Are Low Commercial Roof Replacement Bids Down Payments on a Change Order?

RELATED: WHAT CAN (AND OFTEN DOES) HAPPEN WHEN A COMMERCIAL ROOFER HIRES POOR SUBCONTRACTORS

We watch this play out year after year. A general contractor nobody in the market knew came in well under every established roofer on a commercial roof replacement bid. The price looked like it was the best. But a vague proposal often leaves out details that were not included in the original bid that later become a change order request - and the project inflates.

In Florida, on that roof, a coping cap is code. There is nothing optional about it. The building doesn't pass inspection without it, the permit doesn't close without it, and the owner carries the insurance exposure until it's on.

We see it far too often, contractors move a required item into the options column and the base price drops. The low base price wins the signature. Then the permit review or the inspector catches the gap, and a change order shows up mid-project, priced by the only contractor who can now do the work: the one already on your roof. Our GAF rep, who sees bids across the whole region, puts it at roughly a nine in ten chance of a change order when you actually line these bids up apples to apples.

So you pay for the roof you should have been quoted, plus change-order markup, plus the schedule slip, and you pay it at the exact moment you have zero leverage.

How to strip a bid down to something comparable

Before any bid gets forwarded up the chain, check four things in the base scope:

• The Florida code items. Every flat roof here has required components that cannot legally be skipped. If any of them appear as options or don't appear at all, the bid is incomplete, and the price is fiction.
• The warranty, by name. Which manufacturer warranty is being registered, for how long, and is this contractor even certified to register it?
• Who is actually on the roof. Payroll crews or labor subbed out by the square? This is also where workers' comp exposure hides.
• Line-item parity. Same membrane, same thickness, same attachment method, same tear-off scope. A thinner spec is a different roof, no matter what the proposal cover says.

A bid that survives that checklist and still comes in lowest is worth further conversation. But more often than not? We see the low bids don’t stand up at all, and often fetch change order after change order.

If you're holding a bid that looks too good to be true, odds are that you might be right. Send it to us or engage a roofing consultant before you sign it. We'll walk the line items with you and show you exactly where the change order is hiding.