Get ready for a frustrating experience and very often the frustration is unnecessary. If there is a home inspector involved, the hoops that you have to jump through can be many and quite frankly, petty. Understand this about the inspection for sale process – the inspection reports are often not about reality - they are about preventing the inspector from being sued. It’s as if they are telling you that your hair is still growing after you just had a haircut. I’ve seen amazingly trivial comments to include “shakes are weathered,” and often as not, the guy didn’t even set foot on the roof! Obviously there are conscientious inspectors who are also realistic but there are also a lot of them who remind me of the family counselor who has been divorced four times. So how does this apply to your roof?

The sale process can change the set of glasses through which we need to look at your roof. It can change the standards we have to meet in doing repairs, even though they can be needless. It can change the urgency of doing repairs from annually or biannually to right now. It can even change the feasibility of proceeding with repairs at all. We can keep some pretty ugly looking roofs serviceable but that’s not to say they will make a home inspector, who may or may not know what he’s looking at, happy. If your roof is older and has not been particularly well maintained, you might be well served to compare the cost of an aggressive repair job with the cost of a new roof. While doing this, don’t forget to factor in the idea that we can do an extensive repair, you pay the bill and I go to Tahiti with the money. Then a realtor shows up out front with their client in tow. Chances are they don’t particularly know what they are looking at but they look up, slump their shoulders and go, “Oh, 18 year old roof.” It doesn’t matter if the roof is serviceable. It doesn’t matter if it can be certified (we can do that). It only matters that it is ‘X’ number of years old. And then you add to the mix a gun-shy inspector and maybe a roofer or two who the buyer’s agent uses and guess what? Sometimes it makes sense to take what may likely be a hurdle in the sale process and turn it into a selling point. By the way, we are licensed and fully capable of doing complete reroofs but I have chosen not to, so I’m not necessarily impressed by the argument of, “We had several different roofers look at it and they said….” OK, so much for shooting myself in the foot.