What is delivered
Text, ratings, quantities and costs in the format your assessment already uses, plus a numbered photograph log and marked up roof plans. The section is written to be placed, not adapted. Where the assessment carries immediate, short term and reserve brackets, the roof items arrive in those brackets with the basis for each placement stated.
The quantities separate a usable section from a narrative one. A cost table cannot carry a sentence saying the membrane is near the end of its life. It carries an area, a unit and a year. Producing those requires the roof to be measured and split by section, which is a different exercise from describing it.
What sits outside the section
Pricing. Unit rates belong to contractors and they move with market conditions, so where your cost table needs rates we work to the ones the assessment firm applies rather than inventing our own. What we supply is the scope and the quantity that a rate is applied to.
Reliance. The assessment is addressed and relied upon under your engagement. We are not a party to it unless the engagement says so, and that is settled at the start rather than raised by a lender at the end.
Anything not inspected. Sections that could not be reached, areas under solar arrays or screening, roofs obscured by standing water and assemblies that were not opened are listed as such, with the wording drafted for inclusion in the report body.
When firms engage us for this
Where the roof is the component most likely to be questioned and the assessment team would rather it were walked by someone who does only roofs. Where a portfolio assessment needs consistent roof treatment across many assets and many site visits. Where a lender has come back with questions on a roof component and somebody has to answer them. And where the schedule is tight enough that the roof needs its own visit running in parallel rather than waiting for the building walk.
The article on what a roof section should contain sets out the substance. This page is about who produces it.
Common questions
Can you produce the roof section for an assessment another firm is writing?
Yes, and that is the usual arrangement. The assessment firm holds the engagement, the format and the relationship with the lender or the buyer, and the roof component is produced and delivered into it.
- Send the template, the rating scale, the cost table structure and the report date
- State clearly who the assessment is addressed to
- Agree scope in writing: which roofs, whether testing is included, what is excluded
- Agree authorship: attribution, naming, and whether our limitations wording carries through intact
A limitation edited out of a section leaves a confident statement about a roof nobody inspected fully. We also answer questions after the assessment is issued, because lenders and buyers ask about roofs more than most components, and a section its author cannot defend creates work for the firm that signed the report.
What format is the section delivered in?
Whatever your report uses. That means editable text in your template rather than a separate branded document, ratings in your scale, quantities in your units and costs in the year brackets your cost table carries.
- A standalone report has to be rewritten, and rewriting is where errors enter
- The photograph log is supplied separately, numbered and located
- Findings reference photograph numbers rather than describing images in prose
- Roof plans arrive as marked up images, with sections identified consistently with the text
Tell us at the start if your template limits the section length. A roof component that has to fit one page is a different piece of writing from one that can run longer, and it is better to write to the constraint than to have the section cut later by someone who was not on the roof.
Can the section follow your consultant's own rating scale?
It should, and it is one of the things to settle before field work rather than after. Send us the scale and the definitions behind each point on it.
- A rating means nothing on its own, only against a defined scale
- A section on its own scale makes the whole document easier to misinterpret
- Where a roof sits between two points, we rate the sections separately
- The split is explained in the text rather than averaged away
What we will not do is force a rating the evidence does not support because the scale has nowhere else to put it. Where the scale has no category for something that matters, such as an assembly still serviceable but at a layer count that limits the next roof, it goes in the narrative and is flagged for the cost table.
Does the assessment consultant need to be on the roof as well?
Not usually, and in most cases it is more efficient if they are not. Splitting the visit lets the roof be walked section by section rather than viewed from the hatch while a building walk waits.
- The consultant covers systems, envelope, site and interiors in the same window
- Attend together where the roof is likely to drive the headline number
- Whoever defends that number benefits from having stood on it
- Attend together where interior and roof evidence need connecting on the same day
Tracing a stain from both sides at once is far more reliable than doing it from photographs a week apart. Either way, coordinate the access once. Tenant notice, lifts and escorts cost the same whether two consultants use them together or separately, and sellers grow impatient with repeated requests.
What happens if the roof section contradicts the rest of the assessment?
It gets resolved before the report is issued, in writing, and the resolution is recorded.
- A hatch view may call a roof serviceable where a full walk finds a section finished
- Interior observations may point to a leak the roof walk could not locate
- A seller's paperwork may describe a replacement the physical evidence does not support
- None of that is awkward: it is the reason more than one person looked
What matters is that the final document says one thing. If the roof evidence changes the conclusion, the conclusion should change rather than the section being softened to match. If the section is the one that is wrong, we would rather hear it from your reviewer with the evidence attached and correct it.