A referral service for snow removal across Oakland County, Michigan. It connects the person who needs a driveway, a walk, a private road or a parking lot cleared with an independent operator who already runs that area.
This site does not plow, shovel or salt. It owns no trucks, employs no crews and holds no contracts of its own. Every job is performed by an independent snow removal contractor under their own company name, their own equipment and their own insurance. What happens here is an introduction.
When the City of Novi put a season of snow and ice work out to bid in 2024, three contractors priced identical scope at $144,000, $255,745 and $483,500. On the same bid sheet, a 4x4 pickup was offered at $80, $150 and $295 an hour. That is a public record, and it is the clearest illustration available of why a single quote tells a property owner almost nothing.
Residential is no different in kind, only in scale. The county’s most visible residential company runs three regions and lists twelve communities — which leaves Troy, Novi, Farmington Hills, Southfield, Northville, South Lyon, Commerce, Milford, Oxford, Madison Heights and Berkley served by somebody else entirely. Finding out who actually runs your subdivision, in October rather than in January, is most of the job.
Michigan does not license snow removal contractors at the state level. There is no license to check, no registry to search and no board to complain to. Some municipalities require a local contractor registration and those requirements vary from city to city. That leaves insurance as the one piece of real, checkable verification in this trade, and there is a specific trap in it.
Michigan insurance agencies warn that many commercial auto carriers exclude plowing operations outright, and that a personal policy excludes business use entirely. An operator can hold a commercial auto policy in good faith and still have no coverage the moment a blade touches pavement. The question is not “are you insured.” It is whether the commercial auto policy names plowing operations, and whether there is workers’ compensation behind the person shoveling the walk.
A useful benchmark, because it is public: the State of Michigan requires its own snow removal contractors to carry commercial general liability at $500,000 each occurrence and $1,000,000 aggregate, automobile liability including hired and non-owned, workers’ compensation with a waiver of subrogation, employers liability at $100,000 each accident and $500,000 aggregate disease, and insurers rated A.M. Best “A-” or better. An Oakland County operator serving gated communities and estate grounds advertises $2 million in general liability with certificates on request. Ask for the certificate in October.
For two decades, a Michigan slip-and-fall case involving visible ice was close to unwinnable for the person who fell. Lugo v. Ameritech Corp. (2001) made an open and obvious hazard a no-duty question, and nothing is more open and obvious than ice.
On July 28, 2023 the Michigan Supreme Court decided Kandil-Elsayed v. F & E Oil, Inc. and Pinsky v. Kroger Co. of Michigan, overruled Lugo, and moved open-and-obvious out of duty and into breach and comparative fault. The question a court now asks is whether the property owner took reasonable steps — whether it plowed, whether it salted, whether it warned — and Michigan’s comparative fault rule lets a plaintiff recover even when partly at fault themselves.
A separate line of Michigan cases runs to the contractor rather than the owner. Fultz v. Union-Commerce Associates (2004) was itself a snow plowing contract case and set a narrow “separate and distinct” test that largely insulated contractors from third-party claims. Loweke v. Ann Arbor Ceiling & Partition Co. (2011) substantially reformed that, returning to ordinary tort duty in the performance of the work.
The practical consequence for an association board or a commercial owner in this county: liability flows from the property owner to the contractor through the service contract, and the evidence that matters afterwards is timestamped photographs, weather logs and service records. That is why the strongest commercial operator in this market advertises documented service records for liability files. It is a product feature now, not paperwork. The cases, in more detail.
Michigan’s environmental agency sets the chloride level at which aquatic life suffers chronic effects at 150 parts per million, and the acutely toxic level at 320 ppm. Its 2022 Fall Bug Hunt Report documented seven Rouge River sites above the toxic threshold. The Rouge runs 127 miles through Oakland, Washtenaw and Wayne counties, and the state has funded sampling at roughly 40 sites through Friends of the Rouge.
There is no Michigan salt applicator certification to ask an operator about — some states run one, this one does not, and any contractor claiming a Michigan credential of that kind is describing something that does not exist. What is worth asking is simpler and more practical: does the operator pre-wet, does it scale the application to the temperature, and does it know that rock salt begins losing effectiveness below 20°F and does very little below 15? The Road Commission for Oakland County works to exactly that threshold, and uses sand rather than salt on the county’s 750-plus miles of gravel road. Troy runs designated no-salt zones where brine or sand substitutes in sensitive areas. What good ice control looks like here.
All of Oakland County — 63 cities, villages and townships across roughly 900 square miles, from the 1920s estate stock in Birmingham and Bloomfield to the post-war brick ranches of Royal Oak and Troy, the 1970s and 1980s colonials and quad-levels through Rochester Hills and Novi, and the gated and site-condominium development that filled Novi, Commerce and Lyon Township from the 1990s onward.
The county is not one snow market. The National Weather Service’s own station documentation puts average annual snowfall near its White Lake Township office at 60 to 70 inches, against 41 inches at Detroit Metro Airport in Wayne County — a gap it attributes to the office sitting on one of the highest points in southeast Michigan. Storm forecasts run the same gradient every winter. A contract written for Berkley is not a contract written for Oxford. All service areas →
Address, driveway type, what else needs clearing, and whether the road is public or private.
Call (248) 494-7362 Get a Seasonal Quote
Oakland County