Many roofing contractors and local roofers have to spend a lot of time putting together a free roof estimate for a roof replacement. According to statistics, this time can vary from 4 hours to 8 hours. At the same time, only every fourth customer is ready to discuss the roof estimate further, and only every sixth signs a contract to complete the work. Depending on the number of teams, it is necessary to maintain a staff of highly paid employees.
What is the job of roof measuring and how does a roofer have to do it?
Let’s figure it out.
1. The local roofer must agree with the owner of the house for a certain time to visit the house. This is often difficult, because… everyone always has their things to do. The most unpleasant thing in this matter is when scheduled meetings begin to be rescheduled and the entire constructed schedule collapses.
2. It is necessary to get to the customer’s home. The road to the site and back also costs time, as well as depreciation of the car and expenses on fuel.
3. At the site, a roofer must put on work clothes and, if necessary, use safety equipment. Take all measurements on the roof with a ruler, measure a roof pitch, write them down, and then calculate the area of the roof slopes by using formulas.
4. Usually calculations are made in an office. A roofer compose an roof replacement estimate and sent it to the homeowner. He can’t discuss all details in person at this moment.
If you are a roofing contractor, you know all this very well. And most likely you would like to reduce these expenses. There are solutions for this.
Roof Measuring App and Software.
In today’s digital world, there are several roof measurement apps and software offerings. They can be divided into 2 categories:
– Roof Measuring App. Installed on mobile devices – phones or tablets. It’s fast, convenient, and not completely dependent on an Internet connection for the most of operations. A work phone or tablet is always with you as a necessary tool. You can do your work offline in any place.
– Roof Measuring Software. This is a browser version of the roof measuring tool. Often it is not adapted to work on mobile devices due to limitations in the software of the phone itself due to security policies.
The main advantage of using Roof Measuring App is that in 10-15 minutes you can get a roof measurement right at the customer’s home, clarify all the necessary details, and create an offer to the customer. Communicating live with the customer always beats the option of communicating via the Internet. You can always discuss options, discounts, and temporary conditions and impress the customer. In most cases, the number of transactions concluded for roof replacement occurs through personal communication.
How does Roof Measuring App work?
The main work takes place using satellite and aerial images using Roof Measuring Apps and Software tools.
Most Roof Measuring App developers offer imagery from either the Bing Maps platform or Google Maps. Usually, they are shareware, i.e. included in the price of Roof Measuring App and Software. LocalProBook offers images from both sources, allowing you to choose the best one for free. It’s worth noting that there are often areas where satellite imagery is too old or of poor quality. The second disadvantage may be the angle at which the Earth’s surface is photographed, which leads to distortion of the image of the roof of the house.
The second option is aerial photographs. They solve the problems described above. Pictures are in HD quality and strictly vertical. But it costs extra money – from $1 to $3.5 per photo. LocalProBook offers the most attractive price of $1 per photo from partner NearMap. Sometimes a certain number of such images are included in the price of Roof Measuring App, and the cost of use is higher. But the better the image, the more accurate the roof measurements will be.
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If you look at the example images, the choice is obvious.
Some Roof Measuring Apps suggest rotating the image so that most of the roof lines are vertical and horizontal – this makes it much easier to work with the image.
LocalProBook offers a special tool for cropping and rotating images.
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2. The tools for applying roof elements are all similar. But there are also some peculiarities:
– adjusting the position of the ramp point,
– the presence of auxiliary lines that simplify drawing contour lines of slopes,
– the order of specifying the type of line as a roof element (rake, eave, hip, ridge, valley, step & wall flash)
– use of different levels, which allows you to work with complex roofs. It is also a tool that allows you to measure dormer roofs correctly. You can read about the features of measuring such slopes here. Not all developers provide such functionality.
In addition to all of the above, LocalProBook offers an additional tool – a “magic wand”, which allows you to create strictly symmetrical roof slopes if necessary.
3. Determining the angle of inclination of the slopes.
There are two options:
– through the Google Street View service
– using photos from the customer
This is an important step in using Roof Measuring App because it determines the result of calculating roof slope areas. The roofer must specify an angle for each slope drawn.
It is this step that usually does not allow accurate measurements because the Google Street View service allows you to see only the main facade of the house, along which the angle of inclination is measured.
LocalProBook provides the ability to measure the slope angle from any photo. How to take a right photo for this can be found here.
4. Product selection. The step is quite simple and necessary to receive a quote for roofing replacement. For each type of element, it is necessary to select a material – these can be cap shingles, roof starters, ventilation, underlayment, ice and water barriers, step and wall flash, and asphalt shingles. Typically, most manufacturers are already available in the materials database, but if necessary, you can add any roofing materials used (clay or cement tiles, metal sheets, rubber tiles, slate roof elements) to the database.
Indication of the cost of materials. At this step, we indicate the required quantity of materials and cost. Some developers of Roof Measuring App allow you to specify % waste for all materials at once. LocalProBook considers this to be incorrect and for each item, the roofer can select the required amount of material based on his experience working with it.
6. Formation of a proposal. Here, all manufacturers differ quite significantly both in format and in general with structure and capabilities.
LocalProBook automatically includes in the offer:
– list of materials indicating their quantity and cost
– the name of the roofing company and the necessary data from the company profile
– customer data
– allows you to specify the cost of delivery of materials
– allows you to indicate the cost of roof replacement work (labor cost)
– allows you to specify the cost of garbage removal from the site (dumpster rental)
– allows you to specify the cost of removing the old roof covering
– allows you to add a roofing company logo
7. Receiving an offer. The options also differ – some suggest downloading the file from cloud hosting, others simply save it in various formats to your device.
LocalProBook allows you to immediately send an offer through any software installed on your phone or tablet. These can be instant messengers or email apps, saved to Google Drive and other options.
Roof Measuring App Downloads
