Roofing in Ladue, Missouri

Four things worth knowing before you get a bid

If you read nothing else on this site, read these. They are the four points that change how a Ladue homeowner reads a roofing proposal, and none of the four is a sales point.

1. Missouri does not license roofers. There is no state roofing licence to check, because there is no state roofing licence. Three attempts to create one failed in the legislature. Whatever screening happens, happens at the municipal level and at your kitchen table.
2. The roof will fail at a detail, not a surface. Pipe boots, step flashing, chimney counterflashing, valley metal and the fasteners themselves go first. A shingle field in good condition sitting over a failed detail is the most common thing an inspector finds on a house of this age.
3. The gutter is usually the undersized part. On a large steep roof, the gutter is asked to carry water from a very large plane through a very short run. Five inch gutter on a house like that overshoots, and the overshoot lands on the foundation.
4. No roofing company is registered in Ladue. Not one. That is a fact about commercial real estate, not about who is competent, and it is worth understanding rather than working around.

What this weather actually does

St. Louis sits in a genuinely punishing spot for roofing, and not primarily because of storms. The everyday problem is amplitude. A roof deck in this county can sit above 150 degrees on an August afternoon and drop below freezing repeatedly through February, and the fastener holding a shingle down does not expand and contract at the same rate as the wood it is driven into or the asphalt it is holding. Do that a few thousand times and the nail begins to back out. That is a nail pop, and a nail pop is a hole.

Then there is the water. Freeze and thaw drive moisture into every seam that is not sealed, expand it, and open the seam a little further each cycle. This is why the detail work fails first and why a roof that looks sound from the driveway can be actively leaking above a bay window.

Hail is real here too, but it deserves accurate framing rather than a scare. NOAA's Storm Events Database logged 125 hail events in St. Louis County between 2020 and 2025, with the largest measured stone at 2.5 inches and an average of 1.32 inches. Those are counts of reported events, not of insured losses, and reporting density follows population, so a densely populated county naturally logs more reports than an empty one. Read conservatively, the figure still means a roof in this area takes repeated impact over its life.

Amplitude does the slow damage. Storms get the attention.

The full record, including the May 2025 tornado and what the Missouri Department of Commerce and Insurance published about that season, is set out in the storm record for this county. The mechanics of ageing are in what actually ages a roof here.

Details, not surfaces

Walk a roof of this vintage and the pattern repeats. The shingle field has plenty of granule left. The pipe boot has split at the collar because the rubber has fifteen summers of ultraviolet in it and rubber is not a lifetime material. The step flashing behind the chimney has been face sealed with roofing cement by someone who did not want to open the masonry. The valley is holding debris because the tree above it drops more than the valley can pass. The ridge vent is intact but the cap shingles over it were hand cut from three tab and are lifting.

Each of those is a small repair on the day it is found and a framing job three winters later. It is also the part of the roof that a bid written from the ground cannot price, which is why the specification of the details is the part of a proposal worth reading twice.

Roofing, gutters and downspouts. Nothing else.

Keys Roofing does three things and declines the rest. There is no siding division, no window division and no commercial arm, and that is deliberate rather than a limitation waiting to be filled. Shingles are Atlas and Malarkey.

Replacement

Full tear off down to the deck, decking replaced where it has gone soft, then underlayment, ice and water at the vulnerable details, valley metal, flashings, field and ridge.

Repair

Pipe boots, step and counterflashing, valley metal, nail pops, storm damaged sections, and the specific detail that is actually leaking rather than the whole plane.

Inspection

Photographs, measurements and a written scope you keep, whether or not Keys does the work.

Gutter

Seamless gutter formed on site to the length of the run, sized to the roof rather than to the truck, hung with hidden hangers, plus guards, realignment and repair.

Drainage

Downspouts, extensions, reroutes and underground carry away from the foundation. Uncommon for a roofing company and the part that decides whether a well drained roof protects the house or undermines it.

What Keys does not do is equally short: no representation on an insurance claim, no work outside roofing and drainage, and no pricing given before someone has been on the roof.

There is no roofer registered in Ladue

It is worth saying plainly, because a great many local pages are built to imply otherwise. Pull every rated roofing contractor with a registered business address across this metro and sort them by municipality, and the count for Ladue is zero. So is Creve Coeur. The companies cluster in Fenton, Kirkwood, Maryland Heights and along the industrial corridors, because roofing needs a yard, a materials drop, a dumpster arrangement and somewhere for a fleet to park overnight, and Ladue has none of those things by design.

Which means any page ranking "the best roofers in Ladue" by address is either ranking companies that are not there, or ranking gutter cleaners and pressure washers who happen to be filed under a roofing category. A pin sitting in Fenton says nothing whatsoever about whether a company works in Ladue, does good work in Ladue, or has been on your street this month. It says where the trucks sleep.

The full argument is here, along with what to ask instead.

Municipal process, and the licence that does not exist

Ladue is an incorporated municipality with its own building department, so the municipal rule governs and you confirm it with the city rather than with the county. The useful background is the county baseline that most of the metro works from: in unincorporated St. Louis County, a like for like asphalt replacement on a slope of 4:12 or steeper does not require a permit, while a shallower slope does, a change of roofing material does, and replacing more than a quarter of the decking does.

On top of that, municipalities set their own requirements, and some of them, Ballwin and Kirkwood among them, run their own contractor licensing rather than deferring to the county. Missouri itself issues no roofing licence at all. Senate bills in 2016, 2019 and 2021 each proposed a state licence and each one failed, so anyone quoting you a state licence number is quoting something that does not exist.

Read permits and the municipality before you sign anything, particularly if your roof has any low slope section, which on a house with porches and additions is more likely than not.

Ten articles, written to be read once and used

Each of these answers a question a homeowner here actually asks, at the length the question deserves rather than the length that fills a page.

Asked often enough to answer here