5 Things to Check Before Hiring a Roofer — From the Insurance Certificate to the Decking Line on the Estimate

You search for roofers and thirty results come back, and every one of them is licensed and experienced and family owned since some year or other. They all sound the same because they have all read the same advice about what homeowners want to hear.

Qucik Answer If You Guys Are Busy:

Certificate from the broker. Certification tier checked on the manufacturer’s own locator. Workmanship term written in years. Decking priced per sheet before anything comes off. And somebody who has watched roofs fail in your weather rather than in somebody else’s.

Five, before you sign:

• The insurance certificate, sent to you by their broker. Not forwarded by them.
• Their manufacturer certification tier, which decides what warranty they are even allowed to give you.
• Which of the two warranties covers what. Materials and workmanship are separate and only one of them tends to fail.
• What the estimate says about decking, which is where a cheap bid stops being cheap.
• Whether they know your weather. A roof in Washington and a roof in Texas are up against opposite things.

All five can be checked in an afternoon, which is less time than most people spend choosing the colour.

So the checklist above is only things you can go and check yourself, with somewhere specific to check them.

Get The Insurance Certificate From The Broker, Not The Roofer

Start with what happens when this one goes wrong, because it is the only item on the list that can genuinely cost you more than the roof did.

A crew is up there. Somebody catches a foot on a ladder rung, comes off the edge, lands badly, and now there is an ambulance in your driveway and a man who is not working for the next eight months.

If the contractor carries workers’ compensation, his insurer deals with it and the money side never reaches you.

If he does not, the injured man has a serious problem and eventually a lawyer, and the property where it happened is yours. Homeowners have ended up personally exposed for an injury to somebody who was on their roof for half a day.

There are two policies and the corner-cutting outfits tend to carry one of them:

• General liability, a million or more, covering damage to your property
• Workers’ compensation, covering injury to his people

Liability is the one that gets advertised. Comp is the one that would actually land on you.

Then there is the bit that does the real protecting. Ask for the certificate of insurance to come straight from their insurance broker to you. A PDF the contractor forwards you shows what the policy looked like whenever that document was made, and policies lapse for missed payments all the time. Something arriving from the broker is current as of today, and asking for it is a completely normal request in this trade, so if it turns into a whole thing, you have learned something without having to ask anything else.

Same for the licence. The Federal Trade Commission tells homeowners to check licensing through state or county records rather than accepting a number printed on a card, and in Washington that search lives with the Department of Labor and Industries. Every state has its own version and they all take about a minute.

Their Certification Tier Decides Which Warranty You Can Be Offered

This one earns a table, because you can see straight away what you gain or give up.

Manufacturers run certification programs for contractors, and the tiers control which warranties a contractor is permitted to register. Hire outside the programme and certain options are gone no matter how good the workmanship turns out to be.

Taking GAF, since it is the biggest of them:

Contractor status	Share of US roofers	Best warranty they can offer	What that covers
Uncertified	Roughly 93%	Standard manufacturer warranty	Material defects only, installation errors excluded
GAF Certified	Within the ~7% certified at any level	System Plus Limited Warranty	Materials plus limited workmanship
GAF Master Elite	Under 2%	Golden Pledge Limited Warranty	50 years materials, 25 years workmanship, 100% of labour on covered repairs, transfers when you sell

Look at the top row again. Around ninety-three percent of roofers can only offer you cover against material defects, and a material defect is one of the least likely ways a roof ever fails.

Master Elite takes seven years minimum in business, current state licensing, a million in liability plus workers’ comp, credit and financial checks, a clean review history, and annual renewal with training on top. GAF audits it and takes it away from contractors whose installations start slipping, so it is not a logo anyone can print for themselves.

Check it on the manufacturer’s own contractor locator by postcode rather than trusting the truck door. And get one thing in writing before you sign, which is exactly which warranty they will be registering on your roof, and can you see the document first.

There Are Two Warranties And Only One Of Them Usually Matters

Roofs almost never fail in the middle of a shingle. They fail at the edges and the valleys, around the chimney, where the plumbing vent comes through, at the flashing. Nearly all of that is how it was fitted rather than what it was made of.

So look at how most warranty pairs are put together and something is off.

A fifty year shingle warranty next to a one year workmanship warranty is covering the thing that hardly ever goes wrong for fifty years, and the thing that usually goes wrong for twelve months.

Ask for:

• The workmanship term written down in years, kept separate from the material warranty
• Whether labour is included on a covered repair, since a free shingle plus four hours of your money is not much of a warranty
• Whether it transfers when you sell, and what that costs
• What voids it, because bad ventilation and later work by a different contractor are both common exclusions

Somebody who trusts his own crews will put a long workmanship term on paper without much prompting, and if that turns into a negotiation you have found out what you needed to know fairly cheaply.

The Estimate Has To Say What Happens Under The Shingles

This is where two bids sitting two thousand dollars apart can turn out to be the same bid, or where the cheaper one becomes the expensive one on the second morning.

Nobody knows what the decking looks like until the old roof is off. Soft spots, rot around the chimney, old delamination from a leak somebody patched in 2011, none of it shows from the driveway. Every honest estimate deals with that somewhere. A vague estimate deals with it by leaving it out and raising it later, as a change order, while your house is open.

I also asked Mr Anatolii about this, he is a roofing contractor in Westlake, and he was blunt about it:

“Get the decking price written on the estimate before anything comes off. Price per sheet, and how many sheets are already included in the number. When that is not written down, the conversation happens on the second morning with your house half open, and that is a terrible moment to be negotiating anything.”

What else belongs on there:

• Tear-off or overlay, and how many existing layers are coming off
• Decking replacement priced per sheet, with an allowance already in the total
• Underlayment type, and where the ice and water shield is going
• Flashing, replaced or reused, because reusing it is a very common shortcut
• Ventilation, intake and exhaust both, since poor ventilation cooks a roof from underneath and voids a fair number of warranties
• Cleanup and disposal, magnetic sweep for nails included

Two estimates with all of that written out can be put side by side. One estimate with a single number and the word roof on it cannot be compared with anything, including itself.

A Roof In Washington And A Roof In Texas Are Up Against Different Things

Local knowledge gets talked about in a very woolly way, so here it is concretely.

Around Puget Sound the problem is water that never quite stops and never fully dries out. Moss and algae get going on the north-facing slopes, hold moisture against the surface, and lift shingle edges as they thicken. Ventilation matters enormously because the attic is arguing with damp air most of the year. Algae-resistant shingles stop being an upsell and start being sensible, and the flashing details matter more than anything happening in the middle of the roof.

North Texas is the opposite kind of trouble. It arrives all at once, as hail and wind, and then heat ages the whole thing from the top down between storms. Impact rating becomes the conversation. Insurance claims after a storm are routine rather than unusual. The ventilation problem is heat instead of damp.

Same checklist either way, and the answers come out completely different.

Which is why it is fair to just ask a contractor how long they have been working in your particular weather. Outfits that stay in one climate, like ShieldPro Roofing up around Mukilteo, are recommending materials against the failures they have personally watched happen rather than against a catalogue, and they already know how the local inspectors read a permit.

Reviews, Read Properly

Star ratings tell you nearly nothing, since everybody sits somewhere around 4.7.

The three-star reviews are the ones worth reading, because that is where people describe what actually happened instead of gushing or venting.

Look for the same thing coming up repeatedly. Several people saying the crew cleaned up properly. Several describing a job that overran and how it got handled. Several naming the same person. One review saying anything is just one person’s week.

And ask a neighbour who has had it done recently, because they can answer the question no review site covers, which is what the company was like three months afterwards when something needed a second look.