you're bracketing it well enough to triage.

Input 3 — Roof material and slope

What the roof is made of changes the expected outcome dramatically, and it's cheap to determine from imagery and a drive-by.

• Three-tab asphalt is the most hail-vulnerable common material and the easiest to read for bruising. High triage priority when other inputs line up.
• Architectural / dimensional asphalt is more durable but still claims well in real storms. Slightly harder to spot-read from the ground.
• Impact-resistant (Class 4) shingles are specifically built to resist hail. They can still be damaged in big storms, but you should expect more scrutiny and a lower approval rate per inspection. Drop these a lane unless the storm was severe.
• Metal, tile, slate, and wood each have their own damage signatures and adjuster expectations. Metal often shows cosmetic denting that carriers increasingly exclude; tile cracks but causation gets argued; these need specialized documentation.
• Slope and roof complexity affect both the inspection time and the claim. Steep and cut-up roofs take longer to inspect and to replace, which raises the job value but also your inspection cost. Factor the time-per-inspection into routing.

Input 4 — Homeowner signals

The best-documented roof in the storm core is worth nothing if the homeowner won't file or won't sign. Triage has to weight intent.

Strong signals: they called you (inbound beats canvassed), they mention a specific concern like a leak or visible damage, they own the home and aren't planning to sell next month, they haven't already had three other contractors up there, and they understand they'll be filing a claim on their own policy. Weak signals: "just checking," already shopping five companies, recently bought the home and unclear on the policy, or any version of wanting you to find damage that gets them out of paying a deductible. That last one is a hard stop, not a soft signal.

Input 5 — Logistics and route density

The weakest input on its own, but it breaks ties and shapes routing. Two roofs with identical claim odds, but one is alone across town and the other sits in a cul-de-sac with six other requests, are not equal. The cul-de-sac roof is worth more to you because the surrounding inspections come nearly free. Route density turns Lane 3 batches into profitable afternoons.

A repeatable triage scoring model you can run on a spreadsheet

You don't need software to start, though it helps at volume. Here's a transparent point model your office manager can run the morning after a storm. Score each request 0 to 100, then the score maps to a lane. Adjust the weights to your market, but start here.

The scoring table

Mapping score to lane

• 75–100: Lane 1. Climb in the first 72 hours, best documenter.
• 55–74: Lane 2. Verify the soft input, then climb days 4–8.
• 30–54: Lane 3. Batch onto a route through that area.
• Under 30, or any disqualifier: Lane 4. Decline or hand off.

A worked example

Three requests come in the same morning after a hail event:

412 Maple. Address-level estimate shows 1.6-inch hail. Aerial history and shingle profile put the roof at 15 to 18 years. It's a three-tab. The owner called you, has lived there 11 years, mentioned granules in the gutters. Four other requests on the block.

Score: storm 35, age 18, material 15, intent 15, density 10 = 93. Lane 1. This is the roof you climb tomorrow at 8 a.m. with your sharpest tech.

88 Birch. Address estimate shows 0.9-inch hail. Roof reads 9 to 12 years, newer architectural. Owner was canvassed, mildly interested. One nearby request.

Score: storm 10, age 25, material 10, intent 8, density 5 = 58. Lane 2. The soft spot is storm intensity, sub-inch hail rarely totals a healthy 10-year architectural roof. Verify the storm read and the homeowner's interest before you spend a full inspection slot. If the hail estimate firms up larger, it jumps to Lane 1.

21 Cedar. Address estimate shows 1.4-inch hail, good exposure. But aerial history shows the roof was replaced two years ago, it's a Class 4 product, and the owner is "getting a few opinions" while listing the house next spring.

Score: storm 22, age 6, material 4, intent 3, density 0 = 35. Lane 3, drifting toward 4. Real hail hit it, but a two-year-old impact-resistant roof is a tough, low-probability inspection and the seller-owner is barely engaged. Batch it if you're ever on that street; don't burn a fresh-window slot on it.

Notice what the model did. It put the 15-year three-tab in the core ahead of the well-exposed but nearly new Class 4 roof, even though both got real hail. That's exactly the call a seasoned restoration lead makes by instinct, the model just makes it repeatable across a whole board and across techs who don't yet have that instinct.

Getting the data to triage before you climb

The scoring model is only as good as the inputs you can gather without leaving the office. This is where most shops are flying blind, they have the homeowner's address and not much else, so they default to chronological scheduling because they have nothing to sort on. Here's how to actually populate each input.

Storm exposure data

Start with the public sources to confirm the event and its rough footprint. NOAA's Storm Prediction Center storm reports and the National Weather Service give you the regional picture and the date of loss, which you need regardless. For wind, the NWS local office damage surveys and warning archives establish gust context. These are free and authoritative for establishing that a damaging event occurred on a specific date over a specific region.

Where they fall short is resolution. They won't tell you the hail size at one address versus the next street. To triage at the address level you need a storm dataset that interpolates intensity onto a fine grid, ideally modeling the hail and wind exposure per individual roof rather than per ZIP. That address-level read is what turns a vague "the north side got hit" into a sortable number on every request.

Roof age range

Age-range estimation pulls from several sources you can stack:

• Aerial imagery history. Comparing imagery across years can reveal when a roof changed color or profile, bracketing the last replacement. If 2014 imagery shows a weathered gray roof and 2016 shows a fresh black one, you've bracketed an install.
• Shingle style and profile visible in current imagery hints at the product generation.
• Visible granule loss and weathering from high-resolution imagery shifts your range older.
• Public records sometimes carry permit history, though coverage is spotty and permits aren't always pulled.

Stack these into a range, not a date. "14 to 18 years" is the honest output, and it's all the model needs.

Material and slope

Current aerial and street-level imagery usually settles material and gives you a slope and complexity read good enough for triage. A quick drive-by confirms it for the Lane 1 candidates.

Homeowner intent

This comes from your intake. Train whoever books inspections to capture the intent signals as structured fields, not free-text notes: inbound vs. canvassed, owner-occupant yes/no, plans to sell, other contractors involved, and a quick read on whether they understand they're filing on their own policy. Five checkboxes at intake feed the model cleanly.

Where RoofPredict fits in the triage workflow

The hardest two inputs to gather at scale, before anyone climbs, are address-level storm exposure and a roof-age range per house. Those are exactly the two that carry the most weight in the scoring model, and they're the two the free public sources can't resolve down to the individual roof. That gap is the specific problem RoofPredict is built for.

RoofPredict ranks the roofs in your territory house by house, combining a roof-age range per address derived from aerial imagery with storm physics modeled per individual roof rather than per ZIP code. In triage terms, it pre-populates Input 1 and Input 2, the two heaviest columns in the scoring table, across every address before a single crew rolls out. Instead of your office manager guessing at hail size from a regional report and eyeballing roof age, you start the morning with a ranked board of which roofs are most likely due: the ones the storm physically wore the hardest plus the ones already aging out of their service life.

Used honestly, that does two things for your triage. It front-loads Lane 1, so your best documenter climbs the highest-probability roofs in the fresh-damage window. And it keeps you off Lane 4 roofs, the brand-new ones outside any realistic damage window and the addresses the storm barely grazed, that quietly drain crew-hours on chronological boards.

It's worth being clear about the limits, because anyone selling you certainty here is selling you something that doesn't exist. A roof-age range is a range, not a birth certificate, you still confirm condition on the ladder. Storm modeling gives you odds that a given roof took damaging hail or wind, not proof that it did; the proof is the documented condition you find on the climb, and the date-of-loss comes from the storm record. The data tells you where to point your crews and in what order. It doesn't inspect the roof, it doesn't decide coverage, and it never promises an outcome. The adjuster decides coverage and the homeowner owns the claim, same as always. What changes is that you stop spending your steepest decay-curve hours on roofs that were never going to pay, and you get to the ones that will while the evidence is still fresh.

The on-roof inspection: confirm or correct the lane

Triage gets the right roof under the right tech in the right order. The climb is where you confirm the lane and gather the documentation that the claim, if there is one, will stand on. A consistent on-roof protocol matters as much as the triage that got you there, because a strong lane-1 roof with sloppy documentation converts worse than a marginal roof documented cleanly.

Before anything else: get on the roof safely. Falls are the leading cause of death in construction, and steep, wet, or storm-damaged roofs are exactly where people get hurt. Use fall protection, never climb in active weather, and respect the afternoon thunderstorm pattern that follows so many hail days. No inspection is worth a fall.

The standard documentation sequence

Run the same sequence on every roof so nothing gets missed and so your packages look consistent to adjusters who see a lot of them:

1. Wide context shots of the whole roof and each elevation, establishing the property and the overall condition.
2. Collateral and soft-metal evidence first. Before you even read the shingles, photograph the spatter marks and dents on gutters, downspouts, vents, flashing, AC condenser fins, mailboxes, and fence caps. Soft-metal damage is the corroborating evidence that a real hail event hit this property, and it's hard to argue with. It also confirms hail size and direction.
3. Test squares on each slope, typically a 10-by-10 foot area chalked off, where you mark and count every hail strike. Do one per slope so you can show directionality. The slope facing the storm should read heavier, which corroborates your storm-direction data.
4. Close-ups of representative hits showing the bruise: the fractured mat, the granule displacement, the soft spot you can feel. A clear macro photo of a single textbook bruise does a lot of work.
5. Date and geotag everything so the documentation ties to the date of loss and the address. Time-stamped, location-tagged photos are far stronger than loose images.

Reading the result and re-laning

After the climb, every roof gets re-laned based on what you actually found:

• Confirmed substantial, storm-caused damage on a roof old enough to matter: this stays Lane 1, move straight to the homeowner conversation and the claim filing.
• Some damage but borderline: document it thoroughly and honestly, and set the homeowner's expectations accordingly. Don't oversell a partial as a sure full replacement.
• Minimal or no storm damage: tell the homeowner the truth. "I don't see enough storm damage here to support a claim, and filing one that gets denied can count against you." This conversation costs you a job today and earns you referrals and a clean carrier reputation for years. The contractors who tell homeowners the truth about marginal roofs are the ones who get the call next storm.

Triaging wind claims is a different sort than hail

Most triage thinking defaults to hail because hail drives the biggest restoration seasons, but wind events need their own sort, and the inputs shift. A straight-line wind event or the wind field of a larger system damages roofs through a completely different mechanism, and that changes which roofs rise to Lane 1.

With hail, the damage is distributed across every slope and the question is bruise density. With wind, the damage is concentrated, edges, ridges, the windward field, and the question is whether shingles lifted, creased, or blew off. That has three consequences for how you sort:

• Gust threshold matters more than gust average. A roof that saw a single 75-mph gust can have blown tabs even if the sustained wind was modest. Your storm input for wind should key on peak gust at the address, not an averaged number.
• Roof age interacts with wind differently. Older roofs with brittle, poorly-sealed tabs blow off in winds that wouldn't budge a fresh roof. The aging-out band that fights a causation argument on hail can actually be cleaner on wind, because lifted and creased tabs along the sealant line tell an unambiguous story.
• Material weighting flips somewhat. Three-tab is still vulnerable, but the relevant failure is the sealant strip and the fastening, not granule loss. A drive-by that spots already-missing or lifted tabs is a strong inbound wind signal that bumps a roof up a lane before anyone climbs.

The practical move is to run a separate scoring pass for wind-dominant events, weighting peak gust and visible tab displacement, and to let the same roof score differently depending on whether the event that hit it was a hail core or a wind field. A board that treats every storm as a hail storm will mis-sort every wind event that comes through.

Triage for the adjuster meeting, not only the inspection

There's a second triage that happens after the climb, and the shops that skip it leave money on the table. Once a roof is confirmed Lane 1 with documented damage, the next bottleneck is the adjuster meeting, and you have limited senior people who can represent a roof well in front of an adjuster. Triage those meetings the same way you triaged the climbs.

The roofs that most need your strongest person at the adjuster meeting are the ones where the outcome is genuinely in play: aging-out roofs where causation will be argued, partials that could go either way, and high-value complex roofs where the scope is large enough that getting it right matters. The clean mid-life roof in the storm core with textbook bruising on every slope often barely needs you there, the damage speaks for itself. Don't spend your best closer on the easy one and send a junior tech to fight the hard causation case.

A few things make every adjuster meeting go faster and land better, and they all trace back to documentation you gathered during triage and the climb:

• Lead with the date of loss and the storm record. Establishing that a damaging event hit this specific address on a specific date frames everything that follows. This is where your address-level storm data earns its keep.
• Walk the collateral first. Soft-metal spatter on gutters and vents is the hardest evidence to dispute and sets up the shingle damage as consistent with a real event.
• Show directionality. Test squares that read heavier on the storm-facing slope corroborate the storm direction and make the damage pattern coherent rather than random.
• Be ready to talk age honestly. If the roof is aging out, don't pretend it's new. Acknowledge the age and focus on the storm-caused conditions. Adjusters trust contractors who don't overreach.

Triage at scale: commercial and multi-roof portfolios

Everything so far assumes single-family residential, which is most storm restoration volume. Commercial and multi-roof situations, apartment complexes, HOAs, light commercial, change the triage math in ways worth calling out.

On a portfolio of buildings under one owner or association, the storm-exposure input gets more valuable, not less, because the buildings often span enough area that the hail core hit some and missed others. Triaging which buildings in a 40-unit apartment complex actually took damaging hail, versus assuming the whole property did, is exactly the address-level question that separates a defensible claim from an overreach an adjuster will pick apart. Walking onto a property and confidently saying "buildings 1 through 6 took the core, buildings 7 through 12 caught the edge" is far stronger than claiming uniform damage across a property the storm clearly hit unevenly.

The age input also shifts: commercial and multi-family roofs are often re-roofed on a schedule, so segments of a property can be different ages. A range per roof section, rather than one age for the whole property, keeps your triage honest and your scope accurate.

The time math changes too. A single large commercial inspection might consume a crew for half a day, so a mis-triaged commercial roof costs far more than a mis-triaged house. The discipline of confirming real exposure and a meaningful age before committing crew time matters even more when each commitment is bigger.

Common triage failures and how to catch them

Even shops that buy into triage trip over the same handful of failure modes. Knowing them in advance is the cheapest way to avoid them.

Over-weighting the loudest input. A contractor sees "2-inch hail reported in the metro" and laners every roof in the city into Lane 1. Storm exposure is the strongest input, but it's address-specific, not metro-wide. The fix is to resolve exposure to the address before it drives the sort.

Treating roof age as a hard gate instead of a weight. Some shops auto-decline anything under ten years or auto-approve anything over twenty. Age is a heavy input, not a switch. A seven-year-old roof in a genuinely severe core can be a real claim; a twenty-five-year-old roof the storm missed is not. Let it be one weighted factor among five.

Letting the canvassing team set the lane. Door-knockers are optimists by job description, every roof they touch sounds like Lane 1 in their notes. Keep the lane assignment in the office, scored on the inputs, not on the rep's enthusiasm. The rep captures structured intake fields; the model assigns the lane.

Ignoring the weather window for inspections themselves. Hail days are followed by more unstable weather. Shops that pack the schedule without leaving margin end up either climbing in unsafe conditions or blowing through their fresh-damage window when a rainy stretch shuts them down. Build slack into the first two weeks.

Failing to re-lane after the climb. Triage is a living sort, not a one-time stamp. A Lane 1 roof that turns out to have minimal damage needs to drop and free up the adjuster-meeting capacity it was holding. A Lane 3 roof that surprises you on the climb gets promoted. Shops that never update the board after climbs end up with a stale plan by day five.

Confusing odds with proof in the homeowner conversation. This one matters legally and reputationally. The storm data and the triage score tell you a roof is likely to have damage. They are not proof that it does, and you never present them to a homeowner as a guarantee of a claim or a payout. The proof is the documented condition on the roof, and coverage is the adjuster's call. Keep that line crisp in every conversation.

What separates pros from amateurs at the triage stage

A few patterns show up over and over in shops that triage well versus shops that don't.

Amateurs triage on who yelled loudest; pros triage on evidence. The squeaky homeowner who calls four times isn't necessarily your best roof. Pros let the scoring decide and manage the squeaky homeowner with communication, not by jumping the queue.

Amateurs chase the exact roof age; pros work in ranges. Burning an hour trying to pin a roof to a specific install year is wasted effort. A solid range feeds the decision just as well and is more honest.

Amateurs treat the storm as ZIP-wide; pros treat it as address-specific. This is the single biggest separator. The pro knows the core was three blocks wide and sends crews into it; the amateur sends crews to the whole affected city and wonders why half the inspections come up empty.

Amateurs inspect everything; pros decline Lane 4 roofs out loud. Saying "I don't think you have a claim here" is a skill. It protects your carrier relationships, keeps you clear of anything resembling fraud, and builds the kind of trust that turns one honest no into three referrals.

Amateurs let the fresh-damage window slip; pros guard it like inventory. Those first 12 days are perishable. Pros schedule around weather, keep crews tight on routing, and never let a Lane 1 roof sit for two weeks because the board was sorted by date.

Amateurs document inconsistently; pros run the same protocol every time. Consistency makes packages faster to assemble, easier for adjusters to read, and harder to pick apart.

A complete morning-after workflow, start to finish

Here's how the whole thing runs the morning after a storm, end to end.

1. Confirm the event and date of loss from NWS and SPC reports. You need the date and the regional footprint nailed down before anything else, every claim references it.
2. Pull address-level exposure across your territory so every request and every prospect has a hail-size and wind read attached, not a ZIP-wide guess.
3. Attach a roof-age range to every address from imagery history and records.
4. Pull material and slope from imagery for each address.
5. Capture homeowner intent as structured fields at intake.
6. Run the scoring model across the whole board, every signed request and every strong prospect.
7. Sort into four lanes and build routes: Lane 1 roofs anchor the routes, Lane 3 roofs get batched around them, Lane 4 roofs get a polite decline or hand-off.
8. Assign Lane 1 to your best documenters and schedule them in the first 72 hours, around the weather.
9. Run the standard on-roof protocol on every climb and re-lane based on what you find.
10. Have the honest kitchen-table conversation on every roof, full replacement, partial, or no claim, and set expectations to match the documentation.
11. Assemble consistent claim packages for the roofs with real, documented, storm-caused damage and support the homeowner through filing on their own policy.
12. Recycle the board daily. New requests get scored and laned the same way; Lane 2 roofs get their verification step and graduate or drop; routes get rebuilt around the day's Lane 1 anchors.

That's the whole system. It doesn't require you to work more hours or knock more doors. It requires you to stop climbing roofs in the order they happened to call, and start climbing them in the order they're likely to pay, with honest documentation and an honest conversation at every step.

The honest bottom line

Triage is not a trick to wring claims out of roofs that don't deserve them. Done right, it's the opposite: it's how you find the roofs that genuinely got hit, document them while the evidence is fresh, and tell the homeowners who didn't get hit the truth before you waste their time and yours. The shops that do this build carrier relationships that last, referral pipelines that compound, and storm seasons where the same crew-hours produce far more completed jobs than the shop down the road still working its board in chronological order.

The data to do it, address-level storm exposure and a roof-age range per house, used to be the part you couldn't get before climbing. That's the part that's now gatherable, which means the only thing standing between your shop and a properly triaged board is the decision to stop sorting by who called first.

FAQ

How is triaging by likely claim outcome different from just chasing the biggest hail?

Hail size is the single strongest input, but it isn't the whole picture. A roof in the heart of a 1.5-inch hail core that happens to be two years old and impact-resistant is a worse inspection bet than a 15-year-old three-tab on the edge of that same core. Triage combines storm exposure with roof age range, material, homeowner intent, and route density so you climb the roofs where all the factors line up, rather than only the ones under the biggest stones.

Why express roof age as a range instead of finding the exact install date?

On a roof you've never worked on, the exact install date is usually unknowable and chasing it wastes time. A defensible range like "14 to 18 years" tells you everything triage needs: whether the roof is in the mid-life sweet spot where hail damage documents cleanly, or young enough that a typical storm won't total it, or old enough that you'll fight a wear-and-tear argument. Ranges are also more honest, you're bracketing the age, not certifying a date you can't prove.

Why does ZIP-code storm data lead to wasted inspections?

Hail cores are narrow and patchy, it's normal for one side of a street to take damaging hail while the other side gets nothing. ZIP-level thinking treats every roof in an affected area as equal, so crews get sent to the calm edges as often as the core. Address-level exposure data lets you concentrate inspections where damaging hail or wind actually hit, which is where the fundable claims are.

How fast do I really need to inspect after a storm?

Treat the first roughly 12 days as a perishable window and the first 72 hours as critical for your highest-probability roofs. Three things decay over time: the physical evidence of damage gets harder to read, homeowner motivation fades once the storm is no longer fresh in mind, and causation gets muddier as other events and normal wear accumulate. Front-loading your strongest roofs into that fresh window is the whole point of triage.

What should I do with the roofs that score low?

Split them. Marginal roofs that still sit near a strong job get batched onto a route, you inspect them nearly for free because a crew is already in the neighborhood. Roofs with no realistic damage window or no meaningful storm exposure get a polite, honest decline rather than a deployed crew. Declining out loud protects your carrier relationships and keeps you clear of anything that looks like manufacturing a claim.

Does a high triage score mean the claim will get approved?

No. A high score means the roof is a high-probability inspection worth climbing early, that's it. The adjuster decides coverage and the homeowner owns the claim. Storm modeling gives you odds that a roof took damaging hail or wind, not proof; the proof is the documented condition you find on the climb, tied to the storm's date of loss. Triage points your crews in the right order, it never promises an outcome.

How do I capture homeowner intent in a way that feeds the scoring model?

Turn it into structured fields at intake instead of free-text notes. Capture whether the lead was inbound or canvassed, whether they're the owner-occupant, whether they plan to sell soon, how many other contractors are involved, and whether they understand they'll be filing on their own policy. Five quick checkboxes give the model a clean intent score and flag the hard stops, like anyone asking you to "find" damage so they can avoid a deductible.

Where do RoofPredict's storm and roof-age data fit into this?

They pre-populate the two heaviest inputs in the scoring model, address-level storm exposure and a roof-age range per house, across your whole territory before any crew rolls out. That lets your office build a ranked board on the morning after a storm instead of guessing hail size from a regional report and eyeballing roof age. The data tells you which roofs are most likely due and in what order to climb them; it doesn't inspect the roof, decide coverage, or guarantee a payout, you still confirm condition on the ladder.

What does the on-roof documentation need to include to support a clean claim?

Run the same sequence every time: wide context shots of the whole roof and each elevation, then soft-metal collateral evidence on gutters, vents, flashing, and AC fins first, because that corroborates a real hail event hit the property. Then chalked test squares on each slope with strikes marked and counted to show directionality, close-ups of representative bruises showing the fractured mat, and date and geotag on every photo so it ties to the date of loss and address.

Is it ever worth telling a homeowner they don't have a claim?

Almost always, when it's true. Telling a homeowner you don't see enough storm damage to support a claim costs you one job today and earns you referrals and a clean reputation with carriers for years. Filing thin claims that get denied can count against the homeowner and erodes your standing with adjusters. The contractors known for honest no's are the ones who get the first call after the next storm.