Sheet 07 · method

How to read a roofing company's reviews yourself

Both rankings on this site exist to get you to a shortlist of names. From that point the numbers have nothing left to give and the words start doing the work. Reading reviews properly takes about twenty minutes per company and it is by a wide margin the highest value thing a homeowner can do with public information about a roofer. Almost nobody does it, because the star average looks like it has already done the job.

1. Sort by newest and read forward, not by relevanceThe default ordering on most review platforms promotes reviews the platform thinks are useful, which tends to mean long, positive and old. Roofing companies change hands, change crews and change project managers. A glowing review from four years ago describes a company that may not exist any more. Start at the most recent and read until the dates stop being relevant to you, which is usually about eighteen months back.
2. Read the three and four star reviews firstFive star reviews tell you a job went fine, which is the outcome in the overwhelming majority of roofing jobs and therefore carries almost no information. One star reviews are frequently about something outside the company's control, or about a dispute where you are reading one side. The middle band is where the useful writing lives: a customer pleased enough to be fair and annoyed enough to be specific.
3. Look for the four things a rating cannot carryDid the crew who turned up work for the company, or did a subcontractor arrive in an unmarked truck. Did the price on the final invoice match the price on the contract, and if not, why not. Was there any mention of the decking, and what happened when it was found soft. And did anybody come back afterwards when something needed attention.
4. Notice what the company writes backOwner responses are unusually revealing because they are written by management rather than by a customer. Look for a response to a critical review that engages with the specific complaint. A response that says please call our office so we can make this right is a template. A response that says the ridge vent was cut short on the west elevation and we returned on the fourteenth to extend it is a company that knows what happened on your roof.
5. Check whether the reviews arrived in clustersOpen the dates. Reviews that arrive steadily over years are the residue of ordinary trading. Thirty reviews inside two weeks is a campaign, which is not by itself dishonest but does mean the average you are looking at was assembled rather than accumulated.
6. Read the reviewer, not just the reviewA reviewer with one review, written the week the listing appeared, in the same phrasing as four other reviews, is a data point about the listing rather than about the roof. A reviewer with a history of reviewing dentists and restaurants in your own zip code is a neighbour.

What good looks like when you have finished

After twenty minutes on one company you should be able to answer three questions without guessing. Who physically does the work. What happens when the job turns out to be bigger than the estimate. And whether anyone returns after the invoice is paid. If the reviews do not answer those, that is itself an answer: it means the public record on this company is thin, and you are going to have to get the answers in the driveway instead.

Then compare what you learned against the split rule on sheet three. A company whose volume position is far above its rating position, whose recent reviews are fine and whose old ones are furious, is usually a company that fixed something. The same shape with recent complaints is a company still doing it.

The checks that happen off the review platform →