How to Vet a Storm Lead Before Sending a Crew Out

Every roofer who has chased a storm knows the math that quietly bleeds a company dry. A crew of two costs you somewhere between $90 and $160 an hour fully loaded once you count wages, payroll burden, fuel, the truck, the ladder rack, and the lost opportunity of being somewhere that actually closes. A storm inspection that turns out to be a six-year-old roof with cosmetic granule loss and a homeowner who "just wanted a second opinion" can burn ninety minutes of windshield time and an hour on the roof for nothing. Do that four times a day across a six-truck operation in the three weeks after a hail event, and you have lit a five-figure hole in the season before a single contract is signed.

Vetting a storm lead before dispatch is the single highest-leverage habit a restoration company can build. It is not about being stingy with inspections. It is about making sure the inspections you run are the ones where a real, documentable, storm-caused problem is sitting on the roof and a real owner is standing in the driveway. The difference between a shop that prints money after a storm and one that just prints expense reports is almost never sales skill. It is the filter in front of the funnel.

What follows is the screening system I wish someone had handed me early: how to read the storm before you read the roof, how to confirm the roof is old enough and exposed enough to matter, how to verify the person and the property, and how to hand your crew a tight, documented packet so the inspection is fast, clean, and defensible. It also covers the part most articles skip, which is the legal line every storm-restoration shop has to respect about what you can and cannot say to a homeowner about their insurance claim.

Why bad storm leads are so expensive

The true cost of a junk lead is rarely the inspection itself. It is the cascade behind it.

A poorly qualified lead does four things to your business at once. It consumes a dispatch slot a good lead could have used. It trains your sales reps to expect low close rates, which kills their urgency. It generates inspections with no damage, which tempts a tired rep into overselling marginal findings, which is how shops end up in trouble with carriers and state regulators. And it inflates your cost per acquired job to the point where the storm stops being profitable even though the phone is ringing.

Run the numbers honestly. Say your blended cost to run one inspection, including the rep's drive time and the no-show rate, is $120. If one in three inspections becomes a signed job and your average job nets $3,000 in gross profit, your model works beautifully. But if your unqualified lead flow drops that to one in eight, your cost per signed job in inspection labor alone quadruples, and you have not counted the morale tax of reps spending their day climbing roofs that were never going to sell.

The goal of vetting is to push that ratio back. A disciplined shop can take a raw list of storm-area addresses and, before any truck moves, sort it into "inspect now," "inspect if nearby," and "do not bother." Every address you kill on paper is an inspection slot you just bought back.

The four questions every storm lead has to answer

Before a crew rolls, a lead should clear four gates. If it fails any one of them hard, it does not get a truck. If it is borderline, it gets a phone call, not a dispatch.

1. Did a damaging storm actually hit this exact address? Not the county. The address.
2. Is the roof old enough and worn enough that storm damage is plausible and worth pursuing?
3. Is there a real, reachable, decision-making owner attached to this property?
4. Can we document what we find well enough to stand behind it?

The rest of this is how to answer each one quickly, cheaply, and at the volume a storm demands.

Gate one: read the storm before you read the roof

The most common mistake in storm restoration is treating "there was a storm in the area" as if it means "this roof was hit." Hail and wind are brutally local. A hail core can drop golfball stones on one subdivision and leave the one a half-mile north completely untouched. Wind damage clusters along the leading edge of a downburst and around exposure points, not evenly across a ZIP code.

So the first filter is meteorological, and it is the cheapest filter you have because it costs nothing but a few minutes at a screen.

Pull the actual storm data, not the news headline

For any storm date and area, you can reconstruct what hit where using public data:

• NOAA's Storm Prediction Center storm reports give you the day's logged hail and wind reports with sizes and rough locations. The SPC also archives daily severe weather reports that show hail by estimated diameter.
• The NWS local forecast office for the region issues storm summaries and, after significant events, damage surveys. Their public information statements often list specific towns and hail sizes.
• NOAA's Storm Events Database is the official record of severe weather. It is slower to populate but authoritative, and it is what an adjuster's data vendor is ultimately built on top of.
• Radar archives showing reflectivity and, more usefully, the hail signatures derived from dual-polarization radar, let you see the storm's track and intensity over a specific neighborhood.

What you are looking for is convergence. If the SPC has a hail report of 1.5 inches three miles from your target, the radar shows a strong hail signature crossing the neighborhood at the storm time, and the wind reports line up with the direction of damage you would expect, you have a credible event. If the only "evidence" is that a TV station said there was hail in the county, you have nothing.

Hail versus wind: they damage roofs differently, and you vet them differently

This matters because the type of storm dictates what your crew should expect to find, and a lead that does not match the storm type is a red flag.

Hail produces impact damage: fractured or bruised mats on asphalt shingles, granule displacement exposing the asphalt, dented soft metals (gutters, downspouts, vents, flashing, AC condenser fins), and spatter marks on oxidized surfaces that show recent impact. Hail damage is random in its distribution across a slope and tends to correlate with stone size. Pea-sized hail almost never functionally damages a roof in good condition. Damage potential rises sharply once stones get to about an inch (quarter size) and above, and even then it depends heavily on the roof's age and the shingle's brittleness.

Wind produces mechanical damage: lifted, creased, or torn-off shingles; damaged ridge caps; lifted flashing; and debris impact. Wind damage clusters by exposure, on the windward slopes, along rakes and ridges, and around any spot where the wind could get under a tab. A roof that lost shingles on the north slope after a storm with a clear south wind tells a story that needs explaining.

When you vet the lead, ask which one you are dealing with. A homeowner reporting "shingles in my yard" after a pure hail event with no high wind is describing something the storm probably did not do, which means either there was wind you have not accounted for or the roof was already failing. Both change how you approach the inspection. A homeowner reporting "dents in my gutters and the neighbor got a new roof" after a confirmed 1.75-inch hail core is exactly the lead you want.

A quick storm-credibility scoring rubric

Build a simple internal score so anyone on your intake team can apply it consistently:

A lead scoring 7 or above on storm signals alone is worth pursuing aggressively. A lead under 4 should not get a truck on storm grounds, no matter how motivated the homeowner sounds. Motivation is not damage.

The statute-of-limitations clock you cannot ignore

Storm credibility has an expiration date that has nothing to do with the roof and everything to do with insurance contracts. Most homeowner policies require that a claim be filed within a set window after the date of loss, often one year, sometimes two, and it varies by state and carrier. If you are working a storm that is twenty months old in a state with a one-year filing window, the homeowner may have no path to file at all, which means the entire restoration angle is dead before you climb. Knowing the storm date precisely, and knowing the filing window for your state, is part of vetting. A roof can be destroyed and the lead can still be worthless because the clock ran out.

Gate two: confirm the roof is worth the climb

A storm can be real and the lead can still be bad, because the roof underneath is either too new to have meaningful damage or too far gone to be a clean storm claim. Roof age is the second gate, and it is the one most shops skip because, historically, you could not know a roof's age without climbing it or knocking on the door.

Why roof age changes everything

Asphalt shingles get more vulnerable to impact as they age. A two-year-old architectural shingle has a flexible asphalt mat that can take a quarter-sized stone and shrug it off. The same shingle at eighteen years old is oxidized, brittle, and loses granules and fractures from impacts that would have bounced off when it was new. This is why two houses next door to each other can take the same hail and only one has a functional, documentable claim.

This cuts both ways for vetting:

• A very new roof (say, under five years) in a marginal hail event is usually a poor lead. The shingle is too resilient, the damage is likely cosmetic at best, and the homeowner often still has builder or manufacturer paperwork that makes a storm narrative harder.
• A roof at the end of its service life (say, 22+ years on a 3-tab) is a different kind of problem. There may be genuine storm damage, but it is tangled up with ordinary wear, and the distinction between storm and age is exactly what an adjuster will scrutinize. These leads can be real, but they require your most experienced inspector and your most careful documentation.
• The sweet spot is the roof old enough to be vulnerable but young enough that the damage reads clearly as storm-caused: roughly the 8-to-18-year band for typical asphalt, give or take by climate and product. These are the leads where the truck almost always pays for itself.

How to estimate roof age without climbing

You have several ways to get a roof-age read before dispatch, and the smart play is to stack them:

1. Ask the homeowner directly during intake. "Do you know roughly how old the roof is? Did you put it on, or was it there when you bought the house?" Many owners know within a couple of years. This is free and fast, but it is self-reported and often wrong, so treat it as one input, not the answer.
2. Pull the property's permit history. Many jurisdictions log re-roof permits, and a permit dated 2011 tells you the roof is about that age. Permit data is patchy, not every re-roof is permitted, and small repairs muddy it, but a clear re-roof permit is gold.
3. Check the sale history and listing photos. Real estate listing archives often have dated roof photos. A 2016 listing photo showing a roof that already looks weathered tells you something. A 2019 listing that says "new roof" tells you a lot.
4. Read the aerial and street imagery yourself. High-resolution aerial imagery, compared across years, can show when a roof changed color or texture, which often marks a replacement. Street-level imagery captured at different dates can show granule loss, streaking, and curling that read as age.
5. Use a roof-age estimate built from imagery at scale. This is where pulling an age signal across a whole storm list, rather than one address at a time, becomes the difference between vetting ten leads a day and a thousand.

No method gives you a birth certificate. The honest output of any of these, including imagery-based estimates, is a range, not an exact install date. "This roof reads as roughly 12 to 16 years old" is the right kind of answer. Anyone selling you an exact roof install date from a photo is overpromising. A range is enough to vet a lead, because the decision you are making is binary: is this roof in the band where a storm climb makes sense, or not.

Roof-age screening table

Gate three: verify the person and the property

You can have a real storm and a perfect-aged roof and still waste the trip because the person you are talking to cannot say yes, or the property is not what you think it is. Ownership and authority verification is the least glamorous gate and the one that quietly saves the most no-shows and dead inspections.

Confirm you are talking to a decision-maker

The inspection should be scheduled when an owner who can sign will be present. A few intake questions sort this out without sounding like an interrogation:

• "Is the home owner-occupied, or is it a rental?" A rental means your decision-maker is a landlord who may not be on site, and a tenant cannot authorize work.
• "Will all the owners be home for the inspection?" If the house is owned by a married couple or co-owners, you want both at the table, because a one-spouse pitch that has to be "run by" the other almost never closes on the spot and often dies.
• "Is the mortgage current and the home not in the middle of a sale?" A home under contract or in foreclosure changes the entire calculus and frequently kills any restoration path.

None of this has to feel like a credit check. Framed as "I want to make sure I am not wasting your time, so let me confirm a couple of things," it reads as professionalism.

Verify the property exists as described and matches the storm footprint

Quick cross-checks before dispatch:

• Confirm the address geocodes to a real single structure. Storm lists are notoriously dirty; you will find apartment complexes, vacant lots, and commercial buildings mixed into residential pulls. A thirty-second look at aerial imagery confirms you are sending a residential crew to a residential roof.
• Confirm the roof type matches your crew and your story. A tile or metal roof is a different inspection and a different damage profile than asphalt. Hail behaves differently on tile. If your storm pitch and your crew are built for asphalt, a tile roof is either a different conversation or a pass.
• Confirm the property sits inside the storm footprint you mapped in gate one. This closes the loop: the address has to fall under the hail core or wind track you confirmed, rather than just the same county.

Watch for the lead-quality red flags

Certain patterns should slow you down before you dispatch:

• The homeowner leads with money: "How much will I get?" or "Can you get me a new roof for free?" This signals an expectation you legally cannot and must not feed, and it often signals a tire-kicker shopping every door-knocker in the neighborhood.
• The homeowner says three other companies already inspected. The roof has been climbed repeatedly; either there is nothing there or the homeowner is collecting opinions to argue with their carrier. Either way the close rate craters.
• The "damage" described does not match the storm type, as covered earlier.
• The contact information is incomplete or evasive. A real owner who wants their roof looked at gives you a name, an address, and a working phone.

None of these are automatic disqualifiers, but each one should drop the lead from "dispatch now" to "phone-qualify first."

Gate four: set the crew up to document, not merely inspect

The final gate is about what happens when the crew does roll. A vetted lead deserves a documented inspection, because documentation is the entire product you are building. Whether or not a claim ever gets filed, your job is to produce an accurate, photo-backed record of the roof's condition and an honest repair estimate. That record is what protects you, informs the homeowner, and stands up to scrutiny later.

This is also where the legal lines get sharp, so let me be precise about them.

The line you cannot cross: documentation yes, claims handling no

A roofing contractor is allowed to do a specific, valuable set of things. You may inspect the roof. You may thoroughly document damage with photos and measurements. You may prepare an accurate, line-item repair estimate, written to align with the pricing software adjusters use, for the work you would perform. You may hand that estimate and documentation to the homeowner. You may state facts about your own scope of work to the carrier.

What you may not do, in most states, is act as a public adjuster on the homeowner's behalf without a license. That means you must not, for compensation, negotiate or "handle" the homeowner's claim, interpret what their policy does or does not cover, promise a specific payout or that the claim will be approved, promise that the deductible will be waived or absorbed or somehow disappear, advertise a "free roof," or position yourself as representing the homeowner against their insurance company. Those activities are unlicensed public adjusting, and they are exactly what state insurance regulators have been cracking down on.

The safe frame is simple and it is also the honest one: you document the roof thoroughly, you write an accurate repair estimate, and you give it to the homeowner. The homeowner files the claim. The insurer decides coverage. Your expertise is in the roof and the documentation, not in the policy or the payout.

Teach your reps the do-not-say list explicitly, because a tired rep at the kitchen table will reach for the easy close if you have not drilled the alternative:

• Do not say "I'll handle your claim" or "I'll deal with the adjuster for you." Say "I'll document everything thoroughly and give you a detailed estimate you can file with."
• Do not say "your deductible is covered" or "the insurance pays for everything." Say "your deductible is your responsibility; here is what the repair will cost and what your scope looks like."
• Do not say "I'll get you a free roof." Say "if the storm damaged your roof and your policy covers it, the work may be largely covered, but that is the insurer's call, not mine."
• Do not say "this is definitely covered" or "you'll get approved." Say "this damage is consistent with the storm; whether it's covered is up to your carrier."
• Do not interpret their policy. Say "that's a coverage question for your insurer or agent."

Respecting this line is more than compliance theater. It is what keeps your company out of the news and your license intact, and it is genuinely better for the homeowner, who deserves accurate information rather than promises no contractor can keep.

The pre-dispatch documentation packet

Before the crew leaves, hand them a packet so the inspection is fast and complete. A vetted lead with a prepared packet turns a meandering forty-five-minute visit into a tight twenty-five-minute one. The packet should include:

• The confirmed storm date, hail size, and wind data for the address, so the rep can speak accurately and knows what to look for.
• The estimated roof age range, so the rep calibrates expectations and inspection care.
• An aerial image of the roof with approximate measurements and slope facets noted, so the rep is not measuring from scratch.
• The owner-verification notes from intake.
• The standard inspection checklist, below.

The hail and wind inspection checklist

Give every crew the same checklist so documentation is consistent across reps and defensible later. Photograph every item, with at least one wide context shot and one close-up with a reference object (a chalk circle, a coin, or a measuring tape) for scale.

Ground and soft-metal evidence (do this first, before climbing):

• Gutters and downspouts: photograph dents, especially on the upward-facing surfaces.
• Window screens and wraps: hail tears the metal screening.
• AC condenser and fins: hail dents and flattens fins.
• Vents, fascia, and any soft metal: dents and dings.
• Deck and fence tops, mailbox, grill: spatter and impact marks that confirm the event.

Roof-surface evidence:

• Test squares: mark a 10x10 ft square on each slope and count impact marks, so the documentation shows density per slope.
• Shingle impacts: photograph fractured mats, granule loss exposing asphalt, and bruising (press to feel the soft spot).
• Directionality: note which slopes show damage and whether it matches the storm's wind direction.
• Ridge and hip caps: lifted, cracked, or torn caps from wind.
• Flashing, pipe boots, and penetrations: damage and existing wear, documented separately so you do not blur storm damage with pre-existing conditions.

Context and condition:

• Overall roof age indicators: granule loss, curling, brittleness, prior repairs.
• Existing non-storm damage: document it honestly and separately. Conflating old wear with storm damage is how shops get into trouble.
• Layers: note if it is a tear-off or a layover situation, which affects the estimate.

Build the estimate the right way

After documentation, the deliverable is an accurate repair estimate. Write it as a line-item scope, aligned to the standard pricing databases adjusters use, reflecting the actual work to restore the roof. Include tear-off, underlayment, shingles, flashing, accessories, labor, and any code-required items your jurisdiction mandates (drip edge, ice-and-water shield, ventilation) so the estimate reflects a real, code-compliant rebuild. Keep it factual. The estimate documents what the repair costs; it does not promise what the insurer will pay.

Putting it together: a same-day vetting workflow

Here is how the four gates run as one operational sequence when a storm hits and the leads start flowing.

1. Map the storm (1-2 hours, once per event). Pull SPC reports, NWS summaries, and radar hail signatures. Draw the hail core and wind track over a map of your service area. This map becomes the master filter for every lead that comes in.
2. Screen the list against the map (minutes per batch). Drop any address outside the confirmed footprint. For canvassing, this also tells your crews which streets to walk and which to skip.
3. Layer roof age onto the surviving addresses (minutes per batch at scale). Kill the too-new roofs in marginal events. Flag the end-of-life roofs for senior reps. Prioritize the 8-18 year band.
4. Verify ownership and property on the prioritized list (a few minutes per lead). Confirm owner-occupied, single residential structure, asphalt roof, owner reachable and able to decide.
5. Phone-qualify the borderline leads. A two-minute call resolves most ambiguity about age, ownership, and what the homeowner actually saw.
6. Dispatch only the cleared leads, with packets. Each crew rolls with storm data, age range, aerial measurements, owner notes, and the checklist.
7. Inspect, document, and estimate. Photograph everything, fill the checklist, write the line-item estimate, hand it to the homeowner, and stay on the right side of the claims-handling line.

The whole point is that by the time a truck moves, three of the four gates are already cleared on paper. The crew is not discovering whether the lead is good. They are confirming a lead you already know is good and producing the documentation.

A worked example

A hailstorm crosses the north side of a metro on a Thursday. By Friday morning you have 1,400 addresses from a list pull plus 60 inbound calls.

• Mapping the storm shows the hail core (1.5-2 in) actually hit only the eastern third of the affected ZIP codes; the western part got 0.75 in. That immediately removes roughly 800 addresses from serious consideration on storm grounds.
• Roof-age screening on the remaining 600 flags 210 in the 8-18 year band under the real core, 140 too new, 90 end-of-life, and 160 unknown.
• Ownership and property checks knock out 40 rentals, vacant lots, and tile roofs.
• You phone-qualify the 160 unknowns and the 90 end-of-life leads, clearing maybe 120 of them.
• You end Friday with roughly 290 high-confidence inspect-now addresses concentrated in a tight geography, instead of 1,460 scattered ones.

Your six crews now run dense routes through neighborhoods where the roofs are the right age and the storm was real. Close rates climb because the inspections find real damage, drive time collapses because the routes are tight, and your reps stay sharp because they are not climbing dead roofs all day. That is the entire return on vetting: not fewer inspections for their own sake, but inspections aimed where they pay.

Where roof-age and storm data at scale fit in

The bottleneck in the workflow above is obvious the moment you try to run it across a thousand addresses. Mapping the storm once is easy. Estimating roof age and confirming the storm hit each individual address, one property at a time, is not. That is the part that does not scale by hand, and it is the part that decides whether vetting stays a nice idea or becomes how your shop actually operates after every event.

This is the gap RoofPredict is built to close. It estimates a roof-age range per address from aerial imagery and models storm exposure per roof, then ranks a list so the roofs that are both storm-worn and aging out rise to the top. Instead of you eyeballing imagery property by property, you get the age range and the per-roof storm signal across an entire list, and it enriches your own CRM or mailing list rather than selling you someone else's leads. The crews still inspect, and the reps still close. What changes is that the addresses they work are the ones that already cleared gates one and two on data, at the volume a storm actually produces.

Two honest limits are worth stating plainly, because anyone who tells you otherwise is overselling. The roof-age output is a range, not an exact install date; imagery can tell you a roof reads as roughly 12 to 16 years old, not that it went on in March of a specific year. And the storm model gives you odds, not proof; it tells you a given roof was likely in a damaging hail or wind footprint, not that a claimable defect is guaranteed to be sitting on it. Both are exactly what you want for vetting, because vetting is about probability and prioritization, not certainty. The roof still has to be climbed to confirm. What the data does is make sure the climb is worth it.

Vetting door-knocked and canvassed leads differently

Not every storm lead arrives as an inbound call. A large share of restoration work still comes from canvassing crews walking storm-mapped streets, and those leads need a slightly different vetting posture because the contact and the inspection often collapse into the same visit. You do not get the luxury of phone-qualifying before you are standing in the driveway.

The fix is to push gate one and gate two upstream, into the route the canvassers walk. If your storm map and your roof-age screen have already told you which streets sit under the real hail core and which of those streets are dense with roofs in the 8-to-18-year band, your canvassers are knocking doors that already cleared two gates before anyone said a word. That is the entire reason mapping and age-screening a list pays off even when you never call the homeowner: it does not only feed your dispatch board, it routes your feet.

On the door, the canvasser still runs ownership and authority verification in real time. The opening is not a pitch, it is a qualifier: confirm the person at the door owns the home, confirm the roof is the type you work, and confirm a co-owner is reachable if the decision needs two signatures. A canvasser who books a "free inspection" with a tenant has booked a dead inspection. Train the door crew to ask, politely and early, whether they are speaking with an owner, and to set the actual inspection appointment for a time when every decision-maker will be present rather than climbing on the spot for a homeowner who then says they need to talk to their spouse.

There is also a compliance dimension specific to canvassing. The door is where the "free roof" and "we'll handle your insurance" promises get made most often, because the canvasser is improvising under rejection pressure. Script the door language the same way you script the kitchen table, and audit it. A canvasser who closes by promising a waived deductible is creating liability faster than they are creating revenue.

Honor local solicitation and licensing rules

Many municipalities require a solicitation permit to canvass door to door, and a growing number of states require roofing contractors to carry specific licensing or registration to perform storm-restoration work and to include particular disclosures in any contract signed in the home. Some states also impose a mandatory rescission window on contracts signed at the door and prohibit a contractor from paying or rebating a customer's insurance deductible. Vetting a lead includes vetting your own right to be standing there: confirm the canvassing permit, the contractor registration, and the contract disclosures for the jurisdiction before the crew walks the street. A signed contract that violates the local solicitation or deductible rules is not a win; it is an unenforceable agreement and a regulatory exposure.

Build an intake script and track the numbers

Vetting only stays consistent if it is written down and measured. Two assets make that real: a standard intake script and a small set of metrics you watch after every storm.

A reusable intake script

Give whoever answers the phone a script that captures the gates in order, in plain conversational language. It does not have to be read robotically; it has to make sure nothing gets skipped.

1. "Thanks for calling. Can I get the property address you're concerned about?" (Lets you geocode against the storm map immediately.)
2. "What made you reach out, and roughly when did you notice it?" (Surfaces the storm story and whether the described damage matches the storm type.)
3. "Do you own the home, and will all the owners be home for the inspection?" (Ownership and authority.)
4. "Do you have a rough idea how old the roof is? Did you put it on or was it there when you bought?" (Age input.)
5. "Is it asphalt shingle, or something like tile or metal?" (Roof type and crew match.)
6. "Has anyone else already inspected it?" (Red-flag screen.)

From those six answers, an intake person can slot almost any lead into inspect-now, phone-qualify, or pass, without making a meteorology or claims judgment they are not equipped to make. The harder calls escalate to a manager who can run the storm map and the age screen.

Notice what the script never does: it never quotes a payout, never promises coverage, and never says the word free. Build the compliant language into the script so the easy thing to say is also the correct thing to say.

The metrics that tell you if your vetting works

After each storm, track a handful of numbers. They tell you whether your filter is too loose, too tight, or about right.

If your damage-hit rate is high but you are dispatching very few leads, your gates may be too tight and you are leaving real roofs unworked; loosen the marginal-event thresholds slightly. If your hit rate is low, a gate is leaking, usually the storm-at-the-address check or the age screen. Watching these numbers turns vetting from a gut feel into a dial you can tune storm over storm, and it gives you the evidence to defend a screening decision when a sales rep insists a dead neighborhood was full of gold.

What pros get wrong

A few patterns separate the shops that vet well from the ones that just say they do.

They confuse motivation with damage. A homeowner who is fired up to get their roof looked at is not evidence of a storm. Eager homeowners with undamaged roofs are how reps end up overselling. Vet the roof and the storm, not the enthusiasm.

They vet the county instead of the address. "There was hail in the area" is the most expensive sentence in storm restoration. The whole edge is in resolving down to the specific property under the specific core.

They skip age entirely. Plenty of shops map the storm well and then climb every roof in the footprint regardless of age, burning half their inspections on roofs too new to have real damage. Age is half the filter.

They let documentation slide on busy days. The temptation after a big event is to climb fast and document loosely. That is backwards. The busy days are exactly when clean documentation protects you, because that is when reps are tired and tempted to stretch findings.

They drift across the claims-handling line. Under volume pressure, a rep promises a free roof or offers to handle the claim because it closes faster. It also exposes the company to unlicensed-public-adjusting enforcement. Drill the do-not-say list as hard as you drill the pitch.

They never close the loop on their own data. The richest source of storm-credibility data is your own completed inspections. If three roofs on a street showed real hail damage, the rest of that street just got more credible. Feed inspection outcomes back into how you score the next batch of leads.

A printable pre-dispatch checklist

Use this as the final gate before any truck moves on a storm lead:

• Storm confirmed at the address (SPC/NWS/radar), not merely the county.
• Hail size or wind speed meets your damage threshold.
• Event is inside the policy filing window for your state.
• Roof age estimated; falls in a band worth pursuing.
• Roof type matches your crew and pitch (asphalt vs. tile/metal).
• Property is a single residential structure, owner-occupied or landlord reachable.
• Decision-making owner(s) confirmed present for the inspection.
• No disqualifying red flags (free-roof demands, already inspected three times, evasive contact).
• Crew has the packet: storm data, age range, aerial measurements, owner notes, checklist.
• Rep briefed on the documentation-not-claims-handling line and the do-not-say list.

If every box is checked, roll the truck. If not, the lead goes back to phone-qualify or to the do-not-bother pile. Either outcome is a win, because every inspection you do not waste is one you get to spend on a roof that pays.

Vetting is not about doing fewer inspections. It is about earning the right to be confident in every one you do. When the storm is confirmed at the address, the roof is the right age, the owner is real, and the documentation is tight, your crew stops gambling and starts converting. That is the difference between chasing storms and running a restoration business.

If you want the storm-and-age side of those gates handled across your whole list instead of one address at a time, that is exactly the work RoofPredict is built to take off your plate, so your crews spend their days on the roofs the storm actually wore out and the ones aging out, and almost none of their days on the roofs that were never worth the climb.

FAQ

How do I confirm a storm actually hit a specific address, not merely the general area?

Cross-reference three public sources for the storm date: NOAA's Storm Prediction Center storm reports for logged hail sizes and wind, the local National Weather Service office's storm summary or damage survey, and a radar archive showing the hail signature track. Then check whether your target address falls under the confirmed hail core or wind track, not merely inside the same county. Convergence of those signals over the exact property is what makes the storm credible for that lead.

What hail size actually damages a roof?

It depends heavily on roof age and shingle condition, but as a rule of thumb, hail under one inch rarely causes functional damage to a roof in good shape. Damage potential rises sharply at quarter size (about 1 inch) and above, and stones of 1.25 inches and larger frequently cause documentable impact damage. An old, brittle, oxidized roof can be damaged by smaller stones than a new, flexible one, which is why age and hail size have to be vetted together.

How can I estimate a roof's age before sending a crew?

Stack several signals: ask the homeowner during intake, pull any re-roof permit on file with the jurisdiction, check dated real estate listing photos, compare aerial imagery across years for a color or texture change that marks a replacement, and use an imagery-based roof-age estimate to do it at scale. None of these gives an exact install date; the honest output is a range, such as roughly 12 to 16 years old, which is enough to decide whether the roof sits in a band worth climbing.

What roof age is the sweet spot for storm restoration leads?

Roughly the 8-to-18-year band for typical asphalt shingles, adjusted for climate and product. That roof is old enough to be vulnerable to impact damage but young enough that storm damage reads clearly as storm-caused rather than ordinary wear. Roofs under about five years are usually too resilient to damage in marginal events, and roofs past 22 to 25 years tangle storm damage with age, requiring your most experienced inspector and most careful documentation.

Can I tell a homeowner their insurance will cover the roof?

No. Stating that a claim is covered, will be approved, or will pay a specific amount is interpreting policy and promising payout, which crosses into unlicensed public adjusting in most states. The compliant and honest approach is to document the damage thoroughly, write an accurate repair estimate, and tell the homeowner that whether the damage is covered is their insurer's decision. The homeowner files; the carrier decides coverage.

What is the difference between documenting damage and handling a claim?

Documenting damage means inspecting the roof, photographing and measuring the damage, and preparing an accurate line-item repair estimate that you hand to the homeowner. That is squarely within a contractor's lane. Handling a claim means negotiating with the adjuster on the homeowner's behalf, interpreting their policy, or representing them against the insurer, which is public adjusting and requires a license. Stay on the documentation and estimate side; let the homeowner file and the insurer decide.

How do I keep my reps from promising a free roof or waived deductible?

Drill the do-not-say list as hard as you drill the pitch, and give reps the compliant alternative phrasing so they have something to reach for under pressure. Replace 'free roof' with 'if the storm damaged your roof and your policy covers it, the work may be largely covered, but that's the insurer's call.' Replace 'your deductible is covered' with 'your deductible is your responsibility.' Promising a free roof or a waived deductible exposes the company to enforcement and is not something any contractor can actually guarantee.

How long after a storm can a homeowner still file a claim?

It varies by state and by carrier, but most homeowner policies require a claim be filed within a set window after the date of loss, commonly one or two years. If you are working a storm older than the filing window in your state, the restoration angle may be dead regardless of the roof's condition. Knowing the precise storm date and your state's filing rules is part of vetting, because the clock can disqualify a lead even when the damage is real.

What should be in a crew's pre-dispatch packet?

The confirmed storm date with hail size and wind data for that address, the estimated roof-age range, an aerial image with approximate measurements and slope facets noted, the owner-verification notes from intake, and the standard hail and wind inspection checklist. A prepared packet turns a meandering inspection into a tight, consistent one and ensures the documentation is complete and comparable across every rep.

Does roof-age and storm data replace the physical inspection?

No. Data-driven roof-age estimates give you a range, and storm models give you odds that a roof was in a damaging footprint, not proof that a claimable defect exists. The roof still has to be climbed and documented to confirm actual damage. What the data does is make sure the climb is worth it by clearing the storm and age gates before a truck moves, so crews spend their time on roofs that are genuinely worth inspecting.