The standard most North American adjusters were trained on — which is the entire point of using it.
HAAG Engineering is a forensic engineering firm that publishes the damage-assessment standards and training most North American insurance adjusters learn from. A HAAG-certified inspector has completed that training and is assessing damage against those published definitions.
One clarification first, because it gets misused constantly: **HAAG certifies individual inspectors, not companies.** Any roofing company displaying a HAAG logo as a corporate badge is claiming something that doesn’t exist. The honest statement is that inspections are performed by a HAAG-certified inspector — which is what we say, and why our credentials page renders it as text rather than a logo.
The core problem in a disputed hail claim is almost never dishonesty. It’s that two people are using different definitions of damage and reaching different conclusions in good faith. A contractor letter saying “this roof has hail damage and needs replacement” gives an adjuster nothing to reason from — it’s a conclusion without a method, so the only available response is to disagree with it. Assessing to the same published standard the reviewing adjuster was trained on removes that entire category of dispute. You’re no longer arguing about what counts as damage; you’re both reading the same definitions.
A properly built damage report contains:
A claim is written against one date. A Calgary roof may have been under the June 2020 storm, the July 2021 storm, the August 2024 storm and the July 2025 storm. Hail damage doesn’t carry a timestamp, so establishing which event caused what is a reasoning exercise: damage severity and pattern matched against documented storm tracks, hail sizes and the roof’s own age and history. A report that names a date without showing that reasoning is asserting, not documenting.
That there’s nothing there. This is the part that decides whether a report is worth anything: an inspector who has never once written a negative finding isn’t assessing roofs, and adjusters can tell. A report that says “no functional hail damage identified; observed granule loss is consistent with normal weathering for a roof of this age” is a more valuable document than a marginal approval, because it’s the thing that makes the *next* report credible.
There’s no guaranteed acceptance and anyone promising one is overselling. What the methodology does is make the report reviewable on its own terms — the adjuster can check the test squares, look at the photographs, and agree or disagree with specifics rather than with a bare conclusion. That’s what moves files.
No. Insurers sometimes commission a professional engineer’s report on a disputed claim, which is a different and more formal document. A HAAG-certified inspection is a damage assessment to a published standard. Where a file genuinely needs an engineer, we’ll say so rather than produce something outside our competence.
Yes. The inspection is paid and the report is yours — including if it says your roof is fine, and including if you take it to another contractor. That’s the whole basis of charging for it rather than giving it away in exchange for a sales pitch.
Yes, second-opinion work is normal. We document what’s there now and state plainly where our findings differ and why, with the evidence. We won’t characterise another inspector’s work beyond what the evidence supports.
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