How do I know if I really have hail damage?

Genuine hail bruising is round, soft to the touch, has the granules knocked off, and turns up randomly across every slope. The giveaway is the soft metal. If the gutters, the vent caps and the flashing are unmarked while the shingles are covered in marks, whatever made those marks was not hail.

Do I have to sue to get a claim paid properly?

Almost never, and there are two steps before it. Ask for a reinspection with your own roofing company present. If that fails, most Texas homeowner policies contain an appraisal clause, which is a way of settling the amount without a courtroom. Suing is the last step, not the first.

What is the 60 day rule?

Chapter 542A of the Texas Insurance Code. Before suing an insurer over damage caused by weather, you have to give written notice at least 60 days beforehand, saying the specific amount you say is owed and what the insurer did or failed to do. Skip it and you can lose the right to recover attorney fees.

Is there a state roofing license I can check in Texas?

No. Texas does not license roofers, which means there is no register to look anybody up on. Everything therefore rests on the written contract, the references and whether the company has an address in this county.

Roofing in Waco and McLennan County

Central Texas gets hail the way other places get rain. The roof part of that is simple. The insurance part is where people lose money, and that is mostly fixable by knowing it.

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What hail damage really looks like
The 60 day rule before you sue
One call, one local company

Hail is the whole story here. Central Texas sits where the storm tracks put a lot of it, and a roof in McLennan County will meet hail worth arguing about several times in its life. That is not unusual and it is not a crisis. It is just the thing your roof is built to survive and the thing your policy is written around.

What trips people up is never the roofing. It is the paperwork either side of it. A quarter of the people who think they have hail damage do not, and a quarter of the people who genuinely do get talked out of it by an adjuster's first visit and never push back. Both of those cost real money, and both come down to knowing what hail actually does to a roof and what the rules are once a claim is open.

Texas gives you less help than most states on the contractor side. There is no roofing license here, no state board, nobody to complain to about workmanship. What Texas does give you is a fairly specific set of rules about insurance claims, and those rules are worth knowing because they are the only real structure in the whole process.

The three pages below split it up: what hail damage looks like, how the claim works, and what the job actually costs once you get there. If you would rather skip to the end, the number at the top reaches one roofing company working this county.

Have a look at the towns or what the pages cover. There is also a note on what this site is and how to get hold of somebody.

Towns

Robinson, Lorena, Bellmead, Beverly Hills and Crawford sit under the same storm tracks. Say where the house is and it gets sorted out on the call.

What the pages cover

What is the roof doing

This reaches one roofing company working McLennan County. A single company, no bidding panel, and your number stops there.

The questions people actually ask

How do I know if I really have hail damage?: Genuine hail bruising is round, soft to the touch, has the granules knocked off, and turns up randomly across every slope. The giveaway is the soft metal. If the gutters, the vent caps and the flashing are unmarked while the shingles are covered in marks, whatever made those marks was not hail.
Do I have to sue to get a claim paid properly?: Almost never, and there are two steps before it. Ask for a reinspection with your own roofing company present. If that fails, most Texas homeowner policies contain an appraisal clause, which is a way of settling the amount without a courtroom. Suing is the last step, not the first.
What is the 60 day rule?: Chapter 542A of the Texas Insurance Code. Before suing an insurer over damage caused by weather, you have to give written notice at least 60 days beforehand, saying the specific amount you say is owed and what the insurer did or failed to do. Skip it and you can lose the right to recover attorney fees.
Is there a state roofing license I can check in Texas?: No. Texas does not license roofers, which means there is no register to look anybody up on. Everything therefore rests on the written contract, the references and whether the company has an address in this county.