The Best AI Tool for Scoring Roofs from Satellite and Street View

AI technology has changed roof inspections from a tedious, manual task into something a contractor can do from the truck before the first door. For roofing contractors, the ability to assess roof conditions quickly and accurately is a real edge. This guide looks at what actually matters when you score roofs from satellite and street view imagery, and where the tools that claim to do it fall short.

Understanding Roof Scoring with AI

Roof scoring is about evaluating the condition of a roof from parameters like age, wear, and damage. Done well, it reduces the guesswork of which doors are worth a morning. Done badly, it hands you a confident number that falls apart the moment a homeowner asks how you got it.

The distinction that matters: a score is only useful if it is built from imagery that is actually current, and if it is placed against the roofs next door. A roof that reads "worn" in isolation means nothing. A roof that reads "worn" while the two houses either side have visibly gone new is a conversation. That is the difference between scoring a roof from satellite imagery as a measurement exercise and scoring it as a prospecting one.

Key Features to Look for in an AI Roof Scoring Tool

Accuracy is not a marketing word here. It means the tool tells you which imagery it read and when it was captured, and it tells you which roofs it could not judge at all. A roof behind heavy tree canopy or set too far back from the road cannot be scored from the road, and a tool that mixes those in with the confident ones is not accurate, it is just quiet about its blind spots.

Speed matters less than honesty about spend. You want to know before anything runs what it will cost and what it will return. You want to search the roofs already read without spending anything, and you want a clear line between looking and acting.

And you want the tool to remember how you work. If you only do asphalt, or eight doors is a full day for a two-man crew, you should not have to type that every time. The tool should hold onto what stays true about your business and forget the one-off requests. A tool that remembers everything is useful about nothing.

Comparison: Scoring Tools vs a Lead Marketplace

The old comparison was between measurement platforms. That is the wrong comparison, because Roofbird is not a roof-measurement tool and does not pretend to be one. The comparison that matters is between scoring roofs yourself and buying shared leads from a marketplace.

	Shared lead marketplaces (Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack)	Roofbird
Who else gets the lead	The same lead is typically sold to several contractors	Exclusive, self-sourced from imagery you chose to read
Territory knowledge	None. They sell whoever filled in a form	It reads your service area and ranks the blocks in it
Imagery currency	Not disclosed	Every shortlist checked against the newer street-level shot, both dates shown
Neighbour comparison	Not possible	Every roof ranked against the roofs either side
Homeowner contact	Sold as the product	DNC-scrubbed, one click, manual dialling only
Bill shape	Per lead, priced by the vendor on a call	One-off credit packs. No subscription, no per-lead fee

The marketplaces do not publish a rate card you can compare against, and most quote per territory on a call. What you can compare is the shape of the bill. Per-lead pricing scales with how many leads you buy and stops when you stop paying. Roofbird is a one-off credit pack you spend on your own terms, and looking is free.

Where Roofbird Actually Starts

The front door is not a map. It is a box you type a sentence into. "Find me the worst roofs in 75216." "Houses where most of the neighbours have already re-roofed." "Which of these have a tarp on them?" "Six doors for Tuesday morning, in walking order." Searching roofs that have already been read is free, instant and unlimited. It spends nothing and opens nothing.

For anything the stored data cannot settle, Roofbird reads the actual photographs of those roofs and answers in your own words: tarps, patches, missing shingles, moss, rusted metal, skylights, solar panels, chimneys, a second storey, dormers, a detached garage, trees overhanging the roof. That read costs 1 credit per 8 roofs and buys both cameras and the full property record together. There is no separate records purchase, because paying twice for the same house never made sense.

Ask it to do the work and it quotes the credit cost first and waits for a yes. It never spends a credit you did not agree to. Every search saves itself as a named list, and lists are free and unlimited.

It Tells You Where to Scan Before You Draw Anything

Search the area you work, a town, a suburb, a ZIP or a street, and Roofbird reads the neighbourhoods in view and ranks them, so the first scan is not a guess. For each block it reports the housing era, what share of roofs read as weathered, how many homes are actually there counted from building footprints rather than estimated from area, whether hail has hit in the last 12 months, and how walkable the block is. Scattered acreage on long driveways gets called out as bad canvassing even under a perfect storm, because a morning is measured in doors per hour. Click a suggestion and it draws the area for you. You can still drag the corners or draw your own polygon from scratch.

It only suggests blocks worth the trip. When nothing in view clears the bar it says so plainly rather than offering three neighbourhoods you should skip. This is the honest version of "where should I knock today", and it is a thing no lead marketplace can do at all, because they do not know your territory, they just sell you whoever filled in a form. Scanning new ground costs nothing, at any size, and you can hold unlimited service areas.

Every Roof Read From Two Angles at Once

Roofbird reads the top-down overhead tile and a ground-level Street View of the façade together into one combined assessment. The Street View read catches side-visible wear a top-down tile cannot: granule loss, algae streaking, curling shingles, patched sections, rusted flashing. It also compares the roof against its immediate neighbours from a wider centred view. If the houses either side have visibly been re-roofed and this one has not, that gets flagged, because a street where the neighbours have already gone new is the strongest social proof in the trade.

Each roof is placed against the roofs either side of it, replace-now, worn, midlife, or already done, because a roof only means something next to its neighbours. Alongside it sits a plain-English verdict in a roofer's words and the specific reasons behind it, plus the capture date of the imagery it was judged from, the roof's size in squares, how many planes it has and how steep it is. Each lead shows roof material, condition, estimated roof age read off the shingles rather than the building's year built, wear signs, both images, an estimated squares and job-value range, and a ready-to-say door pitch. If you want the longer version of how that read works, how Roofbird scores a roof from imagery walks through it.

Two Scores, Because "Needs a Roof" and "Will Buy Now" Are Different Questions

Every lead carries two numbers. NEED is how badly the roof needs replacing, condition and roof age only. NOW is whether anything is forcing a decision on this specific house: visible active damage like a tarp, missing shingles or exposed decking, hail damage on this specific roof, a purchase in the last 18 months, patching already attempted, or neighbours who have re-roofed. Alongside it is a one-line "why now" in plain words.

Neighbourhood hail deliberately does not raise the NOW score. Every home in the scan shares it, so it cannot separate one door from the next. It belongs in the pitch, not the ranking. This is the opposite of how storm-chasing lists work, and it is why the ranking is trustworthy: most homes in a settled neighbourhood honestly have no trigger, and Roofbird says so rather than inventing urgency to look busy.

Where a hail event is on record, Roofbird also shows roughly how long the homeowner has left to file an insurance claim, based on the typical notice deadline in that state. Treat that as an estimate and verify with the carrier. It is a countdown, not a guess about whether they will win.

It Says Which Roofs It Has Actually Seen

A contractor in Missoula drove nine doors off his own Roofbird list and eight of them had already been re-roofed. His neighbourhood had been ranked from a July 2016 aerial photograph while a 2025 street-level shot of the same houses sat unread. The roofs had not changed since we read them. The picture had. Street-level imagery is newer than the aerial on about 85% of roofs, by roughly five years.

So every shortlist is now checked against the newer picture before you see it, anything already done is moved down and said out loud, and the houses that genuinely cannot be judged, behind tree canopy or set too far back from the road, are labelled as exactly that rather than mixed in with the confident ones. Where the street camera could see his roofs we matched what he found on the ground 4 of 4. Where it could not, 0 of 5. Where the aerial and the street photo disagree, the newer one wins and both dates are shown. A roof whose own description says it was recently replaced never reaches the top of a list. If you have wondered how much the choice of imagery actually changes the answer, satellite vs drone vs street view for roof prospecting is the honest breakdown.

The Homeowner, Not Just the House

The full property record shows on every lead for free, as soon as it is scanned: owner name, whether they live there or it is an absentee or rental owner, estimated market value and confidence, year built, last sale date and price, beds and baths, living square footage, lot size, stories, garage, annual property tax, and mortgage lender. Roofbird also estimates the owner's equity, how much of the home they actually own, because equity is what decides whether someone can say yes. When the deed record cannot support an estimate it says so instead of guessing.

Only the phone and email sit behind a one-click unlock. Every number is DNC-scrubbed and labelled: "clear" means it was checked against the federal Do Not Call registry and is safe for a manual sales call, "DNC" means do not call it, and "verify" means the scrub could not confirm either way, so treat it as unknown. Manual dialling only. No texts, no auto-dialler. A lookup that fails, whether timeout or outage, is refunded. A definitive "nobody listed" answer is charged once and cached so the same address is never charged again. You can read more about homeowner contact details and DNC screening if that side of it matters to you.

Work the List Like a CRM, Not a PDF

Card view or a side-by-side table with sticky headers, frozen actions, zoomable imagery and inline unlock. Filter on everything Roofbird knows: owner-occupied versus absentee, has a live trigger, active damage visible, insurance claim window still open, property record present, minimum need score, minimum roof age, minimum owner equity, and contact state, including "callable", meaning at least one number confirmed off the DNC registry. Add your own tags. Export, or print door-hanger PDFs for the route. If you already run a CRM, the integrations page covers how the list gets into it.

What It Does Not Do

There is no quota and no per-lead fee. Roofs already replaced, the wrong material for the shop, or buildings that are not homes at all are read, labelled as exactly that, and kept out of the way. Knowing which quarter of a street is dead is worth as much as knowing which quarter is hot. A building anyone has already assessed is never re-assessed from scratch and never re-charged, so coverage is shared and re-scanning an area surfaces genuinely new homes instead of the same roofs again.

What It Costs

One meter: credits. Looking is free, acting costs.

The free trial is 10 credits, free, no credit card, no expiry. After the trial there are no subscriptions and no monthly plans. You buy one-off credit packs when you need them: Starter $49 for 49 credits, Crew $99 for 125, Hunter $199 for 300, Pro $399 for 800. Bought credits never expire. Nothing renews.

Free and unlimited for everyone, including during the trial: asking, searching, sorting and saving lists. Free: scanning new ground and ranking every roof in it, at any size. Unlimited service areas, as many and as large as you like.

Credits are spent on reading a roof properly, both photographs from above and from the road plus the property record in one go, at 1 credit per 8 roofs. The owner's name, phone and email cost 1 credit per 2 roofs. Opening a house completely costs 1 credit. Opening a house completely means the roof read in full with the imagery date, the street address, the owner's name and mailing address, whether they live there, DNC-flagged phone numbers, an email where one exists, and the whole property record. A failed lookup is refunded. A "nobody listed" answer is charged once and never again for that address. Nothing is gated by pack: every pack gets the whole product, and a bigger pack only costs less per credit. Never per lead, never a subscription.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How accurate is Roofbird's roof scoring?

It is as accurate as the imagery underneath it, and it tells you which imagery that was. Every roof is read from the overhead tile and a Street View of the façade together, ranked against its immediate neighbours, and given two scores: NEED for how bad the roof is and NOW for whether anything is forcing a decision on that specific house. Where the street camera could see the roofs, we matched what the contractor found on the ground 4 of 4. Where it could not, 0 of 5, and those roofs are labelled as unjudgeable rather than mixed in with the confident ones.

Q: Does neighbourhood hail raise the score?

No. Hail that hit the whole scan is shared by every home in it, so it cannot separate one door from the next. It belongs in your pitch, not in the ranking. NOW only rises on things specific to that house: a tarp, missing shingles, exposed decking, hail damage on that roof, a recent purchase, patching already attempted, or neighbours who have re-roofed. Where a hail event is on record, Roofbird shows roughly how long the owner has left to file a claim based on the typical state notice deadline. Verify that with the carrier.

Q: What do I get for free, and what costs a credit?

Asking, searching, sorting and saving lists are free and unlimited. Scanning new ground and ranking every roof in it is free at any size, and you can hold unlimited service areas. Credits go on reading a roof properly, both photographs plus the property record, at 1 credit per 8 roofs; on the owner's name, phone and email at 1 credit per 2 roofs; and on opening a house completely at 1 credit. The trial is 10 credits, free, no card, no expiry. After that you buy one-off packs, Starter $49 for 49 credits up to Pro $399 for 800, and bought credits never expire.

Q: Can Roofbird integrate with my existing CRM?

Yes. Lists export, and there are direct integrations including JobNimbus and AccuLynx. If you already have leads sitting in a CRM, scoring the leads already in your CRM is the way to find out which of them are worth a knock without buying anything new.

Q: What is the cost of using Roofbird for roof assessments?

One meter: credits. Looking is free, acting costs. There are no subscriptions and no monthly plans after the trial, and no per-lead fee at any point. See the full breakdown on Roofbird pricing and what a credit buys.

Explore these tools with the question you actually have, which is which roofs in your area are worth your morning, and look at a live scored area before you sign up for anything.