Spring is here and roofing season is underway! With that, we are sending you this brief update on a few things we can expect to see this year. We are here to help you mitigate risk, and to that end, we wanted to provide some insight on recent happenings in the roofing industry.
Among the many disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are seeing a number of shocks to roofing. We have recently seen price increases ranging from 7-12% on most materials with some increases as high as 20%.
We are seeing material delays on some products already delaying projects on the order of weeks to months - so far, we have seen this specifically with metal products and PVC related components primarily, and this seems to be increasingly impacting insulation products as well.
Additional safety and overhead requirements and job delays have resulted in price increases in labor and insurance rates.
Please take this email as a cautionary step to review existing projects that are being planned for 2021 and 2022 and know that IRE will review and implement the best value of roofing that is available for your needs. You can expect us to continue to update you and engage on a job-to-job basis on your behalf to help you deliver for your stakeholders.
A few things you can do:
Extend the life and maintain the value of your existing roof
The most impacted product lines tend to be metal (accessories, fasteners, plates, etc), followed by membranes and insulation, followed by coatings. Adapt your roof strategy to fit this new reality where you can.
Add a 3-5% allowance on your budgets to be safe
Get your 2021-2023 projects specified, bid, and booked ASAP. Don’t take shortcuts, but do go to bid, get triple-bid, and level-set bids from qualified contractors, and select a low bidder. Then, book it in with the contractor with a written, mutually agreed upon approach to adapting future project costs to any further material price increases.
Take extra care to issue complete, detailed, and customized project bid packages, then carefully qualify bids. Any unforeseen change orders and mid-project ordering will be extremely problematic this year, as the project could get stuck for many months awaiting the additional supply.
No need to panic; a good plan well-executed still wins the day.