Fort Lauderdale Roof Pros: Roof Replacement, Leak Repair & Reroofing

Yes, and there is no version of a reroof that is exempt. The city issues a roofing permit on the state's Uniform Roofing Permit Application, and the application has to name the specific product approval or Notice of Acceptance for the assembly going on.

Florida also requires a recorded Notice of Commencement on work above $2,500, which protects you as much as it protects the contractor. If a bidder tells you the job is small enough to skip the permit, what they are really telling you is that no inspector will ever look at their work.

The Florida Building Code puts Broward and Miami-Dade counties in the High-Velocity Hurricane Zone. Products used here must be approved for that zone specifically, tested under the Testing Application Standards the code names, and installed exactly as the approval document describes.

A shingle, vent or skylight sold legally in Orlando or Savannah can be unusable on your roof, not because it is a bad product but because nobody paid to test it for this zone. It narrows the catalogue considerably, and it is the single biggest reason a quote from outside the county comes in low.

The labor on an average Fort Lauderdale house is a few days. The schedule is set by inspections, not by labor. Permit review, then a sheathing inspection after tear-off, then a dry-in inspection before the covering, then a final. Each one is a separate visit on the city's calendar, and tile roofs add an attachment inspection in the middle.

Plan on two to four weeks for a straightforward shingle roof and longer for tile. Anyone promising a two-day turnaround on a permitted reroof is describing a job that skipped a step.

It depends on the age of the roof and on how much of it is bad.

The reroofing chapter of the code limits how much of a roof can be repaired in a twelve-month period before the whole system has to be brought up to current standards, and there is a statutory exception for roofs already permitted under the 2007 code or later. So we measure before we quote.

If your damaged area is comfortably under the threshold we will repair it and tell you what you bought in years. If it is near the line, we will show you the arithmetic instead of discovering it halfway through.

On older Fort Lauderdale housing, usually yes. When the covering comes off, the sheathing has to be fastened to today's schedule rather than the 1960s one, which normally means 8d ring-shank nails at closer spacing. The code's mitigation provisions also require improving roof-to-wall connections on many pre-2002 buildings once the job value passes a share of the building's value.

These are code-driven costs, not upsells. We put them on the estimate as line items so you can see which ones the permit forces and which ones are optional.

Yes, and the process differs. On a condominium or a townhouse association the building itself usually holds the roof as common element, so the association's board and often its engineer of record approve the assembly before the city ever sees an application. That adds a review cycle, and it means the specification has to satisfy two readers.

We are used to submitting approval documents and uplift figures to an engineer as well as to a plans examiner, and we would rather do that up front than argue about it at the dry-in inspection.