How we report
Restoration HQ is a restoration-industry news desk that sweeps roughly 100 trade, insurance, legal, and government sources every cycle and publishes only the stories that change how you run a restoration company.
The sweep
Every edition starts with an automated pull across about 100 sources: the trade press, insurance and claims journals, policyholder-side coverage-law blogs, FEMA, OSHA, and EPA activity, IICRC and RIA standards work, Xactimate and pricing trackers, plus the long tail of podcasts, equipment makers, software vendors, and claims communities. The software reads all of it so you don't have to. Everything it surfaces comes in dated and sourced, or it doesn't come in at all.
The relevance gate
Most of what the sweep pulls in dies at the gate. Out of a typical pull of 80 to 100 items, maybe 8 to 12 survive. Generic P&C earnings chatter, press releases with no operational consequence, insurance news that never touches a job site: gone. Every story has to pass the same test: does this change how a restoration contractor bids, staffs, documents, or gets paid. If the honest answer is no, it doesn't run. That's how the desk has tracked 77 stories so far across arcs like claims suppression, carrier exits, PE consolidation, Xactimate pricing, smart-water mandates, the NFIP reauthorization cliff on September 30, and Connecticut's mold licensing deadline on October 1.
Where human judgment comes in
The sweep is automated. The calls are not. A person decides what leads, what a court ruling actually means for your supplement fight, when a vendor announcement is real news versus marketing, and when two outlets writing the same story in the same week is a pattern worth naming. When confidence in a story is anything less than high, the brief says so in plain terms, usually with a note to verify before you act on it.
What this desk will not do
No pay-to-play. No sponsored stories, no vendor placements, no featured-partner write-ups dressed up as coverage. If a product shows up in a brief, it's because the news warranted it, not because someone paid for the slot.
Check our work
Every claim links to its source: the ruling, the filing, the trade article, the federal declaration. You should be able to click through, read the original, and decide for yourself. If a brief ever cites something you can't verify, that's a miss, and we want to hear about it.
The desk is edited by Jake Shelton, co-founder of Axiom and Restoration360.
When we publish
Restoration HQ ships a new edition every few days, when the news warrants one, rather than on a fixed weekly clock. The archive shows the actual rhythm: sometimes two briefs in a week, sometimes a quiet stretch, because a slow week in the news should be a slow week here too. Subscribe or grab the RSS feed and you won't miss an edition.