Serving Salt Lake City, UT & Nearby Areas
(385) 438-3591
Serving Salt Lake City, UT & Nearby Areas
(385) 438-3591
Often yes, and not because cheap roofers are villains. The cheapest bid is usually a smaller job: fewer code items, reused flashings, no ventilation math. What I have watched for years is that people who buy passively on price alone reliably end up with the worst roofers. A roof is a 20-plus year decision.
Make the cheapest bidder itemize what is included before you treat their number as a bargain.
Low bids are usually low because of scope removed, not efficiency gained, and scope is checkable.
Put all bids side by side on inclusions: tear-off, flashings, ventilation, underlayment, and warranty terms.
A Utah roof is a 20-plus year decision. The cheapest bid only wins if you never end up buying the same roof twice.
Mattie Tueller, Master Roofing
A roofing bid is not a fixed product with a variable price. It is a description of work. The fastest way to make the number smaller is to describe less work.
The items that most often disappear from a low bid:
None of these are visible in a finished roof. All of them are visible in a written scope. That's why the comparison that protects you is scope-to-scope rather than total-to-total.
The clearest case we have seen of free costing the most involved a homeowner who had her roof installed at no charge by a group of volunteers, specifically to save money.
The crew used staples instead of nails. That's a code violation. Ran the wrong stagger pattern, which both voids the manufacturer's warranty and sheds water incorrectly. The roof leaked on the first rain.
Here is where it compounds. Shingles cannot be reused once they have been installed, so the material was not salvageable. She bought roughly $5,000 in material, watched it fail, and then bought roughly $5,000 in material again. On top of that she paid for the installation she had originally avoided, plus the drywall repair from the leak.
Nobody in that story was trying to cheat her. The volunteers were trying to help, and they did not know what they did not know. That is the whole point: good intentions do not install a stagger pattern correctly. The homeowner had no way to see the mistake until water came through her ceiling. She did not save the cost of a roof. She paid for two sets of material, one installation, and a repair.
A badly installed roof looks exactly like a well installed roof on the day the trucks leave. That is the uncomfortable part of this decision: the feedback arrives years after the money does.
Most shortcuts have a delay built into them:
So the first few years feel like proof you made a smart call. The bill arrives later, in a season when you were not thinking about your roof.
There is a second delayed cost that surprises people. Work done outside code can give an insurance adjuster grounds to decline coverage later, if they can connect the damage to the non-code work. Building code is the bare minimum standard to stand up a structure, not the right way to do it. Falling below even that minimum can follow you into a claim years afterward.
By the time any of this surfaces, the company that did the work is often no longer reachable. That's the point at which a warranty becomes a piece of paper rather than a promise.
It would be dishonest to tell you the low bid is always wrong. Sometimes it is simply the right price from the right company. Here is when to trust that:
A smaller company with low overhead and high standards can absolutely beat a large one on price. What you are testing for is not size or price, it is whether the number is low because of efficiency or low because of omission. Those two look identical on a one-page quote and completely different on an itemized scope.
As a contractor I have watched the same pattern for years: people who buy passively, on price alone, reliably end up with the worst roofers. It is not because they are careless. It is because the price is the only part of a roofing bid a homeowner can read without expertise.
That is the trap, and it is worth naming plainly. Everything that separates a good roof from a bad one is invisible to you: the nailing pattern, the stagger, whether the flashing is new, whether anybody did the ventilation math. If nobody hands you a way to compare those, the number becomes your only lever. The company that left the most out wins.
Here is the fair part: the cheap bid is very often sincere. Plenty of low numbers come from people who really do not know what they skipped. Both of you can be acting in good faith while the roof still fails.
So we built Master Roofing to reward the opposite behavior, because effort in equals outcome out. And the move that breaks the trap is small: hand every bidder the same written list of inclusions and ask them to price that. Once all three are quoting the same job, the cheapest bid is finally safe to take.
There is no single percentage. That's because the question is never the gap itself but what explains it. A bid meaningfully below the others deserves one question: what does this include? If the answer is the same scope with a leaner operation behind it, that is a real bargain. If the answer gets vague, the gap is scope. You now know which items are missing.
You can ask, and their response is informative. A company that priced low by leaving things out will often add them and land near the other bids. That tells you the original number was never comparable. What matters more is whether they can explain the items competently. That's because a crew that has never done ventilation math correctly does not become good at it because you asked for it.
It is worth exactly as much as the company's ability to still exist and answer the phone when you call. A 25-year warranty from an outfit with no physical address and subcontracted crews is a longer promise from a shorter-lived business. Ask where the office is, how long they have been at it, and who honors the warranty if the original crew is gone.
Then the honest move is to change the scope rather than the standard. A smaller job done correctly, such as repairing properly now and replacing in two years, beats a full replacement done badly. A good company will tell you when a warrantied repair buys you real time. That conversation is more useful than shaving the price of work that has to last two decades.
It can, in a specific way. If work was done outside code and an adjuster can draw a logical connection between that work and later damage, they have grounds to decline part of a claim. It is not that insurers audit your roof for price. It is that non-code work becomes relevant at exactly the moment you need the policy to respond.
We're here to see what's going on with your roof. A real assessment starts with your history and your attic, not a number from the driveway. You'll get a straight answer about what's up there, what it needs, and what it costs. Sometimes the honest answer is: your roof looks great.