Winback for Roofers
Every roof you patched is a re-roof with a date on it
You already know which roofs are failing
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.
Here is something no other trade has. You have been on hundreds of roofs and you know the condition of every one of them.
When you patched a slipped tile in 2021 you could see that the felt was perished, the battens were tired and the valleys had four or five years in them. You said so at the time. The customer heard it, could not afford a re-roof that year, paid the £505 and got on with their life.
Four years later that roof is at the end. It will leak this winter or next. Somebody is going to be paid £5,090 to replace it.
There is no reason at all for that somebody to be another firm, and in most cases it is, because nobody wrote the date down and nobody went back.
The two dormant groups, and they behave differently
Repair customers whose roof was already ageing. The group above. They are not comparing roofers; they are waiting for the roof to force the decision. Contact from the firm that did the repair, referring to what was found at the time, is not a sales approach — it is continuity, and it converts unusually well.
Customers from five years and more ago. Fascias, guttering and flat roofs all have finite lives. An EPDM flat roof done in 2010 is at the end of its expected life now. A customer who had gutters replaced eight years ago has moss and joints failing.
Neither group is difficult to identify and neither has been contacted by anybody, because roofing is treated as a one-off trade by almost everyone in it.
The one thing both require is that you were honest with them the first time. A roofer who said “this needs replacing eventually but a repair will hold it” and was right is in a very strong position four years later. A roofer who oversold at the time will not get the call.
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 the dormant repair list: two hundred repair customers over four years, of whom perhaps sixty had roofs you knew were near the end. A ten per cent conversion over two winters is six re-roofs — £30,540 — from a list you already own and inspections you have already carried out.
What we’d actually do
Reconstruct the list from job records, flagged by what was actually found on the roof at the time rather than by what was invoiced.
A contact that leads with the finding, not the offer. “When we replaced the tiles at the front in 2021 the felt underneath was perished — that is usually four or five years from needing attention. Worth a look before winter.” That is a survey booking, not a sales pitch.
Timing it for autumn. The decision is made when the weather turns, so the contact lands in September rather than in March.
A free or fixed-price re-survey, because the objection is uncertainty rather than money, and the survey is what resolves it.
Age-based sweeps for flat roofs, fascias and guttering, which have predictable lives and are almost never followed up.
What good looks like at twelve months
- A dormant list flagged by roof condition rather than by invoice value
- Autumn contact going out ahead of the weather rather than after it
- Re-surveys booked from repairs done years ago
- Flat roofs approaching end of life identified and contacted
- Re-roofs arriving from customers who already trust you
The mistakes we see most
Never recording what you saw. The condition of the roof is the whole asset and it usually exists only in your memory of a morning four years ago.
Contacting in spring. The decision follows the first bad weather. September is the month.
Opening with a price. They need a look, not a quote. The survey is the ask.
Overselling on the original repair. It wins £505 once and forfeits the £5,090 four years later, which is a poor trade in every direction.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1–4. The dormant list reconstructed, flagged by condition — this is the substantial piece of work and it is what everything else runs on.
Weeks 5–8. The autumn contact written and sent to the group whose roofs are genuinely due.
Weeks 9–12. Age sweeps for flat roofs and rainwater goods, plus a habit of recording roof condition on every future job so this list maintains itself.
At ninety days the measure is survey bookings from past customers. Those convert far better than anything cold, because the trust already exists.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Survey findings and roof photographs sit against the property, so a repair carried out in 2021 carries a record of what the felt and battens actually looked like.
That record is what makes the dormant list a filter — every property where the roof was noted as near the end, sorted by year — rather than an exercise in recall.
And because photographs stay with the job, the contact four years later can include the picture you took at the time, which is considerably more persuasive than any description.
The houses that changed hands
Roofs outlast owners, and that produces a dormant group nobody in the trade contacts.
A house you surveyed or repaired in 2019 has a reasonable chance of having been sold since. The new owner has inherited a roof they know nothing about, usually with a homebuyer’s survey that said something vague and alarming about the covering being at the end of its serviceable life.
You, meanwhile, hold the only detailed record of that roof in existence. You have been up there. You have photographs. You know what the felt was like and which valley was suspect.
That is a genuinely valuable thing to offer a new owner, and it costs a letter. Not a sales approach — an offer of information. We carried out a repair at this address in 2019 and hold photographs and notes on the condition of the roof at that time; you are welcome to a copy, and we are happy to look at it if anything has changed.
It works for three reasons. New owners are actively spending on the house in the first year. They are anxious about exactly this and have usually been told to get a roofer to look. And receiving detailed history about a property they have just bought is a small gift from a stranger, which is not how most roofing approaches land.
Land registry sale data makes the moved-on addresses straightforward enough to identify.
Questions roofers ask
Is it not opportunistic to go back? You told them at the time and you were right. Following up on your own diagnosis is the opposite of opportunism.
What if they had it done by somebody else? Then you learn that, and they come off the list. Better to know.
What if I never recorded the condition? Then we start recording it now, and reconstruct what we can from photographs and invoices. Most roofers have more material than they think.
When should the contact go out? September, so it is read before the first storm rather than during it.
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