a cool sneak peek of how @restorefast manages its federal projects, as opposed to traditional contractors:

restorefast.com/federal

The median U.S. rental unit was 43 years old in 2024, per Harvard's 2026 housing report. In 2010 it was 36.

So half of U.S. rentals were built around 1981 or earlier. If you manage units that old, what do you end up replacing most: supply lines, drains or the water heater?

Florida's insurance regulator counts 54,797 Hurricane Isaias claims. As of Oct. 20, 41,375 were still open with nothing paid. If yours is one of them, keep drying things out and take dated photos as you go. That record helps when the adjuster shows up.

In the federal government's 2020 home energy survey, about 3.14 million rented U.S. homes had a main water heater 20 years old or more. The ones still in place are older now. If you manage units, walk the closets and note tank ages before a ceiling downstairs tells you.

After Hurricane Isaias, the aerial imaging firm Vexcel checked 412,403 buildings in the high-wind zones of Florida, Alabama and Mississippi. About one in 23 had damage. A small roof opening is easy to miss at first. It usually shows up later as a ceiling stain, a few rains in.

The EPA says 9% of homes have leaks that waste 50 gallons of water or more a day. The tricky part is that nothing looks wet. A worn toilet flapper can leak silently all year without leaving a puddle. On a master meter, the water bill usually notices before anyone does.

Florida tracks how many hurricane claims get closed. For Hurricane Milton, as of December 9, 2025, 94.2% of residential property claims were closed. Commercial property was at 47.5%. Opening a commercial claim after Isaias? Date every photo and moisture reading from day one.

Two big modelers looked at Hurricane Isaias and came back with different numbers. Verisk puts insured losses at $1–2 billion, and Cotality says $2–3 billion. Either way, a lot of homes are still drying out.

About 21% of U.S. asthma cases are estimated to be tied to dampness and mold at home. That's about 4.6 million people, per a 2007 EPA and Berkeley Lab study.

A musty smell or ceiling stain is worth checking that week. Find where the water's coming from before mold sets in.

A leak inside the house is rarely a small bill. The average homeowners insurance claim for water damage and freezing came to about $15,400 from 2019 to 2023, according to the Insurance Information Institute.

That's houses, not apartments, but it's a good gut check for anyone esident reports a ceiling stain or a soft spot in the floor, get someone out that week to open it up and take moisture readings. A leak that sits until turnover only gets more expensive.

Florida's Public Service Commission counted 448,298 power accounts still out Saturday morning after Hurricane Isaias. In Santa Rosa County, it was about 9 in 10.

If you've got buildings out there that took rain, that's the part to plan around. Drying a wet unit runs on power: . Until it's back, nothing is pulling water out of the walls. When it comes back, go to the wet units first, and get photos and moisture readings on file before anyone starts pulling drywall.

About 11.2 million occupied homes in the U.S., roughly 1 in 12, reported water leaking from inside the house in the Census Bureau and HUD's 2023 American Housing Survey. None of that needs a storm. It's a supply line under a sink, a toilet, a water heater that finally lets go.
ts, that's the leak you'll see far more often than a hurricane. What decides the bill is how fast someone finds where the water went, gets it dry, and writes it down before the drywall goes soft. That's most of what our crews do on a normal week.

Specialty contractors who work on homes and apartments lost 7,900 jobs from August to September, while the same kinds of trades on commercial buildings added 12,300. That's from last Friday's federal jobs report, and the September numbers are still preliminary.

If you manage de is the drywall, flooring and paint crews a unit waits on after a leak. When there are fewer of them, a unit can be completely dry and still sit empty waiting on someone to put it back together. We line up the rebuild while the fans are still running, so the unit isn't starting at the back of the line after the last moisture reading.

Water damage that isn’t from a storm got about 63% more expensive per claim since 2019 — even as those claims got less frequent last year.

Fewer leaks doesn’t mean a smaller bill. Materials and labor still add up, so moisture readings and photos have to be on the claim file w bad the loss was.

How we close it: same standards on every wet unit — scope, photos, moisture on the claim file — so the cost of the loss doesn’t turn into a fight after the water’s gone.

251,000 construction job openings at the end of August — down 48,000 from a revised July.

Labor cooled. The wet unit didn't. Openings dropping still doesn't put a crew on site, and it doesn't put moisture and photos on the packet.

How we close it: same standards on every job — on the file — so throughput isn't waiting on the hiring cycle to turn.

moving atoms and human behavior is hard.

restorefast.com

$28 billion from thunderstorms in the first half of 2026 — hail, wind, tornado, mostly U.S. — and that was still the quietest first-half thunderstorm book since 2021.

Global natural catastrophe insured losses came in at $42 billion. Quiet half. Exposure didn’t leave.

If he top peril on a below-trend half, the dry-out and the packet don’t wait on a named storm. Same-day on the wet unit, moisture and photos on the file, dry-out finished before the scope grows.

$171 billion — Verisk’s modeled annual average for global insured catastrophe losses, up $19 billion year over year and the highest figure they’ve published.

The United States is $117 billion of that book — sixty-eight percent. Severe thunderstorm now carries forty percent of ad of tropical cyclone. Six straight years above $100 billion insured, even when the U.S. hurricane landfall calendar stayed quiet.

Quiet landfall season isn’t a quiet claim year. Residential reconstruction costs have been climbing about five percent a year since 2021 — the loss isn’t only the storm, it’s the rebuild queue after.

How we close it: same-day on the wet unit, moisture and photos on the job file, dry-out finished before the scope grows. Capacity is a crew plan before the first inch, not a phone tree after.

41,822 vacant public-housing units — nearly five percent of the stock as of May 2025.

HUD’s Office of Inspector General walked fourteen PHAs. Eleven of them had units sitting empty 242 to 1,113 days — past the department’s own 180-day turn line. That’s not a waitlist story. ng the next family’s clock.

How we close it: vacant walk, moisture and life-safety on the job file with time-stamped photos, then keys. Turnover isn’t finished when the unit looks empty — it’s finished when clearance is documented.

That card is months of work sitting in the pipe — 9.9 if you’re on a data center, 8.3 if you’re everyone else.

ABC’s August Construction Backlog Indicator (survey late Aug into early Sep) put the national average at 8.5 months. The split is the useful part: contractors with rrying almost ten months on the books; everyone else sits at 8.3. Roughly one in six ABC members are on a data-center job now — highest they’ve recorded — and that work still pulls crews and materials off the rest of the market.

So when a PM hears “backlog is rebounding,” it doesn’t mean a crew showed up on your wet unit. It means capacity is parked on someone else’s campus for the better part of a year.

How we close it: same standards on every job — scope, photos, moisture on the packet — so throughput isn’t waiting on the next hire the data centers already took.

326,000 construction job openings at the end of July — up 28,000 month over month, near a two-year high.

Openings aren’t a crew on the wet unit. You can’t hire your way out of a systems problem.

How we close it: same standards on every job — scope, photos, moisture on the isn’t waiting on the next hire to figure out the file.