Compare STL Roofers · The sheet
Put two roofing quotes on one sheet
Ten lines. Write both quotes into them. Any line where one document says something and the other says nothing is not a saving, it is a question you have not asked yet.
The reason two roofing quotes are hard to compare is not that roofers are dishonest. It is that there is no standard form. Each company writes its proposal in its own house style, some in numbered specification language and some in three sentences, and the reader is left trying to subtract one document from another when the documents do not share a vocabulary.
The fix is boring and it works: stop comparing the documents and start comparing the answers. Take the ten lines below, write them down the left side of a page, and put each quote in a column. Ten minutes. Most people find at least three blanks on the cheaper side, and filling those blanks in is usually the whole story.
Do not send this to the roofers as a list of demands. Ask the questions on a call, in the order below, and write down what you hear. A company that answers all ten easily is telling you something real about how it runs jobs. A company that gets irritated at line four is also telling you something real.
How many layers come off
Tear-off to the deck, or new shingles laid over the existing roof. A layover is legitimate work in the right circumstances and it is genuinely cheaper, because it removes labour, disposal and the risk of finding something. It also means nobody inspects your decking, the old flashing generally stays, and the assembly runs hotter, which shortens the life of the new shingle. Whichever you choose, both quotes have to be quoting the same one.
If it is a tear-off, how many layers do you expect to find, and what changes if there are more?What happens to the decking
The single largest source of surprise cost in a St. Louis reroof. Older housing stock here is often planked rather than sheeted, and planks split around old nails. A quote that names a unit price for replacement decking has priced the unknown honestly. A quote that says nothing has left it to be priced later. This is line one of the lines that move.
What do you charge per sheet or per board foot, and do I see the bad decking before it is covered?Which underlayment
Felt or synthetic, and what weight. Synthetic is standard on most quotes now and costs a little more. This line rarely decides a job on its own, but it is a fast test of whether the quote is specific: a document that names the underlayment usually names everything else too.
Name the underlayment on the proposal, not on the phone.Ice and water barrier, and where
The self adhering membrane that goes at the eaves and in the valleys. Where it goes and how far up the slope it runs is a real difference between quotes, and in a climate that produces freeze and thaw cycles through January and February it is not a decorative upgrade. Two quotes can both say they include it and mean very different quantities.
How many feet up from the eave, and is it in every valley?Flashing: which pieces are new
Step flashing at walls and chimneys, counter flashing, valley metal, pipe collars, drip edge. Reusing sound flashing is a defensible decision. Reusing tired flashing under a new roof is the most common reason a young roof leaks. What you want on the page is a verb next to each item: new, or reused.
Walk me around my own roof and tell me which flashings you are replacing.Ventilation, in and out
Intake at the soffit and exhaust at the ridge, working as a pair. A ridge vent with no intake does very little, and mixing exhaust types on the same attic can make one vent pull air from another instead of from outside. If one quote includes a ridge vent and the other does not mention ventilation at all, that is a scope difference, not a price difference.
What is my current intake, and does the plan change it?Who is on the roof, and who carries the insurance
Employees or a subcontracted crew. Both are normal. What matters is who holds the general liability and workers compensation certificates covering the people physically on your property, and whose name is on the workmanship promise afterwards. The full comparison of the two models.
Send me the certificate of insurance with my address on it as certificate holder.Cleanup, magnets and the dumpster
Where the dumpster sits, whether tarps go over landscaping, how many magnet passes, and what happens to the gutters, which fill with granules and nail shanks during a tear-off. Small line, easy to verify afterwards, and a reliable indicator of how the company treats the parts of the job that are not billable.
Who sweeps the driveway, and when does the dumpster leave?The two warranties, separately
The manufacturer covers the shingle. The roofer covers the installation. They are different documents from different companies with different failure modes, and blurring them is the single most common piece of confusion in this trade. Read them apart, and be clear on what lifetime means before you let it decide anything.
Show me the workmanship warranty document itself, not a sentence about it.How a change gets priced and approved
Every reroof has the possibility of a change once the roof is open. The question is not whether changes happen, it is whether they are agreed in writing before the work is done, and at what rate. This is the line people skip and then argue about.
Does anything get added to my bill without my signature first?
What to do with the completed sheet
Once both columns are filled in, one of three things is true. Either the quotes now describe the same work and the price difference is real, in which case you are comparing companies rather than documents and the rest of this site is about how to do that. Or one quote turns out to include work the other does not, in which case you go back and ask for a like for like revision. Or one company will not answer the questions, which is itself an answer.
The revision is the step people skip because it feels awkward. It should not. Asking a roofer to requote against a defined scope is completely normal, it is what commercial buyers do as a matter of course, and a good contractor would rather requote than win a job on a misunderstanding and then argue about it in week two.
If you want a written scope that lines up against the two you already have, that is a phone call. The measurement, the photographs and the written scope are yours to keep whether or not you hire anybody.
Fill in the third column on the worksheet
The sheet above works best with three quotes, because two can be wrong in the same direction at the same time and nothing on the page would tell you.
Keys will write the third one in the format the worksheet asks for, line by line, and you keep it whether or not the work ends up here.
Straight through to the Keys Roofing office. If you would rather talk it through than type it out, this is the line.
Ask for the third scope
Roof replacement. St. Louis metro only.
This goes to Keys Roofing and nowhere else. No company named anywhere on this site receives it, and none of them pay to be mentioned.