Where to knock in Madison before you spend anything
The hardest part of a Madison morning is not the doors, it is choosing the block. Drive out to the far west side and you can burn three hours on scattered acreage in the Town of Verona or the rural edges of Fitchburg where every house sits on a long driveway and a half-mile of windshield buys you two conversations. Work the near-east isthmus instead and you can hit forty doors before lunch.
Roofbird reads the area you work, whether that is a whole city, a suburb like Middleton or Sun Prairie, a ZIP, or a single street, and ranks the neighbourhoods in view before you draw anything. For each one 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 Roofbird draws the area for you. You can drag the corners, or draw your own polygon from scratch. If nothing in view clears the bar it says so plainly instead of offering you three neighbourhoods you should skip. That is the honest version of where should I knock today, and it is the one thing a national lead marketplace structurally cannot do, because they do not know your territory. They just sell you whoever filled in a form.
- Housing era and weathered-roof share per block
- Real home counts from building footprints, not area estimates
- Hail history for the last 12 months
- Walkability, with acreage and long driveways flagged as poor canvassing
What the April 2026 Dane County hail means for your pipeline
On 15 April 2026, Dane County recorded hail reports of 100, 150, 150, 100 and 325, with wind events on 14 April and 11 June. That is a real, dated event in the metro, and it matters for two reasons. First, it gives you a legitimate reason to be on a Madison porch in the months that follow. Second, it starts a clock, because most insurance policies require the homeowner to give notice of a claim within a set period after the loss.
Roofbird shows roughly how long a homeowner has left to file, based on the typical notice deadline in Wisconsin. Treat that as an estimate of the state's usual window, not a legal deadline, and always tell the homeowner to verify with their carrier. What it does is tell you which doors are time-sensitive and which are simply old.
One thing Roofbird deliberately does not do is let neighbourhood hail raise the urgency score on every house in the scan. If every home on the block shares the same hail event, it cannot separate one door from the next. Hail belongs in your pitch, not your ranking. Most homes in a settled Madison neighbourhood honestly have no active trigger, and Roofbird says so rather than inventing urgency to look busy.
- Dane County hail 15 April 2026: reports of 100, 150, 150, 100 and 325
- Dane County wind: 14 April 2026 and 11 June 2026
- Claim-window countdown shown per home, framed as an estimate to verify with the carrier
- Neighbourhood hail is used in the pitch, never in the ranking
Two scores, because needs a roof and will act now are different questions
Every Madison lead carries two numbers. NEED is how badly the roof needs replacing, based on condition and roof age alone. 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 roof specifically, a purchase in the last 18 months, patching already attempted, or neighbours who have re-roofed.
That last trigger is the quiet one in Madison. On the west side and in the older villages, you can watch a street re-roof in waves. If the two houses either side of a property have visibly gone new and this one has not, Roofbird flags it, because a street where the neighbours have already re-roofed is the strongest social proof in the trade and it is repeatable at the door.
Each roof is read from the top-down overhead tile and a ground-level Street View of the facade at the same time, 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. Every roof is then placed against the roofs either side of it as replace-now, worn, midlife, or already done, with a plain-English verdict in a roofer's words and the reasons behind it.
- NEED: condition and roof age only
- NOW: active damage, hail on this roof, recent purchase, prior patching, neighbours re-roofed
- Every roof ranked against its immediate neighbours, not given a number nobody can repeat at a door
- Imagery capture date shown, so you know how fresh the read is
The homeowner, not just the house
A Madison door goes better when you already know who is behind it. Open the house for 1 credit and the full property record comes with it: 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 owner equity, because equity is what decides whether someone can actually say yes. When the deed record cannot support an estimate, it says so instead of guessing.
The same credit brings the phones and email. 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. Verify means the scrub could not confirm either way, so treat it as unknown. Manual dialling only, no texts and no auto-dialler. A failed lookup is refunded, though a nobody-listed answer is charged.
This is the part a shared marketplace cannot give you. Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, Networx and Modernize sell the same lead to four or more contractors and let you race to the phone. Roofbird does not sell leads one by one: it reads the roofs in your own territory, ranks them, and you choose which ones to act on.
- Owner name, occupancy, mailing address
- AVM value with confidence, year built, last sale, beds, baths, lot, taxes, lender
- Estimated owner equity, with an honest no-estimate when the record cannot support one
- DNC-flagged phones and email come with opening the house (1 credit), manual dialling only
Working a Madison list like a CRM, not a PDF
Madison routes reward planning. The isthmus and near-east are tight and walkable, the west side spreads out along Mineral Point and University Avenue, and the suburbs ring outward through Middleton, Verona, Fitchburg, Sun Prairie and Waunakee. You want a list you can sort, tag and print, not a spreadsheet you fight with on a tailgate.
Roofbird gives you card view or a side-by-side table with sticky headers, frozen actions, zoomable imagery and one-click open. Filter on everything it 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, on every credit pack.
Lists save themselves and are free and unlimited. Ask for six doors for Tuesday morning in walking order and you get them in walking order.
Pricing, and what Roofbird will not do
There is one meter: credits. Looking is free, acting costs. Asking, searching, sorting and saving lists are free and unlimited, including on the trial. Drawing areas and ranking every roof in them is free too, any size, as many areas as you like.
Credits are spent on reading roofs in bulk at 1 credit per 8 roofs, owners in bulk at 1 credit per 2 roofs, and opening a house completely at 1 credit. Opening a house completely means the full roof read, the street address, the owner's name, DNC-flagged phone numbers, an email where one exists, and the whole property record. A typical list (read about 80 roofs, owners for the best 30) uses about 20-25 credits.
The free trial is 10 credits, no credit card, and it ranks up to 1,000 houses. After that you buy one-off credit packs: Starter $49 for 49 credits, Crew $99 for 125, Hunter $199 for 300, Pro $399 for 800. No subscription, nothing renews, and bought credits never expire. Every pack gets the whole product; bigger packs only cost less per credit, and it is never per lead.
Roofbird is honest about its limits. It scores roofs from imagery and public property records. It does not predict who will buy, it does not guarantee a claim will be approved, and it does not know anything about a homeowner's intent beyond what is on the record. Roofs already replaced, the wrong material for your shop, or not homes at all are read, labelled as exactly that, and kept out of the way. Knowing which quarter of a Madison street is dead is worth as much as knowing which quarter is hot.
Roofbird has already read homes across Wisconsin, with open scan reports published for Sheboygan, Fond du Lac and Eau Claire. A building anyone has already assessed is never re-assessed from scratch and never re-charged, so re-scanning a Madison area surfaces genuinely new homes instead of the same roofs again.