Introduction

I first thought of the idea of a virtual roof inspection when I started using aerial satellite images to measure roofs instead of measuring a roof by hand. I struggled to measure roofs by hand years ago when I first got started in roofing and the company where I worked would hire a roofing installer to go out and measure the roof by hand and then charge me for that measurement. I was happy to pay because I was saving so much time and headaches.

Personal Background

Technology has always fascinated me. I was the first kid in my high school to have a cel phone. It was a Nokia and shaped like a small brick. I used to love that phone and felt so cool going to high school party’s and calling people while hanging out. After I graduated high school, my single mother bought us a nice $2,000 computer and that was a really big deal. My high school girlfriend’s father helped me connect it and get it up and running. I ended up using thet computer to set up video calls so that we could communicate with each other when she went away to college.

As I moved through my college career and eventually work career, technology and computers came very naturally to me. Looking back I wished I would have taken my friend Ravi’s advice when he suggested that I learned coding. He went to college for computer science and was a software engineer. We started a website together but I couldn’t help him much because I didn’t know how to code. That website project fizzled out and I continued to find work in sales.

Technology and Roofing

After working in roofing for a couple of years I began to wonder how I could save time when doing roof inspections.  I also had safety concerns especially after getting stuck on a roof one day and not able to get down! The satellite aerial measurements were good but they didn’t tell us if a roof had hail damage or not. As I would train others on finding hail damage and moved into a Sales Manager role, I realized that I could outsource a roof inspection and essentially hire someone else to do it for me. I did this for a long time and as I would work with customers I would send a roofing assistant or Project Manager out to the roof to inspect for hail damage while I was at my office.

Photo storage technology helped with this approach especially when a company called Company Cam emerged into the roofing industry. Their mobile app would allow my project assistant to project manager to get photos and I could view the photos in real time from my computer. This app really helped me begin to formulate the idea for a full virtual roof inspection but it still required a live person to get on a roof and take photos.

Using Tech in my Roofing Company

Once I went out on my own and started my own roofing company in 2018, I started to get more serious about implementing virtual roof inspections. I implemented drones into our roof inspection process. I taught myself how to use a drone to inspect a roof and I was shocked at how well the drone cameras worked. During this time I also came across a company that specialized in doing virtual sales similar to what Zoom does. The company was essentially doing Zoom calls and allowed you to send a contract through their software during the virtual call.

I got so excited about doing business virtually that I essentially used this idea as the premise for my new roofing company. We were going to be the company that does business virtually. Then came Covid and Zoom and my idea to do business virtually became a necessity and everyone learned how to use Zoom seemingly overnight. My competitive edge lost its allure because it most roofers were learning how to do video calls and sell roofing products over the phone. My zeal for virtual roof inspections persisted and I continued to find ways to do a roof inspection virtually.

I came across more technology that allow roofer to scan a roof for hail damage using photos and I continued to hire people to train project managers to inspect roofs for hail damage using drones and photos. I would look over the photos and use the images as well as my years of experience doing roof inspections to quickly tell the homeowner or project manager if the roof was hailed out and they needed to do an insurance claim.

Discovering Hail Trace

As I continued to run my company I started to create videos to promote my roofing company and run video ads. I’ve always been creative but I had no idea that producing videos would spark an enormous passion within me. I became enthralled with creating videos and I enjoyed it so much that I started a video marketing agency. I would promote my video services to companies in the roofing industry and one of those companies is called Hail Trace. I created a nice scripted video for them to assist with their launch of a new feature of their hail mapping software that would allow a roofer to simply input an address into their software and then the software would tell the roofer the percentage likelihood that the roof was hailed out. This feature blew my mind and it felt like it was what I was always looking for in terms of technology that would allow me to conduct a virtual roof inspection.

For some reason the feature was never released and Hail Trace seemed to have put an end to it, however, I never forgot about that feature and I was already a regular user of their software. I continued to use their software and I also applied my own expertise to fill in gaps in the analysis that they provide.  The gaps are things like the age of the existing roof, the quality of the existing roof, the hail activity history on that address, and the location of the home relative to the eye of the hail storm. My years of experience being a roofing contractor and training others to become roofing contractors also gives me a certain unique intuition when performing an analysis and I can come up with my own percentage likelihood of whether or not a roof is damaged by hail.

Virtual Roof Inspections in 2024

I started using this approach this year in 2024 and I now am performing completely virtual roof inspections personally. The insurance agents that know me simply send me an address and I send them back the percentage likelihood that roof is hailed out and requires an insurance claim. When I determine that the roof is 70% or lower than I will still send a project manager to get drone images or climb the roof and get actual photos that I can analyze. I have had some homeowners send me photos of the roof themselves just be using their phone and looking out their window that overlooks the roof. If I have an actual photo then I can make a determination with 100% accuracy.

Conclusion

This is a new and exciting way to do business as a roofer in Colorado and I am looking forward to finding new ways to save time and money in the roofing and share these ways with others in the roofing industry through my consulting.

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