This company has been replacing a lot of roofs in our neighborhood lately, and the way they've done it is that they know from the news reports when some bad storms came through here during our very rainy spring, and know there must be a lot of roof damage. However, what makes this company different from sketchy storm-chasers is that they've based their business model on working with your homeowners' insurance provider.
Our case was typical: We called them after seeing their signs on neighborhood yards, because we knew from the outset that our aging roof needed replacing soon, and if these guys could convince our insurance company that there was damage from one of those bad storms, all we'd have to pay was the deductible. Alex came out, inspected our roof, and took pictures of wind damage. Did it indeed happen during the storm of the date that Alex knew about, or did it happen at some other point during the 17 years we've had this house? Who knows, but it COULD have, so at this point the ball was in our court. We called our insurer and they sent out their adjuster to see for himself. If he didn't agree that any of the damage was due to the storm, and our insurer refused to pay, that would be the end of it.
Alex made sure to come on the same day as the inspector, and the two of them checked the roof together. The adjuster agreed there was basis for a claim. These two guys had clearly met on many previous occasions like this; Alex knew him by name. The process was so smooth that I wondered if there was some kind of collusion going on, but the adjuster was our insurer's employee, with plenty of incentive to disagree with Insured Roofing.
Now this is where things didn't go quite as expected. Instead of the nice round-number deductible written on our policy, it turned out to be some weird number that some percentage of our home value or something. This, I think, is a result of the success companies like Insured Roofing, who base their entire business model on encouraging as many policy holders as possible to make claims with their insurers: Now insurance companies are sending out notices of adjustments in their coverage so that your deductible is higher. More on that later.
The adjuster wrote a check for the current value of the roof, but not for the full cost of actually replacing it--the idea being that he'd give us the rest once we'd actually used that money to replace the roof instead of buying a car or something. Alex, naturally, had all the forms needed in order for us to sign the check over to his outfit and clear it with our mortgage company. We did it, and the following Thursday and Friday, their crew came out and replaced our roof, removing our no-longer-used satellite dish for us in the process. It looks great; we have spare shingles for later repairs as needed; and it's guaranteed for 30 years, with newer features such as fungus-retardant copper flakes, etc.
When the remaining insurance check came in, Alex came to collect it, and make final arrangements for paying the deductible. He gave discounts right and left to lower that amount: $100 for letting him put one of those yard signs in our yard, $200 for every referral we sent who scheduled a roof inspection (regardless of whether they ended up hiring this company), $250 for writing some online reviews (including this one, and he agreed it didn't to be a good review; honest would ultimately be more useful to them). In fact, if I can scrape up a couple more referrals, we'll end up paying nothing for the roof.
Overall, it was a great experience. We figured we needed to replace our roof soon anyway, and Insured Roofing made it easy for us to file a claim to do it. We're not going to get a better opportunity than that.