Buying local series: Roofing Contractor

Buying local series: Roofing Contractor

When building a new home it is always best to buy from the local businesses in the area or community that you are constructing the home. No matter if it’s your summer home or a second home buying locally always makes more sense. This time I’m writing about the reason you should be having your roof supplied and installed by a roofing contractor locally, I’m talking about the local roofing contractor.

Roofing Contractor:

Something that is often forgotten about is the material that is installed on your roof and the way it was installed. That is the way it should be on a new home, you should take the roof for granted and never think about it because it does what it’s supposed to do and that is keep the elements on the outside.

Now to be perfectly honest roofing a house isn’t rocket science but there are certain things that should be done by the installer to insure that the roof stays watertight for many years to come. So if you’re thinking that you should be getting a roofing contractor from somewhere else like a larger city you are wasting your time and probably your money. Local roofing contractors wherever you build your home or chalet are probably just as good as the one from a larger urban area.

Some of the advantages of retaining a local roofing contractor:

·         They know the local weather patterns and prevailing winds. This will allow them to be able to properly flash your home so that even in the worst of storms your roof stays water tight.

·         Your general contractor will have used a local roofing contractor a fair number of times and will understand the strengths and weaknesses. This allows him to properly supervise the installation of the roof.

·         They will be able to give you advice on what products perform better in the area that the house is being built. An example is if you have heavy snow loads where you are building the home then you might want to go with a steel roof instead of asphalt shingles so that the roof will properly shed snow and water, keeping the ice build up to a minimum.

·         For warranty they are not far away to come over and immediately do repairs on anything that would be there fault.

·         If you have an emergency, like tornado level winds tore shingles off the roof, they are able to quickly come over and tarp the place to protect the inside of the residence. Then they are able to organize a quick and efficient repair. They are also able to give you quotes for your insurance company so that you can have the roof fixed.

·         Since there local you don’t have to drive far to see the quality of their work on other homes.

·          You don’t have to go far to check there references, just knock on the door of a home they did and ask your questions.

·         If your building in a high area and you need your house shingled in the winter, a roofing contractor from out of the area will be reluctant to come up when it is snowing hard. The local roofer is able to be closer to the site and able to work on the job even when they are not ideal conditions.

·         Because they are local they have a certain reputation to uphold and will want you to be happy when they are done, so the service level should be higher.

If you hire a roofing contractor thinking that you are saving money buy getting him from out of the build area, remember you get what you pay for, that means they are not just charging less than the local roofer, but they are also going to commute to the site too. A company that is willing to do this should raise some red flags for you as the homeowner. It probably means that they are undercutting the job just to get it and will try to make the money up somewhere else in over priced extras that they didn’t include in the quote. Other thing a lot of roofing contractors will do is they will take on a job out of their normal area just to keep their crews working. But if they pick up jobs that are closer to their normal area and they can make better money at it because they don’t have to pay their men to travel then you get put on the back burner.

Waiting for a roofer can cause serious delays in the building of your home.

Mechanical, plumbing, electrical cannot be installed until the roofing material is properly installed. Before any of this can happen, you need to install the windows and no contractor will do that until the roof is properly installed.

So when you are building your new home or chalet, or just getting a replacement roof, it’s better for everyone when you get the local roofing contractor to do it and not someone from out of the area.

Rob Abbott

Operations manager

Village Builders Inc.

What you need to know about the new asphalt shingle warranties before you decide what to have installed on your roof

There is a new wrinkle in shingle warranties that is going to change everything about the way you shop for shingles.

For decades when you found yourself looking at buying new roofing material, the default was asphalt shingles. What you had to decide was the brand of shingle, the style, the colour and what quality of shingle that you wanted to pay for. The quality of the shingle was determined by the amount of years they were warrantied. So cheap shingles were 10 or 15 year shingles and they went up in 5 or 10 year increments until you got to 40 year shingles that were considered premium.

The big shingle companies have changed there warranties starting this year, they have done away with year warranties on there shingles. They have gone to limited lifetime warranties on all of there shingles. This means that they will warranty the shingles and replacement of the shingles for about 10 to 15 years. After that they only replace the shingles, but you have to pay to have the old ones removed and the new ones installed. It's also a sliding scale on the value of your shingles, so if you spend $10,000.00 on a roof if they replace that amount of money in 15 years you will not get enough shingles to replace the shingles that you took off because of inflation.

It sounds like this system would cost the shingle companies more money because they would have to pay out money for the life time of the home they are installed on because the shingles will eventually fail. Here's the catch, the warranty on the shingles is not transferable if the home is sold. The average homeowner only lives in there homes for 7 years. So on average shingle companies now are banking on the percentages to only have to warranty there shingles for 7 years. That means that they have actually down graded there warranties to below the cheapest shingle they used to sell.

The shingle companies are now promoting this lifetime warranty as a plus and are even charging more for there shingles on average. So they have figured out a way to lesson there exposure with there warranties and raise there prices without giving the consumer anything extra.

So if you can afford it, you should look into other alternatives other then shingles.

There is an ever growing list of alternatives in roofing with the dissatisfaction of asphalt shingles. Also with the price of oil on the rise the gap between oil based asphalt shingles and all other non oil based roofing products is rapidly closing.

But if you have to buy shingles for your roof, go into the purchase with your eyes wide open.

If you want anymore information on shingles or other roofing products feel free to email me at robabbott@villagebuilders.ca

Rob Abbott

Operations Manager

Village Builders Inc.