How To Avoid Roofing Mistakes With The Help of AI: Insights from an Expert Contractor

As a commercial roofing contractor and major manufacturer’s representative for over a decade, I witnessed first-hand the multitude of challenges owners, managers and roofing contractors face maintaining roof assets. The lack of transparent visual data on roof assets creates inefficiencies in servicing, assessing, and capital planning. While the construction industry has been slow to adopt new technologies, I knew there had to be a better way.

In searching for potential solutions, I discovered SITE Technologies. SITE is an AI-Driven property assessment platform that enables property owners/managers to take an objective, data-driven approach to facilities analysis. Experiencing the SITE Platform for the first time was a “light-bulb” moment for me. Never before had I seen a software platform that could address all these issues in a single, easy-to-use application.

In this post, I’ll unpack the most common challenges I ran into as a contractor, and how SITE addresses them.

Reactive Work Order Management

Effective work order management is crucial for maintaining roof assets and addressing maintenance issues promptly. I recommend property owners and managers implement proactive maintenance strategies to prevent minor issues from escalating into major problems. This includes conducting regular inspections and scheduling routine maintenance tasks to identify and address potential issues before they become more costly repairs.

How SITE Helps: Provides a centralized repository for all active and historical work orders, geo-referenced facility photos, assessments, and as-built documentation. With SITE, you can easily identify and provide your service partners with more transparent data that gives them the ability to quickly resolve work orders to reduce your OpEx spend.

Inability to Prioritize Repairs

One of the most common problems for property owners/managers is getting consistent estimates from contractors. Due to how subjective traditional assessment methods are, you can hire 5 contractors to walk a roof, and you’ll get 5 different opinions on the scope and cost of the project. If you want to ensure you’re allocating capital in the right areas, you first need a consistent way of measuring the condition of your assets across your portfolio.

How SITE Helps: Standardizes condition assessment ratings across your entire portfolio. Having consistent, objective analysis to inform your capital planning will stretch your budgets further, allow you to get more done, and prevent you from wasting capital in the wrong areas.

Trusting Contractor Estimates

Building trust between property owners/managers and contractors is essential for a successful partnership. As a former contractor, I understand the importance of transparency and reliability when providing estimates and recommendations for repairs. Make sure your contractors establish clear evaluation criteria and provide detailed documentation to support their recommendations.

How SITE Helps: Allows you to create your own scope of work and send it directly to contractors without ever leaving the platform. This prevents contractors from expanding the project scope and inflating costs, and it also saves significant time because all responses are in the exact same format.

Managing a large portfolio of roof assets can be quite challenging. But utilizing a platform like SITE that acts as a centralized repository for all your data, creates an objective standard for measuring the condition of your assets, and improves transparency with your contractors can make the life of an owner/manager much easier.