Employed or subcontracted
The first question
Residential roofing runs on two models. Some companies employ their crews. Others sell the job and subcontract the installation to a crew that works for several companies. Both models produce good roofs and both produce bad ones, so this is not a question with a right answer, it is a question with an answer you are entitled to have.
What changes is where accountability sits. With an employed crew, the company that sold you the job is the company standing on it, and the foreman answers to the same person the salesman does. With a subcontracted crew, there is a commercial relationship in the middle, and the quality of your roof depends heavily on how much the company actually inspects what its subs do.
So ask directly: are the people who will be on my roof your employees or a subcontractor? Then ask the follow up that actually matters: who from your company will be on site while the work is happening, and for how long?
The follow up nobody likes
If the answer is that a project manager will stop by, ask when and for how long. A visit at the end of the day sees a finished roof. It does not see how the ice and water membrane was lapped at the valley, because that was covered four hours earlier.
This is the single most useful question on the page and it is uncomfortable to ask. Ask it anyway. The quality of the answer, and how quickly it comes, tells you more than any brochure.
The salesman
Commission and the incentive it creates
Most residential roofing is sold by someone paid on commission, and there is nothing wrong with that in itself. It becomes a problem in two specific ways.
The first is the storm canvasser. After a hail event in this county, streets fill with people knocking doors who were not in this market last year and will not be in it next year. They are not necessarily dishonest, but their relationship with your house ends the day the contract is signed, and a warranty from a company that has left the state is a piece of paper.
The second is the pressure close: a price good only today, a discount for signing now, a claim that the crew happens to be in the neighbourhood. Roofing is a five figure decision on a house you plan to keep. There is no legitimate reason for it to be decided in one evening, and any structure designed to make it happen in one evening exists for the seller's benefit.
A related warning sign is specific to this state and it is objective rather than a matter of taste: anyone offering to conduct or negotiate your insurance claim is offering conduct that Missouri prohibits under RSMo 407.725. That is covered on the claim sheet.
Addresses
What a pin on a map tells you
Search for roofers in this town and you will be shown a map with pins on it, and the pins will not be in Creve Coeur, because in the rated business data for this metro there is not a single roofing contractor with a registered Creve Coeur address.
The usual explanation is about commercial property, and it is true as far as it goes. But the more interesting point is what a registered address measures. It measures where a company files. Not where its crews live, not where its trucks were yesterday, not where it has done twenty roofs this year. A company registered four miles away with a foreman who grew up on your street is more local than a company registered on your street whose crew was hired in March.
So an address ranking answers a question nobody is really asking. The questions worth asking are about continuity: how long has this crew worked together, how many roofs did this company do in this county last year, and can somebody name a street nearby where the work is standing.
Including us
Keys Roofing is not registered in Creve Coeur either. Keys works here and is not from here, and the same test applies to Keys as to anyone else on your list.
This site publishes no ranking of local roofers for the same reason. Ranking by registered address would produce a list of companies that are not here, and the only businesses that would fill the gap in that data are gutter cleaners and pressure washers filed under a roofing heading. A list like that would look authoritative and be wrong, and the reader would have no way to tell.
Paperwork
Four documents, five minutes
- Certificate of general liability insurance, sent to you directly by the agent. Not a photocopy handed over in your kitchen. The direct request is the whole point of the exercise.
- Workers compensation coverage for the people on the roof. If a subcontracted crew is being used, the coverage question follows the crew, not the company that sold you the job. Ask which policy covers the people actually up there.
- Whatever registration your municipality requires. Creve Coeur runs its own building department. Confirm with the city what your contractor is required to hold. See the permit sheet.
- Lien waivers from the material supplier on completion. A mechanic's lien can be filed by a supplier who was not paid even where you paid the contractor in full. On a job of any size this is worth asking about before the final payment leaves your hands.
None of those four requests is unusual and none of them should cause friction. Friction is the information.
Two things to check afterwards
The day after and the year after
The day after: walk the perimeter of the house yourself. You are looking for nails in the lawn and the driveway, which is what a magnet sweep is for and which is the most common thing to be done badly. Look up at the gutters for dents from a dropped bundle, look at the landscaping under the eaves, and look at the ground where the dumpster sat.
The year after: this is the real test and almost nobody does it. Look at the ridge, the valleys and the flashing after one full cycle of a Missouri winter, and look inside the attic with a torch after a hard rain. Anything a roof is going to do wrong in the first decade, it usually starts doing in the first twelve months.
A company that answers the phone a year later, when there is no money in it for them, is a different proposition from one that does not. That is not something you can establish before you sign, which is precisely why the questions about crews and continuity earlier on this page are worth asking.