The knock at the door after a storm

Hail crosses a subdivision. Forty roofs of the same age take the same stones. Within a week there are trucks on the street, and within a fortnight there are magnetic door signs you have never seen before. Some of those crews are local firms doing what local firms do after weather. Some are travelling operations that follow storms across several states a year and will be gone before the shingles finish sealing.

You cannot tell them apart from the truck, the shirt or the manner. All four are cheap. What does tell them apart is a short list of questions, and none of them are aggressive.

Four questions, in order

1. Where is your yard, and how long have you been at that address? A settled operation answers this without pausing. Note that a home address is a perfectly normal answer here: eleven of the county's registered roofing contractors are at addresses that read as houses. What you are listening for is whether there is an answer at all.
2. Who will actually be on my roof: your employees, or a crew you subcontract? Both are normal in this trade. Only one of them means the person selling has authority over the person installing.
3. Give me a written scope before anything is signed. Not a price on a clipboard. A document that says what is being torn off, what decking allowance is included, what ventilation is going on, what shingle line and colour, what underlayment, what flashing, and what happens to the gutters. If that cannot be produced, there is nothing to compare.
4. What exactly am I signing? This is the one that matters most and gets asked least.

What a roofer in Missouri may and may not say to you

Missouri has a specific statute for this trade, RSMo 407.725, and it exists because of what used to happen at doors after storms. Two parts of it are worth knowing.

Read that in plain terms: a roofing contractor may not act as your representative with your insurer, and may not advertise that it will. If somebody at your door offers to take the claim off your hands, they are describing something the statute does not permit a roofer to do. A separate part of the same statute bars a roofing contractor from advertising that it will absorb or rebate any part of a homeowner's insurance deductible, so an offer along those lines is also outside the rules rather than a bargain.

What a contractor is entirely free to do, and what a good one will do, is document. Photograph the roof. Measure it. Write a scope. Be on the roof when the adjuster is on the roof, as the contractor, so that the two of them are looking at the same slope and the same courses. The claim stays yours the whole way through, which is not a limitation so much as the point.

Violations of that statute are treated as an unfair practice under Missouri's merchandising practices law, which is why reputable companies in this market are careful about the wording and why the careless ones are worth avoiding for reasons beyond the wording.

You do not have to decide at the door

Nothing about a roof is an emergency in the sense that a decision has to be made in the next ten minutes. A tarp is an emergency response. A signature is not. If water is actually coming in, ask for the roof to be covered and deal with the contract afterwards, in daylight, with the document in front of you.

And if the street is turning over, use it. Ask the neighbour who had a roof done last spring who they used and whether the crew cleaned up. In a cohort street that is a better source than any review page, because it is about the same roof, the same pitch and the same weather.