Being proactive with your commercial roof can save hundreds of thousands of dollars, or more!

According to a Buildings Magazine article, it references a national average that a building owner that strictly reacts to roof problems will get about 13 years of serviceable roof life. It states that if you proactively manage your roof, you're going to get an additional eight years, bumping that up to 21 years of service life, and I would suggest that if you really manage your roof well, you should be able to get 25 years of service life.

You're really talking about a two-for-one scenario. You're talking about having to replace your roof almost two times for every one time if you would simply proactively manage your roof.

The astronomical cost of a roof replacement is super high, and you quickly find out that it is your most expensive asset if you've ever undergone a roof replacement project.

Now that is strictly based upon service life and going from two replacements down to one replacement. That's a huge difference. But other things are impacted by only reacting to problems and not proactively managing your roof, and it all is a case of saturation.

If you are reacting to problems and only addressing leaks that have come all the way through the roof system and found their way into the building, and you're not proactively managing your roof and avoiding water from even infiltrating the roof and sitting in there saturating, not exiting into the building but just simply saturating inside the internal components of the roof system, when it comes time to replace that roof, you can incur additional 20 to 30% costs and deck remediation from the deck becoming corroded or wood nailers that have become corroded and now need to be replaced. Ancillary items that can impact a roof replacement 20-30%.

Now, if you took a 50,000 square foot building, as we talked about yesterday and arbitrarily set on a tear-off project, $10 a square foot. You're talking about a $500,000 project that quickly can become a $625,000 project, simply by not managing your roof properly and allowing saturation to occur and end up incurring some of these ancillary costs that you could have avoided.

The other thing is that if you only have one roof on your building currently, you can overlay that roof and almost cut your costs in half. You can take a $10 square-foot tear-off number and cut it down to a $5 square foot overlay number and go from a $500,000 project down to a $250,000 project if you managed your roof properly and did not allow saturation.

If you're only reacting to problems and your roof becomes saturated internally, you can't overlay it. It has to be torn off and what would have been a $250,000 project quickly jumps right back up to that $500,000 project.

And then if you have other items, again, those ancillary items from that saturation sitting in there, you went from a $250,000 project to a $625,000 project. That is the impact of not managing your roof proactively through the life cycle of that roof. It can make a huge impact on the budget.

Talk to us further about it at sales@roofoptions.com.

To manage your roof proactively. Don't just react to problems. Save yourself a ton of money, and at the end of the day, give your roof the life it deserves.