On May 27, 2017 a hail storm hit the Wyndham subdivision located in Glen Allen and we experienced unprecedented competition in our service area. Roofers from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, Florida, and Northern Virginia swarmed into Glen Allen like vultures, knocking on customer’s doors repeatedly, wearing people down to get “insurance approved” roofs installed.
One company had the word “HAIL” in their phone number. Another company had a sales force of 13 people. They camped out in the restaurants on Nuckols Road for high visibility. They repeatedly mailed out fliers saying, “Your roof was damaged by hail!” Neighbors that we spoke to said they were getting tired of these aggressive salesmen knocking on their doors and calling them and telling them that they needed to get their roofs replaced. Eight (Yes! 8!) different companies installed roofs on the street that Debbie and Nathan live on and none of those customers contacted our company, the local roofer, for an estimate.
Approximately 3000 roofs were replaced as a result of that storm and according to our experienced roofers, only a small percentage of those roofs needed replacing. The big insurance companies denied these unsubstantiated claims. Storm chasing roofers track hail storms and dispatch their “vultures” to the area and saturate the market with lies, brainwashing, and fear-based information. They began convincing the ESL (English as a Second Language) customers to take the bait first and worked their way through the subdivisions in Wyndham and Twin Hickory like professional piranhas. Unfortunately, with our climate crisis creating extreme weather, this type of competition will become “normal.” Buyer beware.