storm

How to Prioritize Streets After a Hailstorm

A ranking method for storm canvassing built on reported hail size, housing stock age, and where your first jobs already are.

A hail event hands you more addresses than you can work. The question is not which neighborhoods to knock. It is which street to knock first, because the window closes and the order determines how much of the swath you get to.

Here is a ranking method and the reasoning behind each factor.

Factor one: reported hail size, at the report level

Start with the storm reports themselves rather than an interpolated hail map.

NOAA's Storm Prediction Center publishes its severe weather database files, with hail and damaging wind events dating from 1955, and serves day-level storm reports with downloadable CSV and KML going back to June 1999. The archival version lives in the NCEI Storm Events Database, which holds data from January 1950 forward and will issue a certified report on request.

Work from the individual reports because they carry three things a heat map hides: the stated size, the time, and the location of the actual observation. The times give you the direction and speed of travel, which tells you where the core was between reports.

Rank sub-areas by the largest reported size nearby. Not because size determines damage, which it does not, but because the density of genuine findings and completed claims will be highest where the stones were biggest, and your first jobs are what make the rest of the week work.

What hail size does and does not justify

Be careful about the claim you build on this factor, because the trade routinely overstates it.

The Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety tested commercially available asphalt shingles with laboratory hail and reported in Hail Impact Performance of Asphalt Shingles that "All products tested with 1.5-in. laboratory hail were rated as Good or Excellent performers," and that in their new state "both IR and non-IR asphalt shingles should offer good protection for 1.5 in. or smaller hail impacts." IBHS states its own limits: it did not test every available shingle, and products were tested "in their new state."

That last phrase is the operative one for prioritization, and there is published work on it. An IBHS-affiliated paper in Frontiers in Materials, Sub-severe hail: the missing piece in assessing asphalt shingle risk in North America, notes the long-standing industry view it set out to test, attributing to Marshall (1999) the suggestion that "hailstones smaller than 25.4 mm (1 inch) rarely cause functional damage." Its own lab finding was that stones "25.4 mm (1 in.) and below can cause nearly 30% of the granule loss of a 50.8 mm (2 in.) hailstone," and that weathered shingles hit by sub-severe hail could "significantly reduce the roof cover's resistance to future large hail events."

This is one lab study with a defined impact scenario and it does not establish a field damage threshold. Do not translate it into a claim at a door.

What it does justify is a prioritization decision: age of the roof interacts with hail size. A new roof under 1.5 inch hail and a well-weathered roof under the same hail are not the same prospect. Which leads directly to the second factor.

Factor two: housing stock age, which is a proxy for roof age

Roof age is the variable you most want and the one you cannot see from the street. Housing stock age is the best available proxy and it is free.

Most suburban subdivisions were built out in a window of two or three years. Every original asphalt roof in them is therefore the same vintage, and in a hail market many of them have already been replaced once on the same schedule. A subdivision built in the late 1990s, replaced after a storm in the 2010s, is now carrying roofs in a very different condition from a subdivision completed last year.

Sources that give you this without walking the street:

County assessor parcel data, which usually carries year built and sometimes roof material.
The Census Bureau's American Housing Survey, which publishes housing and owner characteristics by metro area.
Permit records, which in many jurisdictions will show prior reroofs by address.

Rank subdivisions with older original roofs above new builds at the same reported hail size. And deprioritize the brand-new subdivision at the center of the swath, which looks like the best target on a heat map and is often the worst: new roofs, builder warranties, and homeowners who will be told by the builder to call them instead.

Factor three: proximity to a job you already have

This is the factor most teams underuse and it may be the strongest one.

"We are replacing the roof at 412" is the only opener in storm canvassing that is locally specific, verifiable, and not a claim about the homeowner's own roof. It does three things no pitch can do: it establishes you are already working here, it gives the homeowner a neighbor to ask, and it answers the "are you from out of town" question before it is asked.

So the sequencing rule is to work outward from your first jobs rather than jumping across the swath to the next hot spot. A completed job generates a radius of credibility, and the radius is small. Spend it.

Practically, that means your map needs to show sold and in-progress jobs as a distinct layer, visible to every rep, updated daily. A rep who does not know there is a job two streets over cannot use it.

Factor four: uniformity, because repetition is the real multiplier

A street where every house is the same model with the same roof is worth more than a street with the same number of doors and six different housing types.

The reason is mechanical. A rep who has had the same conversation about the same roof forty times is better at the forty-first. They know the model's weak points, they know what the inspection usually finds, and they can reference the neighbors by name. On a mixed street every door resets that.

Uniformity also compounds with factor three, because a reference from a visually identical house two doors down is a stronger reference than one from a different kind of house.

Factor five: access and walkability

Prosaic and it matters more than it sounds. Rank up:

Subdivisions with a closed loop and one or two entrances, which can be walked without crossing an arterial.
Street grids with short blocks and front doors facing the street.

Rank down:

Gated communities, which are often a dead loss for door-to-door regardless of hail size.
Rural acreage, where the doors per mile collapse and the day turns into driving.
Streets with long driveways and setbacks, which can halve a rep's door count per hour.

A street with great hail and terrible walkability loses to a street with decent hail and a tight loop, because the second one gets covered.

Factor six: jurisdiction

Not a ranking factor so much as a gate. Permit rules are municipal, and a hail corridor crosses city lines without regard for them. Cities differ on whether a permit is required, who issues it, and what hours are allowed, and the hours vary enough to change how a street gets worked.

Florida is a useful illustration of the range. Orlando's code makes it unlawful to conduct business "between 5:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m. or at any time on Sundays," per Orlando City Code Chapter 45. Miami-Dade County's section 21-29.1.1 instead makes it unlawful to solicit on private residential property "between the hours of 7:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m., without first obtaining the consent of the property owner," and applies that countywide.

A street in a 9-to-5 city cannot be worked in the evening at all. That is not a minor scheduling detail, it changes which streets you can cover with the staff you have, so it belongs in the ranking rather than in a compliance briefing afterward.

Putting it together

A workable composite, applied to each candidate sub-area:

Largest nearby reported hail size, from the individual NOAA reports.
Original roof vintage, from parcel and permit data.
Distance to your nearest sold or in-progress job.
Housing stock uniformity.
Walkable door density.
Permitted hours and permit status in that jurisdiction.

Work the top of that list first and re-rank every few days as jobs land, because factor three moves.

What you should not do is rank by total door count. The biggest subdivision in the swath is a tempting first target and it is usually the one where you will be sixth in line, because everyone else ranked it the same way.

Canvass Pro overlays the storm swath on the door map and can route a loop through the doors inside it, so a priority order becomes a walkable route rather than a list.