Quote Systems for Roofers
Quote the repair, the partial and the full job. Let them choose
A single price is a yes-or-no question, and the answer is usually no
A full roof re-tile is £5,090. Fascias, soffits and guttering, £1,830. A flat roof in EPDM, £1,790. A repair, £505. A survey, £175.
You go up, you find a roof that is tired but not finished, and you come down with a decision to make about what to put on the paper.
Quote £5,090 for the full re-tile and a large share of customers say they will think about it, because you have asked them to make a five thousand pound decision in one step, on trust, about something they cannot see.
Quote £505 for the repair and you have sold the cheapest possible version of the visit, and in four years somebody else does the re-roof.
The way out is not a different price. It is a different document. Present all three — the repair that buys time, the partial that deals with the failing section, and the full replacement — with what each one actually achieves and roughly how long it lasts.
The question stops being shall I spend £5,090 and becomes which of these three do I want, which is a question people answer.
Why this works particularly well on roofs
Because the honest answer genuinely is a range. A roof at fifteen years into a thirty-year covering, with two slipped tiles and a suspect valley, can legitimately be repaired, partly renewed or replaced, and the right choice depends on how long the owner intends to stay, what they can spend and how much disruption they will accept.
Presenting that range does something no sales technique can: it demonstrates that you are not simply selling the largest job available. In a trade with a trust problem, that is worth more than the price difference.
It also protects you. A customer who chooses the £505 repair, having been shown in writing that the felt is perished and the roof has perhaps four years left, cannot later claim they were not told. Your options document is the record.
And it sets up the winback. The person who took the repair this year is on your list, with a date, with a photograph, and with a documented expectation that the full job is coming.
The ratio
A re-tile is £5,090. Our Noticed package is £49 a month — £588 a year. One re-tile covers more than eight years.
On options: a single-price quote in this trade converts at a certain rate; the same visit presented as three options converts a higher proportion into something, and a meaningful share of those into the middle option rather than the cheapest. Turning a third of your walk-aways into £1,790 partial jobs is a substantial change to a year, from a document rather than from more enquiries.
What we’d actually build
A three-option quote format — repair, partial, full — with expected life and disruption stated against each.
A survey report that carries the photographs, because the options only make sense alongside evidence of what is up there.
Standard exclusions and provisional wording for what cannot be seen until the covering is off — battens, decking, hidden rot. This is the roofing equivalent of a builder’s groundworks.
Scaffold and access priced separately and visibly, so the customer understands what is structure and what is roof.
A follow-up routine timed to autumn, because a repair chosen in May is a full job considered in October.
A record of what was found, which is the asset that makes every future contact possible.
What good looks like at twelve months
- Every survey producing an options document rather than a single figure
- Photographs from the roof in every quote
- Fewer outright walk-aways, more middle options taken
- Repairs recorded with the condition that justified them
- Autumn follow-ups converting last year’s repairs into this year’s re-roofs
The mistakes we see most
One price, take it or leave it. It maximises the size of the job you lose.
No photographs. The options are unarguable with evidence and unpersuasive without it.
Nothing about what might be found underneath. Every roofer knows the battens might be rotten. Saying so in advance is competence.
Not recording the choice. The customer who took the repair is your best future customer and only if you wrote down why.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1–4. The three-option format built around your real prices, with life expectancy and disruption described in plain terms.
Weeks 5–8. The photographic survey report it sits inside, and the exclusions wording for what cannot be seen.
Weeks 9–12. The autumn follow-up routine and a habit of recording roof condition against every job.
At ninety days the measure is the proportion of surveys that produced any job at all, rather than the proportion that produced the biggest one.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Survey findings and photographs sit against the property, so the options document is assembled from what was actually seen rather than described from memory.
Quotes hold their outcome, which means a customer who chose the repair is a recorded decision with a date — the exact list the autumn follow-up runs from.
And because the original condition notes stay with the property, the conversation four years later opens with what you found at the time and the photograph that proves it.
The quote is worth nothing until the survey is written down
There is a step before the options document that decides whether it works at all, and it is the one most often skipped.
You come off the roof having seen ten things. Two matter now, four matter within five years, and four are worth mentioning only in passing. By the time you sit down to price it that evening, some of that has already blurred, and what makes it onto the quote is a summary of your general impression rather than a record of what is actually up there.
That is a problem in three directions. The options document is less convincing because it asserts rather than shows. The winback contact four years later has nothing specific to refer to. And if the customer takes the repair and something fails later, there is no record that you told them.
The fix is mechanical rather than clever. Photograph in a fixed sequence — each elevation, each valley, the ridge, the flashings, anything failing — and dictate a note on the roof while you are still standing on it. Two minutes at the top of a ladder produces a better record than twenty minutes of recollection at a kitchen table.
Everything else on this page runs off that record. The options are only as persuasive as the evidence attached to them, and the evidence is only as good as what you captured before you came down.
Questions roofers ask
Does offering a repair not cost me the re-roof? It costs you the re-roof this year and wins it in four, with a customer who trusts you. Presenting only the large job frequently costs you both.
How many options? Three. Two is a comparison, four is a menu.
Should I include scaffold in the price? Include it, and show it separately. Customers assume it is inflated and seeing the figure settles it.
What if they choose nothing? Then you have a documented survey and a customer on a list with a date, which is considerably more than most roofers leave a visit with.
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