Universal Auto Hail Repair

Bottom Line — Easy as it comes. Seriously. Completely free out of pocket (they will cover up to a $ 500 deductible) and they’ll give you a rental car as well.
Slightly longer story…
So with the back to back rounds of hail storms in early June of this year, I had 3 vehicles which wound up getting dinged. Naturally my first order of business was to consult Unilocal to figure out what my options were regarding dent repair. There were surprisingly few results that came up. One of the top ones, Dent Teks, I reached out to several times over the course of 2 months to try and schedule an appointment. It wasn’t time sensitive as the cars still worked, and I was traveling quite a bit as well. After they never got back to me for the 4^th or 5^th time I started exploring some of my other options.
Universal Auto Hail Repair (UAHR) was doing door to door flyers but actually one of their salesreps saw my dented Subaru BRZ on the street and knocked on my door to personally talk to me about paintless dent repair. I took the pamphlet and stuck it on the fridge as I was traveling for work again the next day.
When I returned, I called them up and spoke with a rep to get my car taken in for an estimate/​repairs. I was told I could drop it off at their location off Airport Rd. and 2^nd, or they could even arrange for a pickup at my house. I chose to drop it off as I wanted to see what their offices looked like and meet some of their staff.
UAHR is a seasonal business. They are based out of Texas, but essentially follow the hail storms around the country. They worked in Denver through the summer of 2014 and are back again for the summer of 2015. This completely makes sense, since there’s no point having a hail repair business if there haven’t been any hail storms recently. Over the past year they’ve processed over 300+ vehicles in the denver front range area alone.
The repair technicians live in shared apartments and others live in their RV which they drive around. The owner, Troy, was around to answer questions and show me his operation.
I gave them my paperwork from State Farm and left them my key after signing over the necessary documents. As part of their service, they cover the deductible amount and even pay for your rental car from Enterprise Rent-​A-​Car. Due to the volume, they have a pre-​negotiated rate with Enterprise which is far lower than any daily rate that you or I could achieve on our own. So I dropped off my black BRZ and left with a red Dodge Ram 1500.
They called me a week later to tell me that my BRZ was ready to pickup. I was actually on my way out of town for the weekend, so they told me no problem, and to give them a call Monday morning to figure out a time to pick it up. I called them, and then met them back at Enterprise an hour later. I was picked up and brought back to their offices where I inspected my BRZ outside in full daylight and then got the rest of my papers handed over to me.
It’s a fascinating business and I dug into it just a little bit to figure out how it all works. An adjuster came out to assess my vehicle after the hail story, they wrote up a report, and handed me a check for damages minus deductible (~$ 2000-​$ 500 = ~$ 1500). I think most insurance companies hope you as the consumer, choose to cash the check, and forego the repairs. At a typical full service body shop, they’ll handle hail repair through paintless dent removal as well, but they’ll usually subcontract out to another person/​company. By the way, paintless dent repair is literally just massaging out a dent from the other side of the panel; essentially pushing the dent out from the back (it works really well btw).
These body shops will typically take 65−75% of the hourly rate for the shop themselves and then pay the the technician the remainder. UAHR has broken off and become specialized, removing this middle man layer, which is how they can cover your deductible plus the cost of a rental car.
Looking at the end invoice, they’re doing ok for themselves. They ended up getting another $ 1200 from State Farm, and after doing the math they were collecting over $ 3000 for less than 8 hours of labor plus overhead. I see why they follow the hail storms. Regardless, as a consumer, it couldn’t have been any easier for me. I plan on bringing my other two vehicles to them in the coming weeks as well. One of them has a cracked windshield which they’ll replace while it’s in the shop as well.
The entire staff that I interacted with were very friendly and helpful. If you head in, tell them you heard about them from Brian on Unilocal