The hail stops around six in the evening and the phone starts around seven. By the next morning you have forty voicemails, and the first hail storm roof inspection you run that week quietly sets the pattern for the next thirty. Whatever shortcuts you take on Tuesday, you will still be taking on Friday, because nobody invents a new process at address twenty-six.
So the work in the first 72 hours is not really roofing. It is deciding what a visit consists of, and then doing that same thing over and over while everything around you argues for improvisation.
Triage before you schedule anything
Take the calls in the order they came, then route them by street rather than by who sounded most upset. Six addresses in one subdivision is an afternoon. Six addresses scattered across the county is two days and a tank of fuel.
Be honest on the phone about when you can be there. "Thursday afternoon" that happens beats "tomorrow" that does not, and a homeowner who was told Thursday does not call three more times on Wednesday. Ask two questions while you have them: is anything actively coming inside, and has anyone already been on the roof. Water inside moves the address up the list. A roof somebody has already tarped changes what you are going to find, and you want to know that before you climb.
Every hail storm roof inspection runs the same way
Pick a walk order before the week starts and do not deviate from it. Mine is: ground level all the way around first, then elevations, then up, then slopes in a fixed rotation, then penetrations, then the gutters and downspouts on the way down.
Say the same things out loud in the same sequence. Which slope you are stepping onto. What you are looking at. What you can see and what you cannot tell from where you are standing. The narration is doing two jobs at once: the homeowner understands it in the moment, and anybody who watches the recording later can follow the walk without a map. The slope rotation itself is worked through in the slope-by-slope method.
The point of a fixed order is not tidiness. It is that on day three, tired, at the last house before dark, the order is the only thing keeping you from shooting the obvious slope and coming down.
Record before anything moves
Nothing gets picked up, swept, tarped, or straightened before the recording is running. Not the branch on the driveway, not the gutter section in the flowerbed, not the screen lying in the grass. Those are part of the condition you arrived to, and they are the first things people tidy away.
If a tarp is going on today, the roof underneath it gets recorded first, in full, in daylight if there is any left. Once the tarp is down you have lost that view until it comes off, and by then the weather has had a week at it. The larger case for this is in what storm damage documentation has to contain.
Same rule for the good parts. Film the slopes where you find nothing, and say out loud that you found nothing. A file containing only the bad slope tells a reader what you concluded, not what was there.
Let the homeowner watch it happen
The single biggest time saver in a storm week is not a faster walk. It is not having to do the walk twice.
Text the homeowner a link before you set the ladder. They tap it and watch in their phone browser, from the driveway or from work. No app to install, no account, and their own camera is never requested, which matters more than you would think when you are asking somebody to open a link from a contractor they met yesterday. They see the north slope while you are standing on it, they hear you say what you see, and the questions get asked at the moment they occur rather than in a callback on Thursday.
That is what turns one visit into the only visit. The homeowner who watched does not need a second appointment to be walked through photos, and the office does not need a second phone call to explain them. The whole viewer flow is on the how it works page.
The recording starts on its own and lands with the company, not on the inspector's phone. In a week where three people are working six days, that is the difference between a neighborhood survey and thirty unrelated camera rolls.
The shot list does not change either
Same shots, every address, whether the roof looks bad or looks untouched:
- All four elevations from the ground, wide.
- Each slope, wide, then medium, then tight on anything specific.
- Soft metals: gutters, downspouts, vents, flashing, any exposed metal that shows a strike clearly.
- Penetrations one at a time, with the surrounding field in the same frame.
- The area you counted in, if you count within a marked square, filmed with the number said out loud.
- Interior only where something is visibly coming in, and only what you can see.
Consistency is what makes thirty roofs readable as one week of work. It also makes your own life easier at eight in the evening, because you are not deciding anything; you are running a list.
Day three
If the first two days went the way they should, day three is unremarkable. Every address has a dated recording of the roof in the condition you found it, taken in the same order, narrated in the same voice, with the homeowner present for most of them. Nobody is calling to ask what you saw, because they watched you see it.
That is the whole ambition of the first 72 hours. Not to get everything decided, and not to get ahead of anybody. Just to make sure that when the tarps come off in three weeks, there is an honest record of what was underneath them. If you want to try it on a real storm week rather than a demo, every plan has a 7-day free trial with no card, and the plan details are on the pricing page.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.