As a commercial building owner or property manager, you’re probably very familiar with the concept of preventative maintenance for various systems in your building. Did you know that your building’s roof should also be regularly maintained to prevent problems and help keep leaks from forming?
Even if your building is new and you’re not having issues today, you can protect the health of your roof in the future by beginning a regular, customized maintenance routine with an expert commercial roofing service contractor like us here at Heidler Roofing.
What can these professionals do for your roof that others can’t?
The answer is roof inspections. The preventative maintenance program for your commercial building’s roof needs to include a thorough and comprehensive inspection process that puts actual roofers onto your roof to look around for current issues and document conditions that may cause problems later. With regular inspections, you can safeguard your commercial roof’s integrity year after year. And when it’s getting to be time for repairs or replacement, you will have advance warning and be able to better budget and plan ahead.
What does a roof inspection involve?
Many of our prospective clients are curious about what a preventative maintenance inspection involves since it’s much more than just “taking a look at the roof,” though that’s certainly part of it. Here’s what our process entails:
Physical observation
An individual service expert or team of experts physically climbs onto your building’s roof to look for problems. This is much more than simply getting up on a ladder, surveying the roof, and checking some boxes on a list. These highly trained roofing professionals examine every inch of your roof to look for material flaws and deterioration, standing water, debris, and other problems that may be invisible from the ground or from just peeking onto the roof from its edge.
Recording and documenting
As our roofing experts make their observations, they are also cataloging all issues, damage, and deficiencies using state of the art inspection software on tablet devices they carry with them on the job. This includes taking plenty of photos of the environment on your roof and detail shots of particular areas of concern.
The mobile app that our experts use is also available to clients on their devices and computers. It provides an information sharing solution that’s especially helpful to those managing multiple commercial buildings or properties.
Reporting and collaborating with you
Once all observations have been recorded, our technicians produce reports about what they discovered during the inspection process and carefully explain all the information to clients. These reports draw in certain external assets like aerial/satellite imagery of your building from above and incorporate photos techs snapped themselves to provide visual evidence of exactly what’s going on up on your roof.
It’s true that most of our building manager and owner clients have never been on their building’s roof and may not know what they’re looking at, and that’s fine! You’ll find that our technicians are friendly and dedicated to helping customers understand their roofs and their options.
Collaboration is the name of the game, and that’s why we provide our clients with access to our online portal, as we touched on in the previous section. This resource also offers real-time job progress tracking and scheduling capabilities to make your building management job easier. Along with this tool, the reports we produce also encourage a collaborative relationship as our experts help you prioritize fixes for specific issues based on your budgeting and timelines. In this way, our reports are meant to be dynamic documents that help you plan ahead and keep track of repairs and maintenance already completed.
Isn’t that expensive?
It’s true that ongoing maintenance requires an ongoing financial commitment, but it’s not nearly as expensive as a leak can be. If water is already making it into your building, structural damage is inevitable over time, and that could spell a costly disaster for your building and may even cause the failure of businesses operating there.
While regular roof inspections cannot guarantee that you’ll never experience a leak, they will help you get to the root of problems quickly, and help you keep small leaks from getting bigger. Unfortunately, small leaks are often deceiving. You don’t how bad the situation on the roof actually is, and you have a totally uncertain amount of time before major damage occurs (think partial collapses during heavy rainstorms or under snow loads in winter).
An inspection at the first sign of water inside your building will allow you to know what you’re dealing with and helps us help you prevent costly emergencies.
Additionally, as a well-established commercial roofing service contractor, we have years of experience in assisting business owners and managers working through budgeting processes. We deeply understand the need to sometimes defer lower priority maintenance items and minor repairs, and we are happy to help you prioritize to fit your yearly budgets and long-range planning.
But I don’t have a preventative maintenance plan today
As the old saying goes, “there is no time like the present” to schedule a roof inspection and begin preventative maintenance on your commercial building’s roof. Don’t wait for an emergency!
Unfortunately, we often hear from building owners and managers after the worst has happened, or after their roof is already leaking and causing damage to the interior or contents of the building. We can help these folks quickly with emergency repairs, of course, but we would much rather establish a long-term relationship with building owners/managers and their roofs to help them avoid this kind of response as much as possible.
As harsh winter weather approaches, your building’s roof will benefit from seasonal maintenance to provide strong protection against Mother Nature’s worst. Even if you do not have a maintenance plan today, we would love to hear from you!
Get in touch today to talk about what being guarded by Heidler Roofing’s ultimate shield of protection means for your building’s roof, or simply schedule a one-time inspection and give our legendary service a try.