Over the twenty-two years I’ve been with Armstrong I’ve had the opportunity to sit with thousands of homeowners, hundreds of business owners, maintenance personnel and office managers to discuss the re-roofing of their homes, factories, office buildings, hospitals and churches— in that time I’ve been struck by one consistent fact: the vast majority have no uniform criteria to judge the ability or legitimacy of the roofing contractors they are considering for the job.
In fact, it’s even worse than one might suspect. By now most people have heeded the advice to get three estimates, make sure the contractor is licensed and bonded, and to check with some outside agency that registers customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction; unfortunately all this may add up to very little if certain factors aren’t taken into consideration.
Getting three estimates only has relevance if all three contractors are equal in every aspect regarding general liability coverage, Worker’s Compensation Insurance, length of time in business, overall assets, as well as their ability and willingness to provide a legitimate warranty.
Given the amount of roofers that go into and out of business every year (approximately 80% in five years), having a license is little assurance that a roofer is in any way competent or will be around if and when you need him after the roof is installed.
As to the outside sources one can turn to for recommendations, these must be checked out quite thoroughly, as many of them require payment from contractors to be listed and get rated, most have a very small sampling of jobs from which to draw, and several of these companies have gone in and out of business over the years as well; not to mention that these so-called “rating” agencies take no responsibility whatsoever if your job turns out badly.
So what are the proper criteria?
All the items listed above have their place if expanded upon, and if the additional information is available from the contractor in question, but there is more you must do in order to protect yourself.
After checking on the status of a contractor’s license the next step is to see when the license was issued, under whose name, what this person’s relationship is to the company, and has the license always been under this name. The next step is to check on the Worker’s Compensation history, this will say a lot about how the company has been operating over the time it’s been in business. Prior to January 1st, 2007 companies were allowed to claim exemption from carrying Worker’s Comp by stating they had no employees, which is interesting because it’s very hard to install a roof without people to install it. What this usually meant was that companies were hiring day laborers to do the work and paying them under the table, not withholding taxes, and not paying anything into Worker’s Comp to protect and provide for them should they get injured on the job, a practice I’m sorry to say continues to this day for the majority of roofing being done in the Bay Area. In fact, as is sometimes the case, the change in the law made matters worse: the law now states that, in order for a contractor to renew his license he must show that he has at least one fulltime employee making $25,000.00 who has Worker’s Comp insurance, giving the appearance to people checking out the license that everyone working for the company is also covered, which, as I said, is not the norm. In order to protect yourself, you should require the contractor to provide proof that everyone coming to work on your property has the necessary coverage for Worker’s Comp. It is up to each contractor to determine how they will accomplish this, but one possibility is by providing a copy of the Worker’s Comp Insurance payroll receipt. To take one example: on this form, under the claim code for roofers, will be stated the declared roofing payroll portion of the overall bill; if this portion is missing, or is obviously too small to cover a crew of three or more roofers (the minimum needed to re-roof a home), it will be plain enough to see. More importantly, if a contractor is willing to provide this information he’s probably operating legitimately, as most illegitimate contractors wouldn’t comply with this request, or even have the necessary forms to do so in the first place. Any contractor not willing to provide this information is a liability to you and your property.
Once this has been established, you must next check to see if the contractor carries liability insurance: as surprising as it may seem, the State of California does NOT require contractors to carry this insurance, leaving you responsible if damage is done to your property or your neighbor’s during the course of the work, especially if the contractor doesn’t have significant assets that can back up any claims made against his company, which, again, is most often the case.
Over the years I’ve been surprised at how little concern people pay to these issues once made aware of them, but if you’d been around this business for thirty years as I have you’d appreciate how significant they are. The frequency with which things go wrong with roofing jobs, including the injuries suffered by workers, is well known to all in the industry, especially for those companies skirting the law to maximize profit, which, unfortunately, is most of them. In order to protect yourself as a customer it is essential that these things be taken into consideration.
As to the outside agencies people turn to to gauge the performance of potential candidates for the job, I know of only one with a track record long enough to consider valid, and that is The Better Business Bureau. As I mentioned above, all the rest are rather dubious based on their practice of requiring companies to pay to belong to their organization, the short length of time they’ve been in business, and the limited pool from which they take their surveys.
So what assurance do you have that the job will be done in a satisfactory and professional manner?
Beyond the length of time a company has been in business, the number of jobs it’s done, or the reputation it has for doing quality work, the only real assurance you have is the warranty offered by the company. This however comes with its own set of rules, all of which will determine whether or not you have any legitimate legal recourse should there be a problem after the job has been completed. It has been my experience that, when reading the warranties offered by most contractors they most often are designed to protect the contractor and not the customer. For the most part they are ambiguous in their wording, consist of only a few lines stating what they cover, and leave a lot to the imagination. Unfortunately, this is not enough to fall back on if it becomes necessary to hold the contractor liable. Usually these appear on the very front of the contract, giving the appearance of addressing the issue in a forthright manner, but as always the devil is in the details. Notwithstanding the fact that most contractors are not providing the legal contract information required by the state (which is a very important issue I hope to address in the coming months on this blog), somewhere in the paperwork, usually on the back in fine print, will be a list of everything the contractor is not responsible for, a list far more comprehensive than the one or two lines given as the warranty, and most often negating what was written in the warranty in the first place. Even when one comes across what appears to be a legitimate warranty, without an understanding of who the company is, what their volume of business is, or, again, what their assets are, there’s no way to know whether the warranty is worth anything, or whether you have any legal recourse.
While writing this entry so many other important issues came to mind, issues I will expand upon in the future, which crystallized for me to how confusing all this must be to consumers unaware of the many things that go into choosing the right contractor; for though I talk to customers every day, it’s easy to forget what they may or may not know about such a decision. It is a lesson well worth remembering. In the long run there’s simply no escaping the fact that consumers have a very important role to play when choosing a contractor, and if they don’t hold a contractor’s feet to the fire, they might find themselves getting burned.
Until next time…
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