If you are considering hiring a roofing company to re roof your home or building then you may be wondering what the differences are between residential roofing companies and commercial roofing companies. To start with, the one big difference is that often times a commercial roofing company may have signed a contract with and be obligated to a roofing union in able to work on union commercial jobs.
If this is the case then their labor costs will prohibit them from working on non union residential jobs. Beyond that, if a commercial roofing company has not signed a contract with a union they may be outfitted just for commercial jobs and that means that their workers and equipment may not be in line with smaller residential jobs.
Residential roofing contractors in general tend to run smaller companies and hence, are more in a position to bid competitively on residential jobs, which tend to be smaller than comercial jobs. In fact, often times residential roofing contractors will run one man operations, where the contractor that you talk to may be the one that actually does the work on the building.
Also, liability insurance for commercial roofing is more expensive and a larger bond is required for a commercial roofing work which will make it not cost effective for a commercial roofing contractor to do residential roofing jobs.
Still one more factor is that commercial jobs can run on a tighter time frame for any number of reasons, requiring a commercial contractor to employ a larger crew or crews which again makes smaller jobs not as profitable for them.