Insurance Claims Process
Most of what That One Construction Co. does, close to 80% of our jobs, starts with storm damage and an insurance claim, not a homeowner shopping for a new roof. If a hailstorm or a wind event just hit your house and you’re trying to figure out what happens next, here’s how the process actually works.
It Starts With a Free Inspection
Before anything gets filed, we walk the roof and tell you what we find. Hail and wind damage isn’t always visible from the ground: granule loss, bruised shingles, and lifted flashing can look like nothing from the driveway while representing real, claimable damage. Or the roof might have taken a hit that doesn’t rise to the level of a claim. We use the same 50% threshold insurance companies use to define a total loss: if less than half the roof is damaged, we’ll say repair, not replace, even when that’s the smaller job for us. We’re not going to tell you to file a claim you don’t need.
Filing the Claim Is Yours to Do
This is a legal distinction worth being clear about upfront: the claim goes through you, the homeowner. We don’t file it on your behalf. What we do is give you an honest read on the damage so you know whether filing makes sense, and once you’ve started the process with your carrier, we take over the parts that don’t legally have to come from you.
We Meet the Adjuster On-Site
Once your insurer schedules an adjuster to inspect the damage, we meet them there. We’ve done this hundreds of times, so we know what carriers are looking for, what they tend to miss on a roof-level inspection, and what a fair scope of work actually looks like for the damage that’s there. That’s the difference between an estimate that covers the repair and one that gets revised twice.
Pushing Back When an Estimate Falls Short
If siding is part of your claim, matching is often the biggest fight. Most policies now exclude matching unless you have a specific matching endorsement. If your siding is discontinued and you don’t have that endorsement, your insurer may only cover the damaged section, which can leave different colors on different sides of the house. We work to determine your matching or endorsement situation before we file, so you know what to expect going in.
What a Realistic Timeline Looks Like
Best case, a claim can move from inspection to approval in about 30 days. We’re not going to promise you that’s typical, though. Contested claims, ones with an underpaid estimate, a reinspection, or a matching dispute, can run for months. We’d rather tell you that now than let you assume this wraps up in a couple of weeks and have you frustrated in week six. Money moves through you throughout the process; we don’t have a direct payment arrangement with your carrier, and we invoice you once the work is done.
Once the Claim Is Approved
We schedule the work and send you a prep email beforehand: what to expect, what to have ready, what the crew will do on-site and in what order. Most roofs are done in a day, though we tell homeowners to plan for a couple in case weather or scope changes things. Cleanup is a stated standard on every job, not an afterthought: magnetic passes for nails, landscaping protected before the crew starts, garage doors boarded during the work. The goal is that when we’re done, you can’t tell we were there, aside from the new roof.
Why Homeowners Let Us Handle Their Claim
Insurance work isn’t a side business for us, it’s most of what we do. That means the staff who talk to your insurer daily aren’t juggling it between other jobs, it’s their primary role. Joe Huber has been doing this since 1996, which is long enough to know most of the ways an adjuster estimate can miss something and most of the ways a crew can cut a corner nobody notices until years later. And we’re privately owned, no outside investors telling us how to run a job. A lot of roofing companies have been bought up by private equity in the last several years, and the incentive structure that comes with that tends to pressure materials and crew time in ways that don’t show up until long after the invoice is paid.
Start With a Free Inspection
If a storm just hit your house, the first step is the same one it always is: a free inspection and a straight answer about whether you have a claim worth filing.
Call or fill out the contact form to get started.