Xiaoniu 小妞

It looks like lady luck floated through our neighborhood last year\ and throw very large hail at our houses, although, at the time I didn’t realize just how much damage our place suffered. I figured it was just trees and plants in the garden that took the hit. Apparently, our roof took a lot of hits too. Long story short this ‘act of God’ caused a lot of damage in our neighborhood and just about everybody is getting new roofs put on, including us.

It started with a fly-by-night company offering “free or cheap roofs”, which sounded to me like b.s. and I didn’t give it much thought for a couple weeks. Sure enough just about everybody around us had this company replace their roofs so I started to get curious how it was coming to be. I spoke to people and they told me that the hail storm that hit us last year damaged the roofs of most houses and that the insurance companies were replacing them. We called up our roofer (we were saving in preparation to have this guy do our roof next year) and had him inspect our place for damage. Sure enough he found it. We opened a claim and the insurance adjuster agreed and cut us a check on the spot. So, in a week or two our roofer will be out replacing the roof.

It’s just dumb luck that the storm did damage to the roof and we were planning to replace it in a year or two anyways. My neighbor that put on a new roof last fall got reimbursed by his insurance company without even asking; the insurance company came to him and told him that they would reimburse him for his roof since they were sure he had damage since every house on the street had been damaged. Not bad.

Now, back to the company that started all of the work in the area. I say they are fly-by-night because they seem to have started out of thin air and basically work by cell phone. No office. No phone number. Just a few crappy trucks with their company name attached to the trucks with magnets. My coworker happens to know the guy that “owns” or runs the company and claims he is nothing but garbage. I’ve dealt with the guy a couple times and he is very unprofessional. I am surprised that so many people chose to use them when their insurance would pay any roofer. We chose our roofer, but people may have been suckered into this guy’s speech about “his company getting the contract to do all insurance work in the neighborhood.” Bull shit.

They’re not the only ones being aggressive about finding customers (aka suckers). According to our insurance adjuster and our roofer there was also a number of out of state companies going around town putting up roofs. The insurance adjuster called them “store chasers”. They go around the country finding places where hail storms hit and get work by replacing roofs that were damaged. They go out to find work, not just wait for customers to come to them. I feel bad for anybody that uses any of these companies since they are not likely to be of any help if you need warranty work done and cannot be easily sued since they can just close up shop and reopen under another name. We’re going with a guy that has a good reputation and 26 years experience in the business. He’s not likely to screw us over.