The Satellite Report

A while back I got a call about a small roof leak in a house here in Cherokee County. Went out, found it in about ten minutes. Plumbing vent pipe boot had failed, water had gotten in around it, and there was a small patch of rotted decking underneath. Replace the boot, replace the decking, patch in the shingles — $500. The roof itself was about twelve years old and in decent shape.

The homeowner was almost confused by the quote. Not because it was high. Because it wasn't.

While we were talking, she told me why. Another company had already been out to look at the same leak. They never found it. What they did instead was walk the roof, come back down, and tell her she had extensive hail damage and needed to file an insurance claim for a full replacement.

I had just been on that roof. There wasn't a single hail hit on it. Nothing on the soft metals — and this house had a section of copper roofing, which is about the easiest surface there is to dent. Hail that damages shingles leaves copper looking like it was beaten up with golf balls. Hers was clean.

But here's the part I still have trouble believing, and I only believe it because she showed me the report. This company had sent her a satellite image of her own house, and on the image were dozens of little circles. Their claim was that their satellite imagery could detect hail hits on a roof, and each circle was one.

Satellites cannot see hail hits on your roof. I want to be very clear about that, because the report looked official and I understand why a homeowner would take it seriously. Somebody at that company sat down with an aerial photo of her house and drew circles on it.

I have no idea how many claims that report template has generated. And the ugly truth is the math works for them. Some percentage of insurance claims get approved whether or not the damage is real — adjusters are human, they're overloaded after storms, things slip through. The margin on an insurance-paid roof replacement is high enough that a company can eat the rejections and still come out ahead. The report isn't a mistake. It's a product.

She got her boot and her decking fixed for $500 and kept her twelve-year-old roof, which had years left in it. The other version of that story is a fraudulent claim on her insurance record and a replacement she didn't need.