Nine questions, and what a good answer sounds like. These are the ones that matter in Atlanta specifically. Most sealcoating advice online was written for places that freeze, and half its questions are about a winter you do not have.
The most useful question you can ask, and the one that sorts people fastest. Plenty of Atlanta driveways that get sealed did not need it, particularly shaded ones that still look black.
A good answer includes the circumstances in which they would tell you to keep your money. An answer that treats the question as strange is itself the answer.
This is the Atlanta question. A huge share of drives here sit under canopy and carry algae or moss, and sealer does not bond to it.
You want to hear that the growth gets treated and lifted, that there is a wait between that and the coat, and that it is a separate line rather than something absorbed into a round number. "We'll blow it off" is not a plan.
In summer here that is not a hypothetical. Rain on an uncured coat streaks it, lifts it, or washes it off, and the only fix is doing it again.
The answer you want is that they move the day, that they start early for this reason, and that moving it costs you nothing. Somebody who will start a drive at two in the afternoon in July with storms forecast is somebody who will be back.
Aerial images miss the apron, the parking pad, the strip beside the house, and they have no idea your driveway drops fifteen feet to a basement garage.
A measured drive gets a number that holds. An estimated one gets corrected on the day, upwards.
Spraying is faster and uses less material, and it lays the sealer on top of the surface rather than working it in. Squeegee and brush pushes it into the texture, which is what you are actually paying for.
Some good operators spray and then back-brush. What you do not want is spray alone on a porous, sun-beaten drive that needs the material driven into it.
Every product has a manufacturer ratio. Adding water past it covers more ground for less cost and you cannot see it going down or the week after. You see it the following summer.
A straight answer naming the product and the ratio is a good sign. Vagueness about what is in the tank is the single easiest place to lose money on this job.
Cracks are countable in linear feet. Folding them into a lump sum means nobody can tell whether they were done properly or at all.
Separate and measured also lets you decline part of it, which you cannot do with a single number.
Twenty four to forty eight hours, longer if the nights are cool. Anyone offering a few hours in cool weather is telling you something about how the coat will look next spring.
Then ask about tracking. In Georgia heat a new coat stays soft enough to mark a garage floor for a week or two. Someone who warns you about that beforehand is someone who has done this through a summer here.
On a residential driveway this is a reasonable thing to ask and a reasonable thing to be told plainly either way.
On anything commercial it is not optional. A lot, a private road, an apartment or condominium property: ask for the certificate before the booking rather than the week of the job, and if a management company needs to be named as additional insured, say so at the enquiry, because it takes days to process.
Read back through the nine and the tell is the same every time. A good answer names a constraint. A bad one offers reassurance.
"We start at seven because of the storms" is a constraint. "We always do a great job" is reassurance. "It is a hundred and forty linear feet of crack at this rate" is a constraint. "We'll take care of the cracks" is reassurance. The first kind of answer can be checked afterwards and the second cannot, which is the entire difference.
Get the number in writing before anyone starts, with the sealing, the crack filling and any preparation on separate lines. Not because most operators are dishonest, but because an itemised quote is the only version of the conversation that still exists three weeks later when the drive looks different from what you pictured.
And if every quote you get is a single round number with no measurement behind it, that is worth knowing too. It usually means nobody has walked the driveway.
A small question that tells you whether someone has thought the day through. The real answer is short: move the cars off including anything on the apron, and turn off sprinklers near the drive for the day.
That second one catches people out here, because irrigation is on a timer and nobody thinks about it. A zone running at four in the morning onto a coat that went down at noon is a ruined job, and it is nobody's fault except that it was never mentioned.
