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Roofing Warranties – Too Good to be True?

Most roofing material manufactures are now offering lifetime warranties on their roofing materials. While many will applaud the manufacture for their desire to offer peace of mind to the customer, these warranties when needed may do you little good.

Here’s the problem: Most roofing materials are not made to last a lifetime and many of them no more than 20 years. When you think about a lifetime product, you may consider a dam, a federal building, or even the Golden Gate bridge as products that were meant to last a lifetime, not forever, but a generation of years.
Composition roof is not one of them; maybe some tile roofs, slate, and copper roofing materials will fall into this category, but not composition shingles. So why do manufactures offer lifetime warranties on products they know will fail much sooner than warrantied?

Because they are trying to sell a product and compete at any cost. It started about 20 years ago, one shingle manufacture would extend their shingle warranty and for a few months they looked like they were making and offering a superior product. But the competition couldn’t stand by and let their sales slump, so they countered with increased warranties of their own. It has become a vicious cycle and now all shingles – even the cheap starter shingles – have a limited lifetime warranty.

So how can they afford to stand behind their warranties if the shingles and thus claims could start after only 15-20 years? Listed below are some of the small print items their lawyers and accountants include so they can sleep at night: Most warranties are material defects only / Prorated after a period of time / Non Transferable / Transferable only if completed in writing / Do not cover cosmetic wear / Company out of business / Class action lawsuit may be required / Claim process is slow / Claim process requires samples collected and sent in / Installed incorrectly /
Poor maintenance / Improper Ventilation / and so on.

The above list curtails about 99% of the customers from ever collecting on a warranty claim. So what’s the point of this article? Stay tuned to the next post when we talk about realistic warranty expectations for composition shingles and how to protect yourself.