Metal roof repair in Tempe

Tempe is landlocked. Phoenix, Mesa, Scottsdale and Chandler surround it on every side, and it ran out of room to expand decades ago. There is very little new construction, and what does happen is infill and student housing rather than subdivisions.

The practical consequence is that Tempe housing stock is overwhelmingly 1950s to 1980s, and a great deal of it reached the same age at the same time. The metal on those houses is mid century in character: window awnings, attached carports, patio structures and low slope additions, much of it original, much of the rest added in the seventies and eighties.

Then there is the rental factor. The concentration of student and investor owned property around ASU, through Maple Ash, University Heights and the neighbourhoods off Apache and Rural, is very high. Rental property gets maintained reactively almost by definition, and roofs are the clearest example of that, because nothing about a failing metal roof is visible or annoying from inside the house until the day it is very visible indeed.

So the pattern we see in Tempe is different from the pattern in, say, Peoria. In Peoria we find long standing wear on a roof nobody could safely inspect. In Tempe we find long standing wear on a roof nobody had a reason to inspect, and we usually find it because a tenant has reported a stain. By that point the fasteners have generally been going for several summers and the sealant in the laps is well past its life. The repair is usually still straightforward, but it is rarely just the one thing that caused the call.