Finding storm-damaged homes systematically beats driving the neighborhood and guessing. Here's the actual stack.
Most storm-restoration roofing work goes to whichever contractor reaches affected homeowners first. The contractor with the best system for identifying storm-damaged homes — not the biggest crew or the loudest marketing — wins the bulk of the replacements in any given event.
Below is the realistic 2026 stack for finding storm-damaged homes systematically, in order from highest leverage to lowest.
NOAA publishes confirmed severe weather events — hail, wind, tornadoes, precipitation — down to the zip-code level, updated within minutes of confirmation. It's free, public domain, and updates every 15 minutes. The data includes event type, magnitude, location, time, and path.
For storm-restoration roofing specifically, the events that matter are: hail 1" or larger, sustained winds over 60 mph, tornadoes of any rating, and major precipitation events that produce flashing failures.
Get the data: NOAA's Storm Events Database is searchable at ncdc.noaa.gov/stormevents. The NWS API at api.weather.gov also publishes real-time alerts.
Not every home in a storm path needs a new roof. Homes with roofs under 8 years old usually don't qualify for insurance replacement even after a hail event. Homes with roofs over 18 years old often need replacement regardless of any specific storm.
Roof age can be estimated from:
Cross-referencing storm events with roof age narrows the candidate list from "every home in the affected zip" to "every home with both storm exposure AND an aging roof" — usually a 5-10x improvement in lead quality.
Once you have a candidate list, vision scoring on recent imagery can confirm whether visible damage signals match the storm event. Specifically:
This is the layer Roffy automates. You can do it manually — open Google Earth, zoom into impacted addresses, visually inspect — but it's slow at scale and prone to fatigue.
The final layer is always physical. Even the best-scoring storm-impacted home needs a contractor on the ground to confirm and quote. Field methods that work:
Field verification on a pre-filtered candidate list converts 5-10x better than door-knocking blind.
You can build this stack yourself. NOAA data is free. Parcel records are public. Satellite imagery is available through Maxar, Planet, or USGS. Google Street View is free for manual inspection (paid API for programmatic). Permit and tax records vary by county.
The build effort is real — county-by-county permit ingestion alone is a multi-month engineering project. Most contractors use a tool that pre-builds the stack and ships scored leads directly. Roffy is one such tool. There are others — evaluate on cost per closed job, not features.
Storm events appear in the database within 15 minutes of confirmation by a National Weather Service office. For real-time monitoring, the NWS alerts API publishes warnings as they're issued (often before the storm itself has hit).
For obvious damage — missing shingles, tarps, debris, structural failures — yes, with high accuracy. For subtle damage like hail bruising that's invisible from above, satellite alone isn't enough; you need ground-level verification. The combination of satellite + Street View + ground inspection is what produces reliable damage identification.
Probably not. The per-county engineering cost (permit ingestion, parcel matching, vision model maintenance) usually exceeds 12-24 months of subscription fees to a tool that's already built it. Build it yourself if you want a national footprint and have engineering resources; subscribe if you want to focus on the field work that actually closes deals.
NOAA Storm Events Database (free), Google Earth (free for manual inspection), and your county's GIS portal (free in most U.S. counties). The combination gets you ~70% of the value of a paid tool at $0/month, with a much higher per-lead time cost.
Exclusive territory. AI-scored leads. Published pricing. Live in 18 metros across the storm belt.