Guest Post By: Mark Craney (Authentic Restoration LLC)
Inaccurate measurements are a significant profit killer in the roofing industry. This is even more true if your business is involved in insurance roof replacements. At Authentic Restoration, we use RoofSnap to measure roofs at all our locations; Indianapolis, IN, Birmingham, AL, Charlotte and Raleigh, NC (http://authenticrestoration.biz/locations/north-carolina/roofing-contractors-raleigh/).
Insurance jobs generally pay reasonably well, somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 per square. The insurance companies most often use an EagleView Report to obtain their roof takeoffs. There are several potential problems with this from the Contractor’s perspective. The EagleView reports are done by Technicians who not only have never been on the property they are measuring, many aren’t even US Citizens. Often, the images they are using are of lower quality such as in Birmingham, AL where aerial flyovers were last performed in 2006. Those images are 10 years old and taken with outdated technology. The properties may have tree coverage which may prevent the technicians from seeing parts of the roof. This leads to roof reports that are too small. Too small means less money for the Contractor or wasted time supplementing with the insurance company.
RoofSnap allows the user to sketch the roof on an iPad while at the Customer’s property. Google satellite images are included with the standard RoofSnap license. We prefer to add on the NearMap images which provide recent multiple aerial images taken over the past 3 years. We also are now equipping each of our offices with DJI Drones. A drone may be flown directly above the house where measurements are needed. This image can be imported into RoofSnap. This image is then calibrated using one reference measurement taken on site. This approach is very, very accurate.
At $300 per square, missing low by 5% on a 40 square roof can cost you $600 right off the bat. However, there are other costs that may be less obvious but all too real. How much does the roof crew cost when they’re sitting idle waiting on materials to finish up the job? Someone has to drive to the supplier’s location, pick up materials and then drive them back to the site. This represents lost labor and mileage costs. Even going over by any significant amount costs lost profits. Someone has to load that material up, return it to the supplier, pick up a receipt and turn this in at the office.
We recently had a couple of insurance jobs where RoofSnap paid for itself many times over. The first one was a monster roof, 130 squares with a 14 pitch. The insurance company’s initial scope of loss was well lower than our own. One of the big problems was a difference in material quantities. By utilizing our high quality RoofSnap Roof Report, we were able to increase the job by over $20,000.
On another job located in a nice subdivision on a lake, but in a rural area, the initial insurance offering was miserable on a 50 SQ roof replacement. We submitted one email to the Desk Adjuster along with our RoofSnap Roof Report and our Roof Waste Calculation Worksheet. In 3 days, we were able to increase that roof replacement from $11,300 to $19,600, an increase of $8,600! We use the Roof Waste Calculation Worksheet on nearly all of our jobs, both insurance and retail. Inputting extremely accurate data from the RoofSnap Roof Report allows us to quote with confidence and order materials with great efficiency. RoofSnap is one of the best productivity tools we’ve used since starting our business 8 years ago. The team at RoofSnap is constantly releasing improvements that make a great tool even better.
Our roof waste calc worksheet (http://authenticrestoration.biz/contractors/roof-waste-calculation/) is based on Excel. It is something we use on nearly every insurance claim to help get the correct waste % paid and to get starter and cap paid as separate line items. At Authentic Restoration, we believe it is best to share this tool with other Contractors at no charge in order to have it become visible among the insurance companies and common practice. Hundreds of Contractors across the country already use it. Click on the link at the start of the paragraph to request yours.
