46 Years, Three Florida Licences, One Accountable Contractor

46 years, and what that actually buys you

Timothy Parks has been self-employed in construction for 46 years.

Longevity by itself is not a qualification. Plenty of businesses last a long time without getting better at anything. What four decades of running your own jobs actually produces is narrower and more useful: you have seen the same failure enough times to recognise it before it is obvious.

That is most of what experience is worth on a roof. Not knowing more materials than the next contractor — knowing which small thing on this particular roof is the one that matters, and which three things a homeowner is worried about that do not.

It also produces a different relationship with being wrong. Anyone who has been doing this since the 1970s has been wrong in public, in front of a customer, and has had to go back and fix it at their own cost. That experience tends to make people careful about what they promise.

Three licences, and what each one actually permits

Most roofing companies hold one licence. This company holds three, and they are not decorative — each one authorises work the others do not.

• CBC059592 — Certified Building Contractor. Building, remodelling and structural repair.
• CCC1327217 — Certified Roofing Contractor. Roofing work.
• HI4878 — Licensed Home Inspector. Inspection and assessment.

All three are current Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation licences, held personally.

Why the combination matters on a real job

The three licences matter most at the two points where roofing jobs actually go wrong.

At the start: diagnosis. Working out what is genuinely wrong with a roof is an inspection problem before it is a roofing problem, and those are different skills. A roofer is trained to build. An inspector is trained to determine condition and report it. When the same company can do both, the assessment is not being performed by someone whose income depends on the answer being expensive.

At the end: structural work. This is the one that costs homeowners real money and almost nobody thinks about it in advance. A roofing-only contractor cannot legally perform structural repair. When the tear-off exposes framing that has been wet long enough to matter, their licence stops at the edge of the problem. Work halts, you start looking for a second contractor, and your roof is open while you do it.

With a building contractor licence in the same company, that is a scheduling matter rather than a crisis. Two contracts and two schedules on an open roof is where projects stall for weeks.

What Florida law actually says about this

The three-licence position is not a marketing arrangement. It is what the statute requires in order to perform both kinds of work, and the wording is worth reading.

Florida Statutes §489.113 provides that a contractor shall subcontract all electrical, mechanical, plumbing, roofing, sheet metal, swimming pool, and air-conditioning work, unless such contractor holds a state certificate or registration in the respective trade category.

Read that again with your own job in mind. A building contractor must subcontract the roofing unless separately certified in roofing. And the same statute is explicit in the other direction: no general, building, or residential contractor certified after 1973 shall act as, hold himself or herself out to be, or advertise himself or herself to be a roofing contractor unless he or she is certified or registered as a roofing contractor.

The mirror of that is the situation homeowners actually run into: a roofing-only contractor has no authority over structural work at all. When the tear-off exposes framing that needs rebuilding rather than replacing, their certificate does not reach it.

So the practical meaning of holding CBC059592 and CCC1327217 together is straightforward: neither half of the job has to be handed to somebody else. No subcontracted roofing on a building job, no subcontracted structure on a roofing job, one contract, one company accountable for the whole thing.

There is one narrow exception in the statute, and it is worth knowing so you can spot it being stretched: a general, building or residential contractor is not required to subcontract the installation of wood shingles, wood shakes, or asphalt or fiberglass shingle roofing on a new building of their own construction. That is new construction only. It is not a re-roof on an existing home, and anyone using it to justify roofing your house without a roofing certificate is misreading it.

This is also why the licence number matters more than the company name. The number tells you what somebody is legally permitted to do. The name on the truck tells you nothing at all.

What has actually changed in 46 years

Ask Timothy what has changed most and the answer is not materials or techniques. It is that computers and technology have redesigned the entire scope of running a construction business.

Roofs are still roofs. Water still finds the seam rather than the surface, and wind still lifts a shingle the same way it did in 1980. What has changed is everything around the work — measurement, documentation, permitting, product approval records, the photographic evidence a county now requires, the sheer volume of paperwork attached to a job that used to be a handshake and a truck.

Some of that is genuinely better. Measured reports beat guesses. Photographic inspection records mean a job can be verified years later by a buyer or an insurer. Product approval documentation means what went on your roof is a matter of record rather than a matter of memory.

The part that has not improved is that the paperwork makes it easier to look professional without being competent. A good-looking quote is cheap to produce now. That is precisely why a licence number is worth more than a brochure.

How your money is handled

Two structural decisions here, and both exist to answer specific fears rather than to sound reassuring.

Your material deposit is written directly to SYL Roofing Supply — not to us. It is credited against your contract price, it pays for the materials supplied to your job, and once the funds clear it removes the supplier's lien exposure on those materials.

The fear that structure addresses is the obvious one: the contractor who takes a deposit and is never seen again. Ours is a payment made to a supply house for materials that arrive at your property. There is no version of that where the money leaves with a truck.

Your balance is due on completion and after the final inspection passes — not before it.

That wording is deliberate and worth checking on any contract you are handed. "Due before final inspection" is common phrasing and it quietly moves the risk onto you: you have paid in full, and the incentive to return and fix whatever the inspector flags has just evaporated. Ours is written the other way round on purpose.

No material is ordered until brand and colour are chosen and the supplier is paid, so nothing arrives at your house that you did not select.

The warranty, and the honest part about warranties

Workmanship is warranted for 10 years and it is transferable — 5 years on low-slope.

Transferable matters more than most people register at signing. It survives the sale of the house, which means it is worth something to a future buyer rather than expiring the day you hand over the keys. On a house sold within a decade of a re-roof, that is a genuine asset rather than a line in a brochure.

The honest part: a workmanship warranty covers our installation, not your shingles. The shingles carry a separate manufacturer warranty with its own terms, its own exclusions and its own claims process. Some contractors blur those two into a single reassuring sentence. We would rather show you both documents and let you see where one ends and the other begins.

What we will not do

It is worth being explicit about the limits, because the gap between what a roofer can do and what some roofers imply they can do is where most of the trouble in this industry lives.

Timothy Parks Roofing & Construction, Inc. is a roofing contractor, not a public adjuster. We inspect roof conditions, provide documentation, and prepare repair or replacement scopes. We do not file, negotiate, adjust or settle insurance claims. Coverage, deductible, payment and premium-credit decisions are made by your insurance carrier under your policy. Homeowners are responsible for the deductibles required by their policy — TPROCO does not pay, waive, rebate or compensate insurance deductibles. Filing false, incomplete or misleading insurance claim information can constitute insurance fraud under Florida Statutes §817.234.

We also will not tell you a roof needs replacing when it does not. Our written reports carry monitor as a legitimate recommendation alongside repair and replace, and it gets used. A company that inspects a hundred roofs and finds a hundred jobs is not inspecting.

Send us the other quote

If you are holding a quote from another contractor and cannot tell whether it is reasonable, send it to us and we will review it and write back. Free, and you do not have to be considering us to use it.

You will get a written note on what it covers, what it does not, and which lines are likely to move once the work starts. The gaps are usually in the same places: the underlayment specification, whether decking is included or extra, how many tear-off layers are covered, and what happens when something unexpected is found.

We would rather you signed a good competitor's contract understanding exactly what you were buying than signed ours because nobody else was willing to explain theirs.

Where we work

We are based at 614 E. Hwy 50, Suite 101, Clermont, Florida 34711, and we serve Lake, Orange, Osceola, Seminole, Polk, Volusia and Hernando counties.

That list has an edge to it, and the edge is real. It is drawn at roughly 80 driving miles from Clermont, because beyond that a same-week callback stops being something we can honestly commit to. Being told no by a contractor who is straight about their range is better than being told yes by one who will not turn up.

Clermont is home. Same-day local service is not a marketing claim here, it is a drive down the road.

How we quote, and why it is a mechanism rather than a number

Most roofing quotes arrive as a single figure on a single page. You cannot tell whether it is fair, what sits inside it, or what happens when the crew finds something unexpected. That is not accidental — a single number is easy to inflate and impossible to argue with.

We quote a mechanism instead. A roof replacement is priced at $500 per square — a square being 100 square feet of roof. One published number, the same one every proposal is built from. The underlayment is where that shows up most clearly. We use SWR, a premium synthetic water-resistant underlayment, and we supply it at cost — no markup at all. Most contractors mark up materials and never tell you by how much. On the layer that decides whether the deck stays dry when the covering is gone, our margin is zero, and you can price the product yourself against any supplier and check that.

The material and labour figures are allowances. When a real supplier quote and a real sub quote exist for your job, the actual numbers replace them. What we are committing to is the method, not a placeholder.

It works the same way on any covering. Metal does not need a different formula, it needs a real cost — a supplier quote for panel and trim, a sub quote for labour. Metal is slower to install than shingle, particularly on hips, and carrying a shingle labour rate onto a metal job produces a number nobody can honour.

The reason we do it this way is simple: it starts a conversation rather than ending one. A single number invites one response, yes or no. A mechanism invites you to ask what is in it — and that is a conversation we are glad to have.

What we do besides roofs

The building contractor licence covers considerably more than emergency structural repair, and it is worth knowing what is available from the same company rather than discovering later that you needed a second one.

Under CBC059592 the scope includes construction, remodelling, additions, kitchens and bathrooms, garages, pole barns, metal buildings, design and build, and project management. The inspection licence supports home inspections, 4-point inspections, Citizens inspections and wind mitigation reports. Alongside the roofing work there is storm and water mitigation, emergency tarping, tree removal, painting, handyman work, and property maintenance and preservation.

We are not going to pretend every one of those is our specialism. Roofing is what this company does most and does best. But when a roof job turns into a structural job, or a homeowner needs an inspection before buying rather than a repair after, it is useful that the answer is in the same building rather than a referral to somebody you have not vetted.

How to check us out

Everything on this page is verifiable, and we would rather you verified it than took our word.

• Licences: CBC059592, CCC1327217 and HI4878 — displayed on every page of this site, as Florida requires
• BBB: accredited with an A+ rating
• The permit record: once work is done, the notarised scope-of-work affidavit, the product approval documentation and the progress photographs all become part of the county's permanent inspection record. That file is not marketing. It is what was actually installed on your roof, and it can be pulled years later

The last one is the most useful and the least known. A properly permitted job leaves a public evidence trail. A job that skipped the permit leaves nothing at all — which becomes your problem when you sell.

Common questions