Treasure Coast specifics · A Roof That Does Not Leak
Most People Here Are Replacing a Roof That Works
The usual trigger for a roof replacement on this coast is not water in the house. It is a letter about the age of the roof, which is a genuinely uncomfortable position to be put in.
Tell us the age of the roof and whether anything is actually leaking. Those two answers decide what conversation we are having.
2005
A whole region re-roofed in eighteen months, and it is finishing together
No leak
Most people here are replacing a roof that works. We will say so
Our crews
We inspect, we photograph, and our own people do the work
Licensed
A licensed Florida general contractor
Being told to spend on something that is not broken
A homeowner with a dry house receives correspondence raising the age of the roof, and the options presented are usually to replace it or to lose the cover. Nobody in that conversation is looking at the actual roof. The age is a proxy and it is often a reasonable one, but it is not the same as a condition assessment, and an owner who acts purely on the letter may be replacing a roof with several sound years left in it.
What to do before agreeing to anything
- Establish the real installation date rather than an estimate.
- Get the roof inspected and photographed by somebody who walks it.
- Ask your agent exactly what the carrier will accept.
- Find out whether a condition report changes their position.
- Get the replacement priced properly if it turns out to be needed.
Why age became the industry's proxy
Assessing the true condition of every roof individually is slow and expensive, so age is used as a stand-in. It correlates well enough across a large book of properties to be useful to a carrier, even though it is a poor description of any individual roof.
That is the tension a homeowner is standing in. The proxy is defensible in aggregate and it may well be wrong about your specific building, and the only way to find out which is to have somebody look properly.
How we handle it
- 01Inspect and photograph, and report what we actually found.
- 02Give you a document you can put in front of your agent.
- 03Tell you plainly when the roof has life left in it.
- 04Quote the replacement honestly when it is genuinely due.
The document is the useful part. A photographed condition report is something an owner can take to their agent and have a conversation with, rather than choosing between a bill and a letter with nothing in hand. Sometimes it changes the outcome and sometimes it does not, and either way you know what you own.
Said plainly
Where we stop
We cannot tell you what your carrier will accept, we do not negotiate with insurers, and nothing we write is a guarantee about cover or premium. Those are conversations for you and your agent. What we can do is make sure you are having them with an accurate picture of the roof rather than an assumption based on its age.
FAQ
Common questions
- Will an inspection report change my carrier's mind?
- Sometimes, and we cannot promise it. Different carriers treat condition evidence differently. What a report reliably does is let you have the conversation with facts instead of assumptions.
- Should I just replace it and be done?
- If the assessment says the roof is genuinely near the end, that is a reasonable call and a planned replacement beats an emergency one. If it says otherwise, you are spending a lot of money on the basis of a proxy.
- Do you deal with the insurer for me?
- No. We do not negotiate with carriers and we make no promises about cover or premium. We inspect, photograph and report, and you and your agent take it from there.
Roofs we work on
Shingle Roofs
Asphalt shingle is what most of this coast was re-roofed with after 2004, which means a very large number of shingle roofs here started their service lives inside the same eighteen months.
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Tile Roofs
On a tile roof the tile is a rain screen and the underlayment is the waterproofing. Tile outlives underlayment comfortably, so most tile roof work here is really underlayment work.
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Metal Roofs
Metal genuinely lasts on this coast when it is specified and detailed properly. What decides that is rarely the panel. It is the fastener system, the coating and what happens at every edge and penetration.
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Flat & Low Slope
Flat and low slope sections on this coast are very often over an addition, a Florida room or a carport enclosure. They fail differently from the main roof and they usually fail first.
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Leak Diagnosis
Water gets in at one place and appears somewhere else entirely. Diagnosing that properly is the whole job, and it is the part most often skipped in favor of sealing whatever is nearest.
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Deck & Underlayment
The visible roof covering gets all the attention. The deck it is fastened to and the underlayment over that are what decide whether the roof stays on and whether water gets in once it does not.
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More treasure coast specifics
The 2005 Cohort
Frances and Jeanne put most of this coast under new roofs across 2005 and 2006. Those roofs did not age independently, and they are not going to finish independently either.
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Where Roofs Fail
Uplift starts at perimeters and corners. Water gets in at penetrations and flashings. The large open field of the roof, which is what a quote is usually priced by, is the part least likely to be the problem.
Read more →
The Two Inspections
These are two different documents produced by different people for different reasons, and owners conflate them constantly. Knowing which one you have, and which one you need, saves a surprising amount of confusion.
Read more →
Next step
Find out what is actually wrong with it.
An inspection, photographs of what we found, and a written scope. If the honest answer is that it can wait another season, that is the answer you will get.