After the storm, homeowners check reviews before they call a roofer

A hailstorm or high winds roll through, and by the next morning half the street is looking up at their roofs. The calls come in fast. So do the out-of-town crews knocking on doors with clipboards.

Homeowners know this. Storm-related scams are common enough that the Federal Trade Commission publishes warnings after weather disasters. Its advice: hire only licensed and insured contractors, get a written contract, never pay in cash, and pay in full only after the work is done.

That leaves a homeowner with a real problem. A dozen roofers say they're local, licensed, and trustworthy. How do they tell who actually is? For most, the first move is the same one they make for any local business: they read the reviews. BrightLocal's 2026 survey found that 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses.

For a roof, those reviews carry extra weight. A new roof is one of the biggest checks a homeowner ever writes, and research shows reviews matter most on expensive decisions. Northwestern University's Spiegel Research Center found that displaying reviews lifted conversion 190% for lower-priced products and 380% for higher-priced ones. That study looked at online retail, not roofing, but the pattern is easy to recognize: the more a decision costs, the harder people read the reviews.

Storm chasers can't fake what a local roofer has: a long record of real reviews from real neighbors, written over months and years. Recent ones matter most. BrightLocal found that 74% of consumers only care about reviews written in the last three months. A roofer whose newest review is from last spring looks a lot like the crew that drove in yesterday.

The time to build that record is before the storm, not after it. Every roof you finish between storm seasons is a chance to earn a review that will be sitting there when the next wave of calls comes in. And every one of those customers should get the same request, not just the ones you expect to be happy. Google's policy prohibits asking only the happy ones.

PorchPrompt handles that ask automatically. When a job is marked done, the homeowner gets a text with a direct link to your Google review page. By the time the next storm rolls through, your profile already shows the steady stream of real, recent work that out-of-town crews can't match.