Inside RIA’s Fight for Pricing Transparency

Restorers know the routine. The estimate goes in, a reviewer trims it back (sometimes way back) and the conversation about what the job cost either drifts sideways or ends right there.

For years, the Restoration Industry Association (RIA) has pushed back on the idea that a number generated by estimating software is the final word on price. Much of that work now sits with the Independent Pricing Task Force, a volunteer group under RIA’s Advocacy and Government Affairs (AGA) Committee. Its members meet with pricing platform providers, gather feedback from contractors in the field and help shape the peer-reviewed position statements restorers use to defend their pricing. RIA reports the task force has met regularly with leadership from Verisk, the company behind Xactimate, and from CoreLogic, which has since rebranded as Cotality and owns the Symbility estimating platform.

Two of the people carrying that load are Anthony Nelson and Doug Weatherman, who co-chair the task force.

Nelson is a peer group facilitator with Pivot My Biz, a consulting firm that supports independent restoration contractors across the U.S. through a data and analytics model and facilitated peer groups. He spent 26 years running restoration operations in Michigan and Hawaii, including serving as president of Premier Restoration Hawaiʻi, and has served on RIA’s board of directors. His involvement with RIA started in 2019, when the association began pushing back against standardized pricing. Since then, he has helped author RIA’s Accounting and Financial Management Guidelines and is now working on the association’s 2026 cost of doing business survey.

Weatherman is chief operating officer of Rare Restoration and Roofing, a family-owned emergency property damage mitigation company based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that serves the entire state. In close to 16 years in the industry, he has worked as a technician on the truck, moved into large loss management and now helps run the business. He is an IICRC Master certified restorer and also serves on RIA’s Independent Restorers Council.

“It’s the largest trade organization that our industry has,” Weatherman said of RIA. “I think it’s very important that members of our industry continue to support that organization.”

The trouble with 10 and 10

In practical terms, RIA’s push for financial transparency starts with a figure most restorers have heard their whole careers.

“The cost of doing business in a restoration business is not 10% overhead,” Nelson said. “Over the past couple of years, that has been the dominant theme of what we’ve been trying to inform our industry partners about … There’s this longstanding construct of 10 and 10, 10% overhead, 10% profit. That is not the true cost of doing business.”

Pivot My Biz has financial visibility into 55 independent restoration companies, he noted. “I can tell you no single one of them is anywhere near 10% true overhead.”

Weatherman pointed out that both sides of the table can be looking at the same screen and still be talking about different things.

“When a contractor sits across from an adjuster, both parties are going to be looking at the same estimating platform, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re looking at the actual cost of doing the work,” he explained. “Nobody has 10% overhead … We could run this test with any company on earth. The number just doesn’t add up. That’s not anybody’s operating cost.”

That gap is why pricing has moved so close to the center of RIA’s mission.

“Contractors should be involved,” Weatherman said. “They should be at the table when the pricing of our services is on the conversation docket. That’s the most important seat for us to be in.”

Resources such as cost of doing business data let contractors come to that conversation “from a multidimensional place,” he added, rather than arguing from one direction only.

How a field complaint becomes a line item

A recent example shows how the task force turns frustration into something a software provider can act on. Insurance carriers have arranged material pricing programs through Trueline, which supplies materials to contractors at negotiated rates and adds pricing notes to estimates. On paper, contractors are not required to buy through the program. In practice, many restorers have found themselves working around it.

“Most contractors, if we can get stuff for cheaper, we kind of like that. It helps us make more money,” Nelson acknowledged. “The reality is that Trueline vendors a lot of the time don’t carry the products. They don’t carry the support that we need.”

He described a roofing case he heard about recently. The shingles came cheaper, but they weren’t delivered onto the roof, and the vendor was 90 miles from the job site. That meant added trip charges and handling the low number on the estimate never reflected.

“One of the more recent initiatives we were a part of was getting materials handling added as a line item within Xactimate, so restorers can capture the additional charges they’re incurring on supplying those materials and create that transparency for the carriers,” Nelson said.

Volunteer work after the day job

Everyone on the task force is also running a business. The advocacy happens on top of that.

“I think people would actually be very surprised at how much work actually goes on behind the scenes,” Weatherman said. “All of us are business owners, managing employees, dealing with claims, trying to keep our own operations moving. When that’s done, we spend additional hours reviewing pricing concerns, researching methodology, having meetings and trying to make sure that the issues that we are approaching, in fact, affect the entire industry, not just some of us.”

What the group needs most from restorers is data. Nelson encouraged contractors to get involved with RIA and to share their numbers.

“The more credible information that we can get, the stronger our position will become,” he said. “Collectively, having collective participation, we can make a bigger difference than we can with a smaller group of us out here banging sticks.”

Where estimating assumptions fall apart

Asked about the biggest misconception he hears regarding how pricing data is built, Nelson pointed to the assumptions baked into the platform itself.

“The reality is that Xactimate prices very rarely reflect the true cost of doing the work,” he said. “The way that Xactimate is built is on assumptions. There’s this thing in Xactimate called supporting events that basically say, for a drywall guy, they have 15 minutes of setup, 60 minutes of drive time. All those assumptions are built in.”

Real jobs don’t cooperate with averages. Distance from the shop, crew efficiency and job site conditions all swing the cost from one loss to the next.

Nelson also noted a difference between restoration and the rest of construction. Contractors in other trades routinely build contingency into their bids, which he described simply as the expected cost of what nobody knows yet about the project. Restoration estimates written to platform rules carry none.

“There’s a huge disconnect in the way the rest of the construction industry operates with the way that we are required to operate with estimating platforms and the rules associated with them in the restoration industry,” he said.

“Mrs. Jones’s flood is never the same as Mrs. Jackson’s flood,” Nelson added. “The reconstruction of those two incidents will never, ever include the same materials, amounts, anything like that … Every single job that we have is brand new.”

One piece of advice before estimating

Asked what he would tell every restorer before writing the next estimate, Weatherman kept it to three words.

“Know your numbers,” he said. “There’s a wide, big gap between Xactimate pricing and your actual operational cost.”

Writing estimates around what an adjuster is likely to approve, without knowing the real cost underneath, is a losing approach, he explained. “If you don’t know your cost of acquisition, your cost of performance and cost of production, it’s very hard for you to put a price tag on that.”

He compared it to an auto repair shop, where the hourly rate on the invoice is there because that is what the work is worth. As the market gets more competitive, Weatherman sees estimating to an insurer’s comfort zone as working in reverse.

“I think that it’s a little bit more backwards to estimate based entirely on what you think an insurance company would approve rather than what it actually costs to perform the work plus markup, profit margin and everything else,” he said.

The advice sounds almost too simple, Weatherman admitted. The work behind it isn’t.

“You should understand your labor costs, your production rates, you should understand your overhead, your requirements for the project,” he said. “If you have all those things with a dollar amount next to them, then you have a profit margin goal. The estimate is just the conveyance piece.”

This episode of RIA Beyond is sponsored by Engine, the restorer’s best solution and single platform for all business travel.

Watch the complete interview with RIA or listen to the podcast below