Seventy eight roofing companies here hold a perfect 5.0

In a file of 222 rated roofing contractors, 78 carry a flawless five point zero star average. That is more than a third of the market with a spotless public record, which should immediately strike you as improbable, because it is. The number that resolves it is not the average. It is how many people each average is built on.

Why a perfect average is easiest to hold when you have almost nothing

A star average has no memory and no confidence interval attached to it. Google prints 5.0 the same way whether it rests on four reviews or four hundred, in the same typeface, at the same size, with the same five gold stars beside it. Nothing in the display tells you which one you are looking at unless you read the small grey number next to it, and most people do not.

The mathematics is unforgiving. A company with four reviews needs four happy customers to show a perfect record. A company with four hundred reviews needs four hundred, across every crew, every season, every awkward roof and every rain delay, over years. The second is close to impossible and the first happens by default. Which means a perfect average is, more than anything else, a signal that a listing is young or quiet.

The perfect averages that actually survived contact with volume

Of the 78 perfect averages in this market, 8 are held by companies with at least one hundred published reviews. Those are worth knowing about, because holding 5.0 across that much feedback is genuinely difficult and genuinely rare.

Eight companies out of 222. That is the honest size of the group that a phrase like top rated roofers in St. Louis should be pointing at, and it is roughly one twenty eighth of the market.

What to do when you find a 5.0 with almost no reviews behind it

Not dismiss it. Some of the best small roofing companies in this region have thin listings, because asking customers for reviews is a marketing habit and marketing habits are not workmanship. But you do have to stop treating the star average as evidence and go and find some.

• Read every review, not the averageWith eleven reviews you can read all eleven in four minutes. Look at the dates. Eleven reviews in one week is a launch push. Eleven reviews across three years is a small company with real customers.
• Look for the specificsA review that names a crew, a street, a material and a problem that got fixed is worth thirty that say great job highly recommend.
• Ask for addresses rather than referencesA reference is a phone number for someone who has agreed in advance to say something nice. An address in your own municipality is a roof you can go and look at from the pavement.
• Treat a brand new listing with a perfect record and a large advertising budget as a questionNot as a disqualification, but as a question worth asking out loud: how long has this company been trading under this name, and where was the crew last year.

How to read the reviews themselves →