How Tech is Changing the Roofing Industry

By Tim Bruffey, VP of Innovation, Accurence.

As tech improves, so do roofers.

When we got back from the 2019 International Roofing Expo in Nashville, we got to talking about the ways in which a modern roofing tradeshow reflects the ways the roofing industry has changed over the years. Long story short, it’s a lot!

We remember our first roofing expo nearly 20 years ago. It was all about shingles, gutters, waterproofing membranes, and other roofing materials. Technology? Sure, there was the chemistry of the roofing materials themselves, but technological innovations pretty much began and ended with the stuff that went onto the roof.

And a tradeshow today? You can’t walk 30 feet without seeing some sort of tech on display. You’ll see booths showing off camera-equipped drones, booths offering high-definition satellite imagery of job sites, booths demonstrating automated marketing and customer management software, and of course, the Accurence booth showcasing our mobile app for contractors.

Even within our company, profound changes that reflect technological advances are evident. Today, our app allows users to quickly create damage estimates by easily taking photos and captioning them with advanced speech-to-text capabilities. But some of our longtime customers may remember a time when our technology was based on a ‘smart pen’ that tracked the user’s hand movements as they documented roof damage on a precisely gridded-out piece of paper. It’s as outdated today as hand-sketching roof dimensions, but at the time it was a revolutionary change to the way a roofer worked—and it had surprising staying power! We had customers as late as 2012 going to a jobsite with their Accurence smart pen in hand.

As we walked the tradeshow floor, we were impressed with emerging technology that transforms a smartphone into a ground-based CAD creator that allows contractors to create a 3D model of a property without ever stepping foot on a roof. And similarly, we found EagleView’s foray into 3D aerial images that include a building’s elevations quite interesting. Demonstrating the data-driven nature of business, there were lots of examples of smart customer relationship management solutions. A good CRM automates many aspects of customer interactions that improve business relationships for both the buyers and seller, and we thought a highly customizable offering by CutterCroix focused on the needs of roofing contractors was particularly impressive.

Twenty years ago, we didn’t really see cell phones up on a roof, let alone see roofers regularly using them for business; they were too expensive and too limited to be good for anything beyond maybe a quick call to check in with the home office after a job was done—at least if there were any minutes remaining in that month’s calling plan and any juice left in its weak battery. Today, of course, smartphones and tablets are very much an essential part of the modern roofer’s toolbag.

And that’s a good thing for us! Accurence is built around the power of the smartphone, which really gets to the heart of how we stay competitive in the roofing industry in a technology-driven world. We continually have to look beyond our own four walls to identify opportunities and innovations; the goal for us is not competition for the sake of it, but mutually beneficial cooperation that leads to better end-products for our users.

Take our partnership with Xactimate, for example: By merging our expertise in automated scoping and insurance guidelines with their in-depth industry standard pricing, our integrated app simplifies what can be a very complicated process. But in a hypercompetitive environment, we aren’t satisfied with only a single high-quality partner. That’s why our apps integrate with JobNimbus and CutterCroix; it’s why we forged partnerships with both EagleView and Geomni for aerial CADs.

The upshot of all this technological integration? Proven mobile scoping solutions that allow even the newest team members to create repair estimates with the consistency and accuracy of the best in-house estimators. The end result is that roofers can do more of what they do best—not burn time doing paperwork. More time saved means more jobs completed. And we all know that means more money earned.

If history is any indicator—and it usually is!—we’re certain that the technological solutions we have in place today will be obsolete a decade from now. But we’re just as certain that our company mindset that embraces technology and innovation will keep us in a good position to help roofers solve tomorrow’s problems as well!

Accurence is passionate about building smart property insurance solutions, leading the way in automated adjusting solutions that help contractors confidently assess all homeowner peril types with its proprietary, patented technologies that automate the scope of repairs.

Learn more about Accurence.