Hi everybody! On today's video we're gonna answer the question: do roofers
charge for roof inspections?
This is Tracy Bookman owner of Homestead Roofing and welcome to another walk in
the park video where we take just a few minutes to answer your questions and
today's question is whether or not roofers charge to come to your house to
do roof inspections. Well just like so many of the answers to other questions
this one really kind of comes down to it depends. But let me explain why that is
because by and large most roofers will do an inspection of your roof for free.
Here are the factors that could alter that there's because right there's
always exceptions. One factor that could affect that is what kind of market do
you live in and by that I mean do you live in more of a retail market or more
of a storm market by a retail market I mean there's not a lot of storm activity
and there's not a lot of reasons for people to have to redo their roofs or
get roof repairs therefore there's not a lot of roofers in the market so
competition is low so a roofer may feel justified in charging for an inspection
in a market like that. However, if you're in a storm market that's gonna be a
little bit different because in the storm market meaning that's an area
where there's a lot of storm activity whether it's hail or tornados or wind
you know those kinds of things which are going to cause people to need to get new
roofs if you're in a storm market then there's going to be a lot more
competition meaning a lot more roofers in that market trying to get the same
jobs and so more than likely they're going to be offering the inspections for
free. My thought is though that regardless of what kind of market you're
in you're probably going to be able to find that roofers are going to do the
roof inspection at your house at no charge to you. But here's another thing
that may cause you to have to pay to get a roof inspection at your house
and a lot of times people don't really think about this one. So let's say you're
trying to buy a home and the home inspector that you've hired has gone out
there and has identified that he thinks that there are problems or issues with
the roof and a lot of times on the his inspection report it will say that he
recommends giving a licensed and qualified roofing contractor to come out
there and inspect the roof. But here's the catch to that. Between 95 and 99
percent of the time in a real estate transaction if there's an issue with the
roof and work needs to be done it's going to be the home seller that hires
the roofer not the person buying the house. The implication of that for the
roofing contractor who you've asked to go inspect the roof on this house that
you're buying is that he has an extremely small chance of actually
getting any work out of it therefore he may charge to do the inspection I mean
if you think about it your home inspector is not gonna go out there and
do the inspection of that house for free right he's gonna charge you to go do
that a roofing inspector really should be no different if you're on the buying
end and that roofer has very little chance of getting a job out of it in my
opinion he's justified for charging for that inspection. Now there's one other
situation where your roofer may charge you to do an inspection and that's if
you live outside of his normal service area so if he has to travel a great
distance to do the inspection then he may charge you for that inspection again
because if he let's say he drives an hour and a half or whatever to do an
inspection and your roof is good then he's essentially wasted three hours of
driving time plus the 30 minutes or whatever he took to actually be on your
roof doing the inspection. So now you might be asking yourself well what about
Homestead Roofing? At Homestead Roofing we basically don't charge for our
inspections again as long you're within our service area now our
service area includes El Paso County, Taylor County, and Elbert County if you
are that's a that's a very large area so if you are more than one hour away from
our offices which is at Austin Bluffs and Academy then we are gonna charge for
that inspection. Now within El Paso County there aren't any areas that are
more than an hour away from our office but Taylor County and Elbert County
there definitely are areas like that but if we charge you for an inspection and
there's work that needs to be done then we credit the inspection fee to the cost
of the repairs or the re-roof similarly if we are asked to do an inspection for
a real estate transaction and it's either the buyer's agent or the buyers
that have asked us to go do the inspection we do charge for the
inspection but we credit that inspection fee toward the cost of any repairs or
roof replacement. So if you have any questions about whether or not Homestead
Roofing would do a free inspection at your house, please call our office
right up here 719.433.6991 you can also
visit our website and that's right down here at homesteadroofingcolorado.com
We've got a ton of information out there are lots of other informational videos
for you we would also love it if you would give us a big thumbs up if you
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notified when we've got new videos and until our next walk in the park video
I'm Tracy Bookman owner of Homestead Roofing.