Free Roof Inspection STL / Filter 01
Eight things at the door that should stop the conversation
Somebody is on your step and wants a signature today. None of these eight proves anybody is dishonest, but each is a reason to sign nothing, ask one more question, and book an inspection you can hold to every line on this page instead.
A verdict before anybody climbed
The single most common one, and the easiest to check. Someone knocks and tells you from the pavement that you have storm damage. They have not been on the roof, so they cannot have seen a pipe boot, a fastener, a sealant strip, a step flashing or the inside of a valley, because none of those is visible from ground level on any house. A verdict delivered before a ladder went up is a verdict about the neighbourhood, not about your address.
What they have seen is a neighbourhood and a date. That is a marketing decision, not an inspection, and it is worth naming it as one. The honest version of the same sentence is that there was a storm over this area, several houses on this street are having roofs looked at, and would you like yours looked at too. That is a fair thing to say. A verdict is not.
There was hail through here on a date. We are looking at roofs on this street. Can we look at yours and send you photographs.
Your roof has storm damage. I can see it from here. We can get this taken care of for you.
Pressure to sign at the door
Urgency is the oldest tool there is, and after a storm it is easy to make it sound reasonable: the crew is in the area this week, prices are going up, the adjusters are already booked out. Some of that is even true. None of it is a reason to sign a document on your own doorstep on the day you first met somebody.
There is no version of a roof inspection that requires a signature the same day. A roof that has survived a storm will survive a week of you thinking about it, and if it genuinely will not, the correct response is an emergency tarp, not a contract. A company that cannot come back on Thursday is telling you where it will be on Thursday.
Any offer at all about your deductible
This one is not a matter of taste. Missouri law at RSMo 407.725 bars a roofing contractor from advertising or promising to pay, waive, absorb or rebate any part of an insurance deductible, so a contractor who offers to cover your deductible is offering something the statute forbids. It gets dressed up in several ways and they are all the same thing: a discount that happens to equal the deductible, free upgrades in exchange for it, a rebate afterwards, or an invoice written for more than the work so the difference disappears.
Treat any conversation about the deductible as the end of the conversation. Not because the deductible is a secret, but because a company willing to be casual about that statute on your doorstep is a company whose paperwork you cannot rely on anywhere else either.
An offer to take the insurance claim off your hands
The same statute again. Under RSMo 407.725 a contractor may not represent or negotiate a homeowner's insurance claim, or offer or advertise to do so, so anybody who offers to handle your claim is offering you something no roofer in Missouri is permitted to provide. It is a genuinely attractive offer, which is why it gets made. It is also barred, and the reason it is barred is that the contractor's interest in the size of a claim and the homeowner's interest in it are not the same interest.
What a contractor may legitimately do is inspect, photograph, measure, produce a written scope, and be on site as the contractor when an adjuster comes. That is real help and it is a lot of help. The claim itself stays yours. If you want somebody to act for you on the claim, that is a public adjuster, which is a separate licensed profession under Missouri law, and it is covered on what a roofer cannot offer.
A report that is a price
If the document you are handed contains a figure and almost nothing else, you have been quoted, not inspected. There is no way to compare it, no way to check it afterwards, and no way to tell whether the person actually did the walk. The test is simple: does the paper describe the roof.
What that document should look like instead is set out in detail on the written scope. The short version is that it should name the measurements, the flashings by location, the penetrations by count, the ventilation, the underlayment, the decking rate, the shingle by name, and the exclusions.
Photographs you are shown but never given
A phone is turned towards you, you see four pictures of something dark, and the phone goes back in the pocket. You cannot read a roof from four photographs at arm's length on somebody else's screen, which is presumably the point.
Ask for the files. Not a report with the images shrunk into it, the actual photographs. A company that has done the walk has forty pictures on its phone and no reason at all not to share them. A company that has not, has four.
Send me the photographs and a written description of what you found, and I will call you when I have read them. Everything about how that request is received is informative.
No fixed address you can find
After a big storm the metro fills up with companies that were not here in March and will not be here in November. That is not automatically wrong, and out of town crews do real work. It does matter for one specific reason: whoever installed your roof is the only party who can put right a workmanship problem, and a workmanship problem generally shows up in the second or third year.
So the question is not where the crew is from. It is where the company will be. A fixed local address, a landline, a yard, and work you can go and look at in the metro are all evidence about November. A magnetic door sign and a mobile number are not evidence of anything either way, which is exactly the problem with them.
The test that covers all of them at once
Ask this: what will I be holding when you are finished, and when will I have it. There are only two good answers. Photographs and a written scope, within a few days. Or photographs and a written statement that there is nothing to do, within a few days.
Any answer that routes back to a signature, a price, a deductible, or an insurer is an answer about selling. That single question does most of the work of this entire page, and it does not require you to know anything about roofs.