Having spent forty years in the restoration industry, most of them from a privileged seat where I’ve been able to observe industry changes on a national and even international level, it’s easy to see how the restoration landscape has changed over the years.
It would be difficult to isolate one area of change that has affected the industry more than any other, because there have been so many. The changes in drying and building sciences; changes in technology from how jobs are scoped, estimated, and executed in the field to how data is collected and used to better manage projects in the office; changes in electronic and social media. On a larger scale, there have been changes within the insurance industry with how losses are adjusted and paid; the growing number of Third Party Administrators; the increased number of large national and regional restorers and the influence they wield; the influx of private equity money into the industry; and the increasingly litigious nature of our work and the U.S. society in general.