Let me start by saying, all of the best practices in this post should be carried out in a spirit of honesty. We are not advocating for or teaching you how to trick, mislead, or scam your home insurance company. At Evergreen, integrity is one of our core values, alongside customer service. This post is shared in the spirit of helping customers make the best use of their home insurance, in ways that are completely legitimate and in many cases unknown.
We aren’t interested in pursuing anything that would be considered “out of bounds” or more formally - “insurance fraud.” We aren’t interested in bending the rules. In fact, our strategy for helping our customers with insurance claims is quite the opposite.
Insurance companies work within a set of specific rules, as do roofing contractors. We want to make sure our customers are familiar with those rules and how to use them to their advantage, ensuring their roof is taken care of the way it’s supposed to be.
Verify That Your Roof Is Legitimately Damaged
This is where the honesty starts. Homeowner’s don’t need to bother contacting their insurance company unless they’ve verified actual damage to their roof.
If you’ve recently experienced major storms in your area, then the first thing you need to do is schedule a roof inspection with a reputable company. If you can’t find a company on word of mouth recommendation, then check verified google reviews, the Better Business Bureau, and various social media outlets (Nextdoor, Facebook, etc.) to vet the companies in your area.
Don’t sign up to work with just any roofer, and be especially careful with door to door salespeople, after a major storm. They could be legitimate (see the vetting recommendations above), but big storms also bring along shady roofing companies.
These companies send salespeople out into neighborhoods with instructions to knock on every door and get as many insurance claims filled as possible, whether there’s real roof damage or not. Working with overzealous roofers like this will be a frustrating waste of your time at best or a potential case of insurance fraud at worst.
At Evergreen Roofing, we dedicate ourselves to keeping up with how insurance companies evaluate storm damage. We know what they’re looking for, and we know when it’s worth filing a claim.
For example, there’s a difference between indentations on your roof caused by a hail storm and indentations caused by wear and tear (known as blistering in the roofing world). If you file an insurance claim on blistering, your insurance isn’t going to cover anything, as blistering is not storm-related.
If the shingles on your roof are lifted, meaning they have come unglued from the bottom edge, insurance is likely to classify this as normal wear and tear. Insurance considers true wind damage to be when shingles are blown off or blown back and creased at the top.
Here’s an example of a creased shingle (wind damage)
Here’s a blown off shingle, which is the most obvious type of wind damage.
Here’s an example of real, consistent hail damage.
Here’s the bottom line. Don’t let just anyone inspect your roof for storm damage. Make sure you work with a roofer who knows how to identify real damage and knows how to work with insurance claims.
Review The Details of Your Home Insurance Policy
What you’re doing here is weighing the damage to your roof against the coverage provided in your insurance policy, then deciding if you should file an insurance claim.
The better your insurance policy is, the more likely it can be used to replace your roof.
If you went with one of the cheapest policies you can find, then it’s likely that you’ll have to come out of pocket, beyond your deductible, to get your roof replaced. Always make sure you check your coverage before you file a claim.
Insurance policies are long, verbose, dry, and complex. If you’re trying to understand how your roof is covered, here are a few things to look for specifically.
ACV/RCV
Do you have “Actual Cost Value (ACV)” or “Replacement Cost Value (RCV)” coverage on your roof? This is a foreign question to most people, but it’s very important to know the distinction.
ACV means that in the event of a claim approval, insurance will give you a check for what your roof was actually worth at the time of the damage. So if your roof was 25 years old when it was damaged, insurance will give you a check for the value of a 25 year old roof. In other words, an ACV policy takes a roof’s depreciated value into account, meaning your insurance will pay out less money on an approved claim.
ACV policies do not deduct depreciation from labor, which means homeowners still receive a good payout in most cases. For example, we worked with a customer who had tree damage on a 15 year old roof with an ACV policy, and he had to pay about $1,900 in depreciation on top of a $1,500 deductible, but his roof cost $16,000. This means he still got about a $11,500 payout from his insurance company.
ACV and RCV can seem complicated, but the main difference boils down to this:
Homeowners with ACV policies have to pay the depreciation amount on top of their deductible. While RCV policies only require homeowners to pay their deductible out of pocket for a roof replacement.
ACV policies have become a lot more popular in the Kentucky/Indiana region since the start of 2024, as a response to the high volume of roof replacement claims and insurance payouts. It’s important to check your policy in this area, so you know exactly what you have to pay for before you file an insurance claim.
Deductible
Before you file a claim on your roof, make sure you know your deductible amount. If you pay for a better policy, then you’ll likely have a lower deductible (typically $1,000 - $1,500). If you have a less expensive policy, then you’re deductible could be closer to $2,500+.
I’ve even seen some home insurance policies, where the deductible is set to change with the housing market, based on a percentage of the home’s value. So if your deductible is 1% of your home’s value (say $500,000), then your deductible is $5,000.
Another thing to look out for is special wind and hail deductibles. Your policy might be set up for a $1,000 deductible on less common damage (fire, flood, etc), but then it has a $6,000 deductible for wind and hail damage specifically.
Policies can vary in many different ways. Just make sure you know yours, so the claim process doesn’t include any bad surprises.
Building Code coverage
Roofing projects, like all construction projects, are governed by building code. For example, when we take off an old roof, we sometimes find roofs that didn’t have special ice & water underlayment in the valleys (where ice and water most often collect). In accordance with ICC (International Code Council) standards, we have to put on that ice & water underlayment to bring the roof up to code.
However, the standard for home insurance policies is to get you back to where you were before the event of loss/damage. If you didn’t have the special underlayment before, insurance doesn’t have to pay for it when you get your new roof. You would have to come out of pocket to bring your roof up to code. Unless you have “building code coverage” included in your insurance policy. This is another area, where you don’t want to be caught off guard.
Statute of Limitations/Date of Coverage
The statute of limitations from date of loss (storm date) to officially filing a claim is two years. In most cases, people will file a claim soon after their roof incurs storm damage. But sometimes there’s damage on a roof for a while before it’s discovered.
Maybe you’re getting ready to sell your house, you have your roof inspected, and you find out it’s riddled with hail damage. What do you do? When did this happen? Is it too late to file a claim? At Evergreen, when we do inspections for our customers, we research storm dates at their address, and we share the most recent storm dates with them. If we have a recent storm date to work with, then we can prove to insurance companies that the claim is being filed within the statute of limitations.
Along similar lines, and this one is a bit more obvious, but you can only file a claim for a storm event that occurred after your insurance coverage began. In other words, if you bought a house in May 2024, or even just changed insurance companies in May 2024, you can’t file a claim for a hail storm that took place in March. Your coverage doesn’t apply to that event, since it wasn’t active at that time.
The point of examining your policy for these details is to simply figure out if filing a claim is worth it or not.
If you have real damage, you can pay your deductible, and there’s potential for a large payout from your insurance company, then the answer is probably yes. Either way, it’s just important to be informed.
Part 2 Next Week
I’ve given you a lot to look into for now. I’ll be back next week to post more best practices for filing a claim, focusing more on the claim process itself.
If you’d like to schedule a free inspection and consultation with the Evergreen Roofing team, you can do so here.