How to Vet a St. Louis Roofer — Without Getting Burned

The non-negotiable first step is confirming the roofer is licensed (where licensing applies to the work) and carries current insurance — both liability and workers' compensation. This is not paperwork pedantry. If an uninsured roofer's worker is hurt on your roof, or an uninsured crew damages your home, you can end up exposed in ways that dwarf the cost of the job. Insurance is the thing standing between you and a catastrophe.

"Verify" means more than hearing "yep, we're licensed and insured." Ask for the certificate of insurance and confirm it's current. Ask about license and registration requirements for your specific municipality — roofing requirements vary across St. Louis City, St. Louis County, and the surrounding St. Charles County and Jefferson County jurisdictions. A legitimate roofer expects these questions and answers them without friction. Hesitation or annoyance is itself an answer.

Get everything in writing before work starts. A real contract names the scope, the materials (brand, type, color), the timeline, the total price and payment schedule, how change orders are handled if hidden damage is found, the warranty on both materials and workmanship, and cleanup. Vagueness in any of these is where disputes are born.

Be especially wary of large up-front deposits. A reasonable deposit is normal; a demand for most or all of the money before any work happens is a classic setup for a contractor who vanishes or under-delivers. And never sign a contract under pressure — "this price is only good if you sign today" is a sales tactic, not a real constraint, and it's a reliable marker of someone you don't want on your roof.

After every significant St. Louis hailstorm, out-of-area crews descend on the affected neighborhoods, knock on doors, and pressure homeowners into signing fast — often by offering to "handle the whole insurance claim for you" or to waive your deductible (which is generally improper and can amount to insurance fraud). Some are competent; many are gone the moment the work is done, leaving you with no one to call when the repair fails.

The tells are consistent: high pressure, a too-good-to-be-true claim about your deductible, reluctance to put things in writing, no verifiable local presence, and a push to sign before you've even confirmed you have a claim. A local roofer with a real reputation in the area behaves the opposite way. If a storm just hit, our hail-season guide and storm-damage insurance guide walk through how to handle the aftermath without getting rushed.

Here's the part the industry doesn't advertise. When you fill out a quote form on most home-services sites, your phone number isn't sent to one contractor — it's sold to several at once. That's the business model. It's why you submit one form and then get five calls in ten minutes from companies racing each other to reach you first.

That race is bad for you in a specific way: it rewards whoever dials fastest, not whoever does the best work. The contractors know they're one of several, so they're incentivized to pressure and close quickly before a competitor does, rather than to inspect carefully and earn the job. In January 2023 the FTC ordered HomeAdvisor to pay up to $7.2 million over how it represented and sold leads — a matter of public record, and a fair illustration of how broken the shared-lead model can get. When the same lead is sold as "exclusive" to multiple contractors, the homeowner is the one who pays for it in calls and pressure.

This is the problem Routed was built to solve, and I'll be straight about it. Instead of selling your number to a handful of roofers, we match you with exactly one verified local pro for your area — and nobody else gets your number. Before we route you, we confirm that pro's license and insurance; you can read precisely how we verify. One homeowner, one pro, one call, usually within a minute. No race, no five-phone-call gauntlet.

You don't have to take my word that this is better — the checklist above works regardless of how you find your roofer. But if the part you dread most is the flood of calls and the pressure that comes with them, that's the exact thing we removed. If you're a contractor reading this and tired of buying the same shared lead as four competitors, that's the other side of the same fix.

Vetting a roofer well comes down to a few stubborn habits: verify license and insurance for real, demand a specific written contract, refuse to be rushed, and be skeptical of anyone who finds you instead of the other way around. Do those four things and you've eliminated the large majority of the ways this goes wrong.