Measure/Water damage restoration leads
Territory access · for contractors
Water damage restoration leads, without chasing the storm
Restoration demand arrives in spikes, and everybody chasing it is chasing the same spike. The alternative is a pipeline built between events, from measured ground: which walls have earth tipping toward the structure, how much land drains into them, and where water stands nearby with nowhere to go.
Before anything else, the boundary. We do not predict which houses will flood, and we will not sell that to you or let a script imply it. We measure the shape of the ground. A prediction about a particular building is a different claim and we have not earned it.
What is measured, and what is not
| Measured | Not measured |
|---|---|
| Ground slope on each wall's own outward normal, against a 5% fall over 3 m target | Rainfall, return period, storm intensity |
| Contributing area in m² draining to each wall | Capacity of the storm sewer under the street |
| Modeled surface flow paths across the parcel | Riverine or coastal flood extent |
| Standing-water depth and extent within 20 m of the footprint | Soil infiltration rate, water table |
| Which building the address names, and by what evidence | Anything subsurface: existing drainage, a pump, a pipe run |
| The quantities the engine declined to answer | Whether water has ever reached this structure |
That last row on the right is the one restoration marketing usually gets wrong. It is not knowable from the air, so it is not claimed.
Why the ground is a reasonable place to look
Four physical things put water at a foundation: upstream ground draining to it, the land tipping toward it, flow concentrating at a wall, and nowhere for the water to go. All four are properties of the terrain, and the engine measures all four on every property — then names the ones it could not establish rather than quietly leaving them out.
Ground falling toward a foundation raises the risk of water reaching it. That is ordinary building science and it is not in dispute. What the measurement adds is that you can now find that condition at scale, in your own service area, without driving the streets.
The uncertainty pass, which is why the list is short
A published building outline is a trace of a roof and can sit a meter from the wall it claims to be. On a real Pittsburgh footprint, shifting it north in 0.2 m steps moved one wall from +5.4% to −23.5%, crossing zero inside 1.4 m.
So the footprint is displaced one meter in each of sixteen directions, every wall re-measured, and a direction is published only when all seventeen positions agree on the sign. Everything else ships as too close to call.
Walls that do not survive that pass are reported as undecided rather than dressed up as a finding — and they come back with which way they lean and how many of the seventeen agreed, so they stay useful. It is why a Measure list is shorter than a competitor's and worth more per row.
The identity problem, stated honestly
We publish no headline identification rate, because one figure would hide the thing that decides whether a property is worth knocking on: what identified the building at that address. Where the underlying records are thin the evidence is thin too, and the engine says so rather than guessing harder. And not every disagreement is a different building — some are our source and somebody else's tracing the same roof differently.
Territory lists take only high-confidence identifications, and a wrong building is replaced free.
Why no conversion rate is quoted
We tested measured terrain against Chicago's 311 basement-water complaints and it did not separate them. Read carefully, that is mostly a verdict on the proxy — an owner who knows their grading is bad pays a contractor instead of calling the city, and when a third of a block reports water in one hour the cause is the pipe under the street. It is no evidence that grade does not matter. It is a reason never to promise a conversion rate we have not observed.
Where restoration firms tend to use this
- Mitigation offers between events, where the pitch is the measurement rather than the emergency.
- Canvass routing, so a crew's day is spent on the streets where the ground is against the houses.
- Handing the homeowner a document. A $25 report puts their terrain, the modeled flow paths, the building from four angles and every wall as a number in their hands before you quote.
- Portfolio and property-manager accounts, where the conversation is about which of forty buildings to look at first.
Pricing
Territory access from $14 per property: 25 for $450, 100 for $1,600, 500 for $7,000, or $35 each held exclusively for twelve months. Reports are $25 each with no subscription, cheaper on a plan. Solo is $99 a month for 25 lookups; Pro is $399 for 150.
See whether your territory is open
A 30-minute market analysis: coverage by ZIP, your own addresses run live including the refusals, and how a territory is bounded. One firm per territory — we never sell the same property twice.
Does this predict which houses will flood?
No. No storm is modeled, no return period, no river and no sewer capacity. It measures the ground.
How is it different from a flood zone map?
A flood map describes riverine and coastal inundation over regulatory zones. This measures surface runoff at the scale of a single building. Different questions, and neither replaces the other.
Can I use it for live storm response?
It is measured ground, not an event feed, so it suits pipeline building between storms. Storm-ahead alerts on already-measured ground exist for portfolio customers.
What conversion rate should I expect?
Unknown, and we will not invent one. See the note above about the Chicago 311 test.