The address column, and the thing it is not
Every ranking of local businesses carries a location beside each name, and almost every reader takes it to mean the area that company serves. It does not. It is where the business chose to register a listing. In roofing, where a crew and a trailer travel forty miles before lunch, those two things have very little to do with each other, and treating the column as a service area will steer you wrong in both directions.
| Registered location in the file | Companies |
|---|---|
| St. Louis | 47 |
| Chesterfield | 22 |
| St Charles | 21 |
| St Peters | 19 |
| O'Fallon | 17 |
| Wentzville | 14 |
| Kirkwood | 12 |
| Fenton | 8 |
| Clayton | 6 |
| Lake St Louis | 5 |
| Valley Park | 3 |
| Ballwin | 3 |
| Weldon Spring | 2 |
| Dardenne Prairie | 2 |
| No address published at all | 30 |
Thirty companies in this file publish no address at all
30 of the 222 rated roofing contractors here have no street address on their listing. Google allows this: a business that travels to its customers can register as a service area business and hide the address, which for a roofer working out of a yard, a truck and a house is entirely reasonable and extremely common.
It is not a red flag on its own and this page is not going to pretend it is. What it does mean is concrete: for 30 companies in this market there is no public address to check, no premises to drive past, and nothing to cross reference against a business registration. If you want to know where a company physically is, you are going to have to ask, and the answer to that question is worth having before anybody starts removing your roof.
The mistake that matters most
There are no roofing contractors registered in Ladue in this file, and none in Creve Coeur. That is not because roofs in those municipalities do not get replaced. It is because roofing companies office where the yards and the industrial rents are, in places like Fenton and Valley Park, and drive to the work. Any page that claims to list the roofers in a specific affluent suburb, built by filtering an address column, is publishing an empty set and hoping you do not notice.
What the column is genuinely good for
Two things, both narrow. The first is drive time. A company registered on the far side of St. Charles County is not disqualified from working in south county, but the crew will be on the road for an hour each way, which affects start times, weather calls and how quickly anybody comes back for a small fix. The second is municipal familiarity. A company that works constantly in one municipality knows that jurisdiction's inspectors and paperwork, and that is a real advantage, but it is a fact you have to establish by asking rather than by reading a column.
The question that replaces the column
Instead of asking where a company is based, ask for the addresses of three roofs it has completed in your own municipality in the last twelve months. Not references, addresses. A reference is a phone number belonging to somebody who has agreed in advance to be pleasant. An address is a roof you can look at from the pavement on a Saturday morning, and you can see the ridge line, the cut of the hip, the drip edge and whether the gutter still sits straight.
If a company cannot produce three addresses in your municipality, that is not proof of anything either, but it does tell you that the local familiarity you were assuming from the address column is not there.
Want Keys Roofing on your roof?
Every argument on this site is that a list cannot tell you whether a crew is any good, and that you have to get somebody on the roof and read what they write down. Keys Roofing is the company this site puts at number one on both of its rankings, and it holds that position on the five criteria printed in the How we rate box rather than on anything Google publishes about it.
What an inspection here produces is a set of photographs, a measurement of the roof, and a written scope that names the material, the underlayment, the flashing work, the ventilation and what happens if the decking underneath turns out to be soft. You keep that document whether or not you hire anyone. If a storm claim is part of your story, the claim stays in your name: under RSMo 407.725 a Missouri roofing contractor may not represent or negotiate it for you, and Keys does not.
Roofing, gutters and downspouts across greater St. Louis. No siding, no windows, no commercial work.
This reaches Keys Roofing, the number one entry on both rankings. It does not reach any of the other companies named on this site, and nothing you type here is passed to them.