Compare STL Roofers · The crew
Who is actually on the roof
The company that sold you the roof and the people who install it are frequently not the same organisation. That is normal, legal and workable, and it changes several things you should check.
A homeowner meets a salesperson, signs with a company, and then on the morning of the job a crew arrives in unmarked trucks. This surprises people and it should not, because subcontracting installation is ordinary practice across the trade and always has been. What matters is not whether a company subcontracts. It is whether the company will say so plainly, and whether the paperwork behind it holds up.
The two models, plainly
In-house crews
The installers are employees of the company that sold you the job. Payroll, workers compensation and training run through one organisation. Scheduling is usually less flexible in peak season because capacity is fixed, and the company cannot easily scale up after a hail event.
Accountability is simple: one name on the contract, on the crew and on the warranty. The trade off is that the company carries the cost of employing people through slow months, and that shows up in the price.
Subcontracted crews
The company sells, measures, orders material, supervises and warrants the work, and hires installation crews as independent contractors. It can scale sharply after a storm, which is precisely why volume increases after a hail event in this region.
Quality varies with how the company selects and supervises its crews, which is invisible from the outside. Good ones use the same two or three crews for years and have a superintendent on site. Weak ones use whoever is available in August.
Neither model is better in the abstract, and plenty of the most respected roofing companies in this metro subcontract. What you are comparing is supervision and paperwork: how often somebody from the selling company is physically on your roof during the job, and whether the insurance certificates cover the people actually up there.
The insurance certificate question
Ask for a certificate of insurance showing general liability and workers compensation, issued with your name and address as certificate holder. That last part matters. A general certificate is a photocopy that could be years old. A certificate issued to you comes from the insurer or the agent, which means it reflects a policy that is in force today.
Then ask the follow up that most people do not: does that workers compensation policy cover the subcontracted crew, or does the subcontractor carry its own? Both answers can be fine. No answer is not.
If an uninsured worker is hurt on your roof, the exposure can find its way to the property owner. This is not a common outcome and it is not worth losing sleep over, but a certificate of insurance costs a roofer one email to request, and a company that will not produce one has told you something for free.
Who owns the workmanship promise
The workmanship warranty is a promise from the selling company, not from the crew. That is true in both models. What changes is what happens when you call in year three about a leak at the chimney: an in-house company sends its own people back, while a company using subcontractors has to find and pay a crew to return, possibly a different crew from the one that did the work.
Good companies handle this well and have a service department for exactly this reason. Ask directly: if I call you in three years about a leak, who comes out, and is that a chargeable visit? The answer tells you more about the value of the warranty than the number of years on it. More on the two warranties.
Questions that separate the two models fast
- Are the installers your employees or subcontracted crews? A company that answers this in one sentence without flinching is a good sign regardless of which answer it gives.
- How many of your crews have worked with you for more than two seasons?
- Who from your company will be physically on my roof during the job, and how often?
- Does the crew leader speak with me directly, or is there a project manager in between?
- If I call about a problem next spring, what is the actual sequence of what happens?
A note on the sales visit
In a large share of this market the person who knocks on your door or sits at your table is compensated on commission and is not a roofer. That is not a scandal, it is a sales structure, but it does mean the person describing the work may never see it. When you ask a technical question and get a confident answer with no detail in it, ask whether they can put it on the proposal. Anything that will not survive being written down was not a commitment.
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.
Ask who will be standing on your roof in the morning
In-house crews and subcontracted crews are both normal in this market. What matters is whose insurance certificate covers the people on the ladder and who owns the workmanship promise in year three.
Put that to Keys the way you put it to the other two, and ask for the certificates to arrive from the agency rather than as a photograph.
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.
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