43,000 Homes Under the Swath. About 1,500 Worth Knocking.

A supercell runs the northern Front Range on a Thursday afternoon. By Friday morning the radar-estimated footprint is drawn: roughly four miles wide and twelve miles long at one inch or better. Forty-eight square miles.

Somebody on your team does the obvious math — that's tens of thousands of houses — and by Monday you've got five canvassers and a map with a highlighter line around the whole thing.

That highlighter line is the single most expensive object in storm roofing. Because the swath is not a lead list. It's the starting population, and almost all of it disappears before it becomes a roof.

Here's the whole drop-off, step by step, with the arithmetic shown. Your local numbers will differ — that's the point. Run yours.

Step 1: swath to houses — 43,000

Forty-eight square miles of mixed Front Range suburb, at roughly 900 single-family homes per square mile, is about 43,000 homes.

That density assumption does a lot of work and it's worth checking against your own metro. Denver proper runs far denser; a Weld County subdivision with half-acre lots runs a third of it. If you work DFW, the Plano-to-Frisco corridor sits well above 900 and the land between towns sits well below. Pull a parcel count for one section you know and calibrate.

Call it 43,000. Everything after this is subtraction.

Step 2: not every roof is your roof — 35,000

Strip out what you don't sell to: apartments and condos, commercial and light industrial, HOA-managed blocks where the association controls the roof, and non-asphalt roofs where the damage threshold is a different conversation entirely.

In a typical suburban swath that's on the order of 18%. You're at roughly 35,000 addressable single-family asphalt roofs.

Step 3: the swath isn't uniform — 10,500

This is where most roofers lose the most money, and it's a reading problem.

The footprint you drew is the one-inch-or-better contour. Inside it, the damaging core — the band where a roof of almost any age takes a claimable hit — is a much smaller shape. In a radar footprint banded by size, the 1.5-inch-and-up portion is typically a quarter to a third of the one-inch contour, and it's usually a narrow ribbon rather than a blob. Look at any banded swath map and you can see it — the outer band is most of the area and the least of the damage.

Take 30%: about 10,500 homes sit under radar-estimated 1.5-inch-plus.

Two cautions, both of which cost people real money. First, radar estimates size; it does not observe your roof. We checked our own map against 785 spotter reports — radar found 99% of Colorado's spotter-confirmed hail in 2026, but the "biggest stone near this house" figure most maps display runs about 1.25 inches high against what a spotter actually measured on the ground. Second, the homes outside the core aren't worthless — they're conditional. A 1.1-inch stone on a brittle 19-year-old 3-tab produces a claim. The same stone on a 2019 architectural shingle usually doesn't.

Which is the next filter, and the strongest one in the stack.

Step 4: roof age — 4,700

Two houses on the same street, same storm, wildly different odds. We've written the long version of this, so the short version: age is the variable that converts a marginal impact into an approved replacement, and the Front Range has been replacing roofs hard for fifteen years, which means a large share of the housing stock under any given swath was already re-roofed recently.

If roughly 45% of those 10,500 homes carry a roof ten years or older, you're at about 4,700.

Note what just happened to your day. The highlighter line said 43,000. Roof age alone knocked out more homes than most companies knock doors in a season.

Step 5: can the homeowner actually fund it — 2,800

A claim that clears the adjuster still has to clear the homeowner's bank account.

In North Texas the standard wind/hail deductible moved from 1% to 2% of the dwelling limit — on a $400,000 dwelling that's an $8,000 check before anybody frames a single square. We broke that down in September. Colorado deductibles run lower in dollar terms but the same dynamic applies, and more carriers in both states are settling older roofs at actual cash value rather than replacement cost, which puts depreciation on the homeowner too.

And in both states you are not allowed to solve this for them. Colorado's residential roofing law (C.R.S. 6-22-101 et seq.) bars paying, waiving, or rebating the homeowner's deductible, and Texas prohibits the same thing. The funding gap is the homeowner's to close.

Haircut that at 40% — households who can't fund the deductible, won't fund it this year, or are sitting on an ACV settlement that doesn't pencil. About 2,800 left.

Step 6: can you reach them — 1,550

A qualified address is not a conversation. Phone and email matching on residential records is good, not perfect, and a meaningful share of what you get is a disconnected line, a number that belongs to the prior owner, or a household that screens everything.

Assume 55% reachable by some channel that actually lands — mail, a legal call, a knock during hours you're allowed to knock. That leaves roughly 1,550 real opportunities out of the 43,000 you highlighted Friday morning.

43,000 → 1,550. You just deleted 96% of the map, and you haven't sold anything yet.

What the funnel is actually telling you

Two things, and the second one is the useful one.

First: the top of the funnel is not the lever. Doubling the swath doubles the 43,000 and doubles the 1,550. Every step below it is a multiplier you control — and unlike the storm, you can move those. Getting your roof-age data right changes the outcome more than getting a bigger storm.

Second: the qualified number is small enough to work properly. This is the part roofers miss while they're mourning the 41,450.

Fifteen hundred opportunities is not a disappointment. It's a workable number — it fits inside one crew's season instead of overflowing it. A five-person canvass team running blanket coverage burns roughly $1,800 per week per crew in fuel, labor, and windshield time, per our cost breakdown, and at that burn rate 43,000 doors is a fantasy — you'd need years. The same team working 1,550 scored addresses — call it 25 real conversations per rep per day, since a scored door is a longer stop than a cold one — covers the whole qualified population twice in about five weeks, at a fraction of the driving.

That's the trade. Blanket coverage means touching 43,000 doors badly. Scoring means touching 1,550 doors well, twice, with the storm date and the roof age already in your rep's hand when the door opens.

Run your own numbers

Every percentage above is a dial. Change the density for your metro, change the roof-age share for your subdivision vintages, change the funding haircut for your deductible environment. What won't change is the shape: a big number at the top, four aggressive filters, and a small, workable number at the bottom that deserves your whole attention.

See what's radar-estimated in your area on the Colorado hail map, check the multi-year picture in the state hail statistics, and put your own close rate and crew cost into the cost-per-job calculator to see what 1,550 qualified addresses is worth against 43,000 unqualified ones. If your city is still open, take a look at the map — one roofer per city gets it.