Residential re-roof climate in your area, (hail/ins. work excluded)

We've shyed-away from new construction these past 5-6 yrs......Work has been fairly steady, up till this past 6 mos or so. Now, not only has the volume of available work shrunk, the work continues to go cheaper & cheaper.

There's also less & less mechanics available, and wages are still way low.....You'd think the opposite would be the case....Go figure!

New const. has picked-up a bit.....

And now it's a max of six guys, my Dad and myself. But I prefer the smaller crew on most projects.

I thought you were mostly commercial TomB? I'm mainly saying that based on a post where you mentioned a huge budget for OSHA appearances.

We are mostly Res. We had a huge hail storm here in '09 and I knew nothing of insurance headaches. So my area is bit skewed. We had a top100 roofer move in and grab his share of the work with his subbed crews. I'm a bit angsty about that.

Before the storm we kept 10-12 guys busy year round almost exclusively roofing. Three months deep in the summer. These past two years I've only been a month deep or maybe a bit more at most. I haven't increased my prices on the easy ones since 09, just modified my business to run more efficiently. The steeper and more difficult ones have went up though. I was getting too many of them and not making enough.

Concerning work load, it has rained a LOT this year in the Southeast.

I have been able to keep ME very busy all year doing nothing but repair work, ventilation jobs and replacing a lot of small low slope roofs.

On the year, i can remember only 2 weeks out of 27 that were slow.

I shyed-away from new construction around 1995. I used to love to go to work on a crew doing new construction, slam on a lot of squares and get a nice payday. Working for other contractors fell to the wayside when I learned about homeowners.

I don't have any sons but all my nephews are now between 20-25 yrs. old. They can not find steady work of any sort much less roofing.

When I was there age, I used to brag about being able to go to any city in America and be able to find roofing work within 48 hrs. knowing absolutely nothing about the area except that it was one of the larger cities.

That simply isn't true anymore. The sob's have came in groves over the last decade, taken up most all of the construction jobs and if not lowered the wages, kept them from rising.