How to vet a roofing contractor

Eight questions, asked out loud

• Who is physically on my roof?Direct employees or a subcontracted crew. Both can be excellent. What matters is that you know which, and that the answer does not change between the sale and the install.
• Who carries workers compensation for those people?If the crew is subcontracted, ask whose policy covers them. Ask for the certificate to come from the insurer or the agent rather than as a photograph. An uninsured worker injured on your roof is your problem in a way most homeowners do not expect.
• What is the per sheet price for replacing bad decking?The number that always moves after the tear off. It should be in the proposal, not discovered on the day.
• Which municipality am I in, and what does it require?Trivial for anyone who works here regularly. Genuinely hard for a crew that arrived for the storm season.
• Are the flashings being replaced or reused?The largest hidden difference between two similar looking bids, and one that is rarely volunteered.
• What is the workmanship warranty, who honours it, and what voids it?In writing, and stated separately from whatever the manufacturer covers on the product. If the installing company were to close, the manufacturer's product coverage does not become a workmanship warranty.
• What happens to my landscaping and my drive?On a property with mature plantings and a long drive, protection and access are a real part of the scope, and a loaded delivery truck on an old drive is a genuine risk.
• Can I see two roofs you finished more than five years ago?Anyone can show you last month's work. Work that has been through five Missouri winters is the useful sample.

Four behaviours that should end the conversation

1. Manufactured urgency. A price that expires today, a crew that is in the neighbourhood only this week, a warning that the roof will not survive the next storm. A roof that has come through a storm intact will come through the week it takes you to get a second opinion.
2. An offer about your deductible. Any suggestion that a contractor will absorb, discount, rebate or otherwise make your deductible go away is not a favour. RSMo 407.725 bars a roofing contractor from advertising or promising it, and a company willing to break that statute in front of you is telling you something about the rest of its practice.
3. An offer to run the claim for you. Same statute. A Missouri roofing contractor may not represent or negotiate on a property owner's insurance claim, so a company promising to handle, fight or maximise your claim is either misinformed about the law or indifferent to it.
4. A contract disguised as an inspection. Read the paper on the clipboard. In this trade an authorisation to inspect and a binding contract are sometimes the same document, occasionally one that becomes binding on an insurer's approval rather than on your decision.

What you can actually verify

With no state licence, this is the list of things that are genuinely checkable rather than assertable.

• Business registration. The Missouri Secretary of State maintains a public business entity search. It will tell you when an entity was registered and whether it is in good standing. It will not tell you whether the crew is good, but a company operating under a name that does not appear anywhere is worth a question.
• Municipal registration. Where your municipality registers or licenses contractors, ask the city, not the contractor.
• Insurance. Certificates should arrive from the agent or the carrier. Verify the policy is current for the dates of your work, not merely that a certificate exists.
• The address. Worth understanding rather than over reading. See where a roofer is registered, because in this metro the address tells you far less than people assume.
• Old work. The most useful check on the list, and the one nobody asks for.

Do the vetting before you need it

The reason this is hard is timing. Almost nobody chooses a roofer calmly. They choose one in the week after a storm, with a stain spreading on a ceiling and eight door hangers on the porch, and every part of that situation pushes toward speed.

The counter is to have the conversation before the storm. A written condition report, with photographs and measurements, taken when nothing is wrong, gives you three things: a baseline for what the roof was like beforehand, a relationship with somebody who has already been on your roof, and the ability to tell the difference between a real problem and a sales call.

That is what Keys does on an inspection, and the report is yours whether or not Keys does the work.