Roof Inspection — What We Check and What It Costs

What a roof inspection is actually for

An inspection is not a formality before a sale. It is the step that decides whether you are looking at a repair, a replacement, or nothing at all this year — and those three outcomes are separated by tens of thousands of dollars.

Done properly it answers three questions: what condition is the roof in, how much life is left in it, and what should happen next. Done badly it answers one: how big a job can be sold today.

The difference is not the person's honesty so much as their incentive. A contractor who inspects for free has to make the visit pay somehow. That is worth understanding before you book anyone, including us.

The five things we rate

Every inspection produces a rating on the same five areas, so the report can be compared against another one rather than taken on faith:

• Roof covering — the shingles, tile or panel itself
• Flashing and penetrations — where the roof meets a wall, a chimney, a vent or a pipe
• Decking and structure — the wood underneath, rated on site
• Ventilation — whether the attic is breathing
• Drainage and gutters — where the water actually goes

Ask any inspector for those five. If they can only speak to the first one, they looked at your shingles and called it an inspection.

Flashing and penetrations deserve a note. Far more leaks start at a joint than in the middle of a field of shingles. Water finds the seam, not the surface — which is why a roof can look immaculate from the driveway and still be letting water in around a vent boot.

The condition test that actually decides it

Most people expect the verdict to be about age. It is not. It is about the condition of the shingle.

A pliable shingle is a repair candidate. It flexes. It can be lifted, worked under, resealed and laid back down, and it will keep doing its job.

A brittle shingle is not. It cracks when lifted. Repairing around brittle shingles breaks more than it fixes — you go up to address one area and create three new failure points reaching it.

This is why two roofs of identical age can get opposite recommendations. One sat under tree cover; the other baked on an open ridge for fifteen summers. The calendar says they are the same. The shingle says otherwise, and the shingle is right.

When it is worth having a roof looked at

Three situations genuinely warrant it, and one of them catches almost everybody.

Age. Any roof past roughly twelve years in this climate is a candidate for problems. Not failing — a candidate. Worth knowing about rather than assuming.

After a named storm. Lake County took Hurricane Milton in October 2024 and Hurricane Ian in September 2022. A roof that went through either may be carrying wind damage that is not visible from the ground. Wind frequently does not remove shingles; it lifts them, breaks the seal strip, and lays them back down. Nothing looks wrong from your driveway. The next sustained rain finds the gap. This is the single most common reason a roof that "looks fine" leaks.

Before you spend money. If you are holding a quote for thousands of dollars and cannot independently judge it, an inspection is the cheapest part of that decision by a wide margin.

After a qualifying storm we offer a $75 post-storm inspection.

It may not be the roof at all

We are regularly called to leaks that turn out to be condensation, air conditioning or plumbing. All three produce a ceiling stain indistinguishable from a roof leak when you are looking up at it from your sofa.

An air handler sweating in a Florida attic drips. A backed-up condensate line drips. A supply line in a ceiling drips.

This is where an inspection earns its fee outright. If a contractor arrives, does not investigate, and sells a roof repair for a plumbing fault, the stain returns and the money is gone. Establishing what is actually happening is the first job, not an optional step before the quote.

The $30 Roof Report — what it is and what it deliberately is not

The lowest-cost way to find out where you stand is a $30 roof report: a measured inspection written up, plus a plain-English education packet.

The report gives you an overall condition score out of 100, the five section ratings above, photographed findings, an estimated remaining life expressed as a range of years, and one of three recommendations — repair, monitor, or replace.

That middle option is the point. A report that can honestly conclude nothing needs doing yet is a report worth paying for. One that always finds work is not an inspection, it is a sales call with a clipboard.

What it is not: a high-pressure visit, a contract, an obligation, or a vague verbal verdict delivered from your driveway. You keep the report and can take it to any contractor, including one of ours competitors.

The reason it costs thirty dollars rather than nothing is straightforward. A free inspection has to recover its cost somewhere, and the only place available is the job it recommends. A small fee buys objectivity. Thirty dollars against a five-figure decision is not really a cost.

The education packet

The packet is the part people underestimate. It covers what your roof's age actually means, how a sealed deck and secondary water resistance affect insurance, the real differences between shingle, tile and metal in Florida conditions, how to read a roofing quote and spot the red flags, and how wind mitigation works — including the OIR-B1-1802 form and what insurers do with it.

The quote-reading section is the one that saves the most money, because it applies to every quote you receive rather than only to ours.

Wind mitigation — and an honest limit

An inspection can document the wind-resistant features of your roof on the standard Florida wind mitigation form, and every roof replacement we perform includes an updated report.

Here is the limit, stated plainly. 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.

If a roofer tells you what your insurer will decide, ask how they could possibly know.

What the building code brings to the conversation

Lake County operates under the Florida Building Code 8th Edition (2023), and three provisions come up constantly in inspections.

The 25 percent rule. Under FBC-EB 611.1.1 a roof repair is limited to no more than 25 percent of the roof. Past that it is not a repair, whatever it is called on the quote.

The March 2002 line. Sheathing must be re-nailed on any detached single-family home built before 1 March 2002 when the roof is redone — 8d equivalent at no more than 6 inches on centre, per FBC-EB 706.7.1. You can check your own build year in a minute, and it materially changes the arithmetic on an older roof.

Slope limits. Below a 2:12 pitch shingles are not permitted at all, and between 2:12 and 4:12 multi-layer underlayment must be verified by inspection or photographs. If any part of your roof is low-slope, it is a different job with different rules.

None of this is obscure. It is simply rarely explained, and it is the difference between understanding a quote and accepting one.

What Lake County itself inspects

When work does go ahead, the county's own inspection is documentary as much as visual. Lake County requires printed progress photographs — sheathing re-nailing, underlayment, and purlins or insulation — each with a ruler or measuring device in frame to verify fastener spacing and overlaps, including drip edge and valley flashing.

A notarised scope-of-work and inspection affidavit must be on site at the final inspection, along with Florida Product Approval documentation for every product used. All of it becomes part of the permanent record.

One consequence is worth knowing: the underlayment method used on your roof gets declared on a notarised form. Under FBC-R 905.1.1 the most protective method is full self-adhering polymer-modified bitumen across the entire deck, to ASTM D1970 — the specification we install as standard. Whichever method a contractor uses, it goes on the public file. That makes it checkable years later, including by a buyer or an insurer.

Why the inspector licence matters here

Timothy Parks holds HI4878, a Florida home inspector licence, alongside CCC1327217 Certified Roofing Contractor and CBC059592 Certified Building Contractor. All three are current Florida DBPR licences.

The inspector licence is the relevant one on this page. Working out what is actually wrong with a roof is an inspection problem before it is a roofing problem, and the two are genuinely different skills. Plenty of capable roofers are not trained to diagnose; they are trained to build.

The building licence matters for what comes next. If an inspection finds decking or framing that has been wet long enough to matter, structural repair is within our scope — a roofing-only contractor cannot legally perform it and would have to hand the job to somebody else.

46 years of doing this is the other half. There is no substitute for having seen the same failure a few hundred times.

What the measurements are actually for

The report records roof type, approximate age, measured area in squares, and predominant pitch. Those four numbers do more work than people expect.

A square is 100 square feet of roof. Measured area is what any future quote gets priced against, so having it in writing before you speak to anyone changes the conversation — you can check a contractor's number instead of accepting it.

Be aware that you will see two different figures and both are correct. Squares are waste-adjusted and rounded up: measured area, times the waste factor from the measurement report, divided by 100, rounded up to the next whole square. A roof measuring 4,517 square feet at an 11 percent waste factor becomes 5,014 square feet, which is 50.14 squares, which rounds up to 51. Meanwhile a Lake County permit application states the full square footage of the roof rather than the square count. Same roof, two numbers, different purposes.

Pitch matters because it governs what may legally be installed, and it is one of the more common reasons a quote comes back differently than expected on a house with a low-slope section over a porch or an addition.

What an inspection cannot tell you

An honest limit is worth more than an oversold promise, so here is the one that matters.

Nobody can tell you what is under your roof covering until the covering comes off. An inspection reads the surface, the penetrations, the ventilation, the drainage, and whatever is visible of the decking from inside the attic. It cannot see the condition of every sheet of decking beneath intact shingles.

This is why unknown and hidden damage is the honest answer to what is excluded from any roofing quote. Not a loophole — a physical fact. A contractor who quotes a firm all-in number without that caveat is either padding the price to absorb the risk, or setting up a change order.

What a good inspection does instead is narrow the range. Age, ventilation, staining patterns, the condition of the flashing and the state of the shingle together give a well-founded expectation of what is likely underneath. It is a probability, honestly stated, rather than a guess dressed up as certainty.

Our replacement scope handles the most common version of this in advance: up to three sheets of decking are included. Beyond that you see it before it is replaced.

What happens after the inspection

You get the report. That is the deliverable, and it is yours.

If the recommendation is monitor, we tell you what to watch and roughly when to look again. If it is repair, you get a scope of what needs doing and why. If it is replace, you get the reasoning — usually shingle condition, or damage beyond the 25 percent repair threshold, or both.

There is no obligation attached to any of them, and the report is written so it can be handed to another contractor without translation. See roof repair or roof replacement for what each of those involves.

Common questions