What no roofing ranking can measure

This site has spent nine sheets being careful about two numbers. Here is the part those numbers do not touch at all. Everything that determines whether a roof lasts its full service life happens in a few hours on one morning, on a surface nobody is looking at, and none of it produces a data point that a comparison page could ever sort on.

The decking, which is decided in the first two hours

When the old covering comes off, the boards underneath are visible for the only time in that roof's life. Older St. Louis housing stock, particularly the brick and frame streets in the city and the inner suburbs, is frequently original plank decking rather than sheet, with gaps between the boards and decades of nail holes through them. Some of it is sound. Some of it is soft where water has been sitting under a bad valley or a failed pipe boot for years.

What happens next is a choice made by a crew, on a roof, usually without the homeowner present. Soft boards can be cut out and replaced. They can also be covered, which costs nothing today and is invisible for about a decade. Nothing in a review, a star average, a review count or an award badge distinguishes a company that does the first from a company that does the second.

The flashing, which is where roofs actually leak

Field shingles almost never fail first. Water gets in at the interruptions: the chimney, the wall abutments, the valleys, the pipe penetrations, the skylight kerbs. Flashing at those points can be replaced, or the old metal can be bent back down and reused with sealant over the top, which looks identical from the ground and from the driveway on the day the invoice is paid.

The same is true of the pipe boots. A rubber collared boot is one of the cheapest components on a roof and one of the most reliable ways to end up with a stain on a bedroom ceiling in year eight. A scope that lists new boots is a scope written by somebody who has been called back for that.

The ventilation, which is free to fix while the roof is open

Intake at the soffit and exhaust at the ridge have to be balanced, and a very large number of houses in this region have neither in the quantity the roof needs. A hot, unventilated attic cooks shingles from underneath and shortens their life by years, and in winter it drives the ice damming that puts water back up under the courses at the eave.

Correcting it costs almost nothing during a tear off and is disruptive and expensive afterwards. A company that measures the attic and writes the ventilation into the scope is doing something a company that quotes a price per square never will, and no ranking on the internet knows which is which.

Who is actually on your roof

The name on the truck, the name on the contract and the names of the people carrying bundles up the ladder are frequently three different things, and there is nothing improper about that in itself. Roofing runs on crews, and good crews are subcontracted by good companies. But it does mean that the reviews you read, which describe a company, may not describe the people who will be on your house, and that a company's quality can change between June and August without a single number moving.

Year four, and whether anybody comes back

Almost every roofing review is written within a fortnight of the job finishing, when the house looks better than it has in twenty years and everybody is pleased. Practically nothing in any public dataset describes what happens the first time it needs attention, three or four years later, when the crew has moved on and the salesperson has changed companies. That is the single most valuable piece of information about any roofing contractor and it is the one piece nobody collects.

The closest available proxy is to search a company's reviews for the words callback, came back and returned, and read whatever comes out. It is a weak proxy. It is better than the star average.