Forty names down to three quotes

Day one: pick six, not three

Take six names off the ranking. Six, because two of them will not call you back, one will turn out to be booked into next season, and you want three quotes at the end. Mix the sizes deliberately: two from the top fifteen, two from the middle of the table, and two smaller local names you already recognise from a neighbour's yard sign. A list made only of the biggest companies gives you three versions of the same sales process.

If your roof problem is a leak rather than an age problem, weight the list towards companies whose reviews mention repairs. Plenty of replacement-focused companies will quote you a full roof for a flashing failure, not out of malice, but because that is the work they are set up to do.

Day two: read, do not skim

For each of the six, open the reviews, sort by newest, and read the most recent twenty. Then read every three star and four star review the company has, however far back that goes. Twenty minutes per company. Two hours total. It is the highest return two hours in the entire process and almost nobody does it.

You are looking for repetition, not for individual horror stories. Every company with four hundred reviews has a bad one. A company with four bad ones that all describe the same failure, in the same words, eighteen months apart, is telling you about a process problem rather than a bad day.

Day three: the two-minute checks

• Does the address existPut the registered address into Maps and look at street view. A roofing company operating out of a real building with real trucks is a different risk profile from one registered to a mailbox. Neither is disqualifying. Both are worth knowing.
• Is the website older than the stormCheck whether the site has any content predating the last big hail event. A company whose entire online presence appeared six weeks after a storm is a company that may not be here next year to honour anything.
• Search the company name with the word complaintNot because complaints are disqualifying, but because the second page of results frequently contains a version of the company history that the first page does not.
• Check the phone number answersCall it once before you book anything. A number that rings to a national call centre, or to a voicemail with no company name on it, is telling you where the decisions get made.

Day four and five: three appointments, same week

Book three, in the same week if you can, and be at home for all three. Then ask each of them the same questions, in the same order, and take notes. The point of compressing the appointments is that the differences between companies are only visible by comparison, and comparison degrades fast if the first appointment was a fortnight ago.

Ask every one of them to go up on the roof and into the attic. A company that quotes from the driveway, or from satellite imagery alone, is quoting a guess. Decking condition, ventilation and the state of the flashing are not visible from the kerb, and those three things are where the money actually is.

Day six: compare scopes, not prices

You now have three documents. Do not put the numbers side by side yet. Put the scopes side by side, and specifically look at the four places where quotes silently differ from each other: what happens to soft decking and at what price per sheet, whether the underlayment is synthetic or felt and what weight, whether the flashing at chimneys and walls is being replaced or reused, and whether the price includes hauling everything away and running a magnet over the lawn.

Two quotes that look nine hundred dollars apart are usually four thousand dollars apart once you line those four items up. There is a full page on what a scope should contain, item by item, at what a written scope contains.

Day seven: sleep on it, then check the paperwork

Nothing about a roof requires a same-day decision unless water is actively coming into the house, in which case the correct purchase is a tarp and an emergency repair, not a full replacement signed under pressure. Any discount that expires when the salesperson leaves your kitchen is a sales technique with a countdown attached to it.

Before signing, ask for a current certificate of insurance sent directly from the insurance agency rather than handed to you as a photocopy, and read the payment schedule. A deposit is normal. A large deposit before any material is on site is a risk you are taking on somebody else's cash flow.