Fire damage leads, verified before you roll a truck.

Once a house fire is out, the owner is suddenly fielding calls: the insurer, family, board-up crews, contractors. The first credible restoration company to reach them with real help usually gets the conversation, and often the job. Fire restoration leads that arrive days later in a public-records list reach an owner who has already chosen someone.

You learn about the fire about a minute after dispatch, with the owner and the numbers already attached, so the time you would have spent hunting for an address goes into deciding whether to take the job. More in speed to lead in restoration and the first hour after dispatch. Fast is not rushed, though: the quickest way to lose a fire job is to turn up while the fire department is still working.

A lot of fire dispatch is not a fire at all. Alarms go off for burnt toast, steam, a faulty sensor or a test, and treating every one as a fire means a day of wasted drives. So every lead says, in plain words, what was dispatched and what crews reported:

• Working fire: crews arrived and found fire. This is the call that most often means real damage.
• Smoke showing: crews saw smoke when they arrived.
• Fire alarm: an alarm went off. Most turn out not to be fires.

Fire alarm activations are still delivered, but kept separate from confirmed fires. Your fire list stays a list of fires, and the alarms sit on their own. If crews find more than an alarm, the dispatch updates timeline shows what they reported.

A fire scene belongs to the fire department until crews clear it. Nobody signs a restoration agreement next to a working engine company, and a contractor who walks up to an owner while their home is still burning gets remembered for the wrong reason.

Instead of driving over to see whether the trucks have left, read the dispatch updates timeline and its plain-English summary on your phone. A respectful order of work:

1. Read the timeline, not the street. Let the updates tell you whether crews are still on scene.
2. Wait until crews have cleared before you approach the property in person.
3. Never interfere. Do not block fire apparatus, cross tape or cones, or approach an owner still talking with firefighters.
4. Say who you are. Your name and your company, plainly. Never imply you are with the fire department, the city or the insurer.
5. Offer help, not pressure. Securing the property, board-up, cleanup. If the answer is no, that is the end of it.

Some states set their own rules on contacting an owner after a fire, especially for public adjusters, so know the rules where you work. Adjusters, see fire and water leads for public adjusters.

IncidentLead never dials anyone and never contacts owners. Tapping a number opens your own phone's dialer. You, the licensed professional, decide who to call and own your compliance, and every number on a fire damage lead is labeled so you decide with the facts:

• Clean: no registry listing, disconnection or opt-out found for it.
• On a Do-Not-Call registry: the number is listed. Whether you may call it depends on your situation.
• Disconnected: the line is not in service, so you do not waste a dial.
• Opted out: someone already asked not to be called. Honor it.

The basics: a live person dials manually, with no autodialer and no prerecorded message. Calls go out in the called party's local time, generally 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. under federal rules and narrower in some states, and an owner who lives elsewhere may be in another time zone. Every opt-out is honored for good. The plain-English rules are in our do-not-call and calling-hours guide and in TCPA rules for restoration companies. Neither is legal advice.

Coverage spans 157 counties across 44 states. Fire damage leads are sold by county, month to month, with no long lock-in. Tell us the counties you work and we will confirm coverage there.

Coverage is non-exclusive, on purpose. Another company can buy the same county, so your edge is being faster and better on the call.

Want a feel for how busy your county is? The county loss estimator gives an estimated monthly count of fire and water losses for each county we list. Those are estimates built from our dispatch collection and public population data, not live counts. For the full list, see coverage by county.

A plain fire alert, like the scanner on the shop desk, tells you a fire was dispatched. Then the work starts: pin down the address, find out whose property it is, dig up a number, check whether it is safe to call, and guess whether it is a real fire or an alarm, while the clock runs.

A fire damage lead from IncidentLead arrives with that work done: the verified address, the owner, every number labeled, the status in plain words and the dispatch updates, with alarms kept apart. What is left is your decision. See how we compare with fire alert services, and for water losses in the same app, water damage leads.