Red Flags

After a storm comes through Cherokee County, the trucks show up. Sometimes it's the next day. They park on your street and work it house by house, and there's a knock at your door right around dinner.

I want to walk through the knock, because the knock is the whole business model. A roofer you call is one thing. A roofer who found you is another, and the pitch that starts at your front door follows a pattern. Once you've heard it described, you'll recognize it.

It starts with your neighbors. Three or four houses on your street are getting new roofs, paid for by insurance, and yours will too if you act while the crew's in the neighborhood. Sometimes the number is specific — eleven houses on the street have damage. The number is supposed to do something to you. It's supposed to make you feel like the only person on the street who hasn't figured this out yet.

Then it gets to the signature. Not an estimate, not a business card — a form. It might be called a contingency agreement, or an inspection agreement, and buried in it is language that hands the company control of your insurance claim, sometimes including the right to collect the insurance checks. This gets signed before anyone has been on your roof. Before anyone knows whether you have damage at all.

Hold that thought, because it's the important one. Everything else is decoration.

The deductible comes up, and this is where I'd lean in if I were you. A company that offers to cover your deductible, or work it into the price, or hand you a gift card for the same amount, is offering to help you commit insurance fraud. Georgia homeowners sign the claim. Your name is on it, your policy is on it. The company will be three counties away by the time an adjuster starts asking questions, and "the roofer told me it was fine" is not a defense anybody's used successfully.

The damage itself gets described in ways that don't survive a ladder. You'll be shown an aerial photo with circles on it — I wrote about that in the last section, and it's still the same trick. Or the damage gets pointed at from the yard. Hail damage is diagnosed on the roof, with chalk, by somebody looking at individual shingles and the soft metals. Anybody who can tell you your roof is totaled from your front walk is selling you something, and it isn't an inspection.

Then there's the paperwork problem, which is really a paperwork absence. No written estimate you can take inside and read. No scope of work. The truck has a magnetic sign instead of a name painted on it, and the address on the flyer is a post office box or nothing at all. Georgia doesn't license roofers — there's no state roofing license here, which surprises people — so the words "licensed and insured" on a door hanger mean whatever the person printing it wanted them to mean. What actually means something is a certificate of insurance with the company's name on it, and a company that has one will send it to you without a fight.

Last one, and it's the simplest. The deposit. A company that wants a large check before work starts, made out in a way that doesn't match the name on the paperwork, is a company you might never see again. It has happened in this county, more than once, and the homeowners it happened to were not stupid people. They were people who got knocked on at the right moment.

None of this means every out-of-town company after a storm is crooked. Big storms do bring in legitimate help; local companies get buried and can't answer every call. It means the decision shouldn't happen at your front door with somebody's clipboard under your nose. A real roof problem on Tuesday is the same problem on Friday. Close the door politely. Then call somebody local and ask them to come look.