Any building owner that has the long-term value of the property in mind should take special note of the following best practices to manage and maintain your commercial roof.  If ignored, it could become a major expense and could lead to damages inside the building if leaks occur.

Maintain your commercial roof for maximum ROI

Maintain your commercial roof to optimize building value

If you maintain your roof, the costs can be managed and disasters prevented. This is not one of those things you should put off for another time.

Maintaining your roof is not difficult, provided that you have dealt with the major factors that could go wrong. Prevention is much better than a repair job that has become necessary as a result of an incident. No-one wants to undertake an expensive and major roof repair job out of necessity. Planned and pre-budgeted maintenance is really the way to go.

Best practices to maintain your commercial roof

Follow these 5 best practices to maintain your roof and you will be well on your way to managing your building in the optimal way:

The team approach

Put together a strong and trusted team: The Property Manager, Consultant and Roofer. This combination brings together extensive knowledge and experience, and as long as they are all working towards the same common and well-communicated goal, they represent the best of breed.

Communication

Most problems emanate from a lack of communication. To pre-empt this challenge from ever occurring, create a process (both verbal and written) to deal with roof repairs and leaks from the time it is reported to follow-up or resolved. For example:

• Property Manager is notified by tenant or others on site
• Property Manager will assess the complaint
• Property Manager will dispatch the Consultant
• Consultant to dispatch roofer starting with your preferred roofer and depending on their availability
• Consultant to inspect the work and report back to Property Manager
• Property Manager follows up with the source of the complaint (and the owner) to ensure satisfaction

Make sure that any issues have total closure, and end in a positive experience for the owner and the tenants alike.

Inspections

Getting ahead of the game and preventing issues from arising is the prudent way to manage your roof. Don’t wait for a problem to arise. Undertake a minimum of once a year inspections, preferably after the spring. Ideally another inspection before the snow starts would be helpful and will inevitablye minimize your risk.

The inspection should include the PM and the consultant. The consultant will create a punch list to be reviewed it with the PM. Then the consultant will meet with the preferred roofer and go over the list and prepare a budget and schedule

Warranty

Know and really understand your warranty. There may be criteria that must be met and you do not want to find that out when you make a claim. Most likely, a roof inspection may be a requirement to maintain the warranty.

Protect Your Roof

Make sure that your roof is off-limits to everyone but those that need access. A clear Notice and Contact information must be provided at the roof access point so that anyone seeing a problem can reach the relevant people. This access point must be locked at all times.

In addition, include in all your leases some protection to your building systems which includes the roof. For example: No Alterations by or on behalf of the Tenant will be permitted which may weaken or endanger the structure or adversely affect the condition or operation of the Premises or the Building or diminish the value.

Acknowledgement: thank you to Joel K. Dandelé, CTRC of Dantech Building Technologies for his input for this article.