Retail & strip center roofing in Houston

A strip center roof is a single roof with a lot of people depending on it. Every suite has a tenant, most have their own rooftop unit, and the owner, the property manager and each tenant all care what happens up there.

Water that gets in near the back wall over one suite can run along the deck and come through the ceiling of another. The tenant who calls is not always the one under the failed detail, so we walk the whole roof rather than the patch over the complaint. It helps to tell us every suite that has called, so the roof over each of them gets a close look.

On a strip center that walk covers more than the open field. The parapet walls and coping along the storefront side. The back wall, where scuppers and downspouts take the water off the roof and into the service drive. The curb under every tenant's unit. And the old patches, which on an older center are a fair map of where the roof has already failed.

Retail centers in Houston carry the full range of commercial roofs. TPO and PVC cover newer centers, modified bitumen and built-up cover older strip retail, and metal covers garden centers and older freestanding buildings. Each system wears in its own way, but the problems usually start at an edge, a seam or an opening.

If water is coming into a suite right now, that is commercial roof leak repair: call rather than send the form.

Retail roofs get walked more than most. Every tenant's unit gets serviced, and sign and cable crews come and go. A tenant who moves out can leave behind a curb, a pipe or a dish mount that nobody uses. Each one started as a hole cut through the roof, and not every one was flashed properly.

On an older center, look for pitch pans whose filler has dried and pulled back from the pipe. Curb flashing opened at the corners where technicians kneel. Condensate lines emptying straight onto the roof and keeping one spot wet. Gas lines lying on the membrane. Screws and offcuts left behind to puncture the sheet.

Signs add openings of their own. Power for a sign runs through the parapet or the roof behind it, and brackets get screwed through coping that was meant to shed water. They are small holes, but they sit at the top of a wall, where water that gets in runs straight down behind the flashing.

Abandoned openings get cut out and the roof patched in the same material, not smeared with mastic. Pitch pans refilled or replaced. Curbs raised, and gas and condensate lines lifted onto supports, working with the tenant's HVAC contractor. On our new roofs, walkway pads to the units are standard, which gives service crews a path that is not the membrane.

Most of this is commercial roof repair. A standard repair generally runs $1,500 to $3,500, with the price in writing before work starts.

Garden centers, older freestanding stores and some strip retail sit under screw-down metal roofs. They fail the way metal fails anywhere: fasteners backing out, laps opening, rust starting at cut edges and around every pipe and curb, and gutters overflowing along the eave.

A worn metal roof has more answers than new panels. Where the panels are rusted on the surface but still solid, a fluid-applied restoration runs $3.75 to $5.00 a square foot, against $7 to $12 to replace them. On sound steel that needs a new surface, a TPO roof built over the existing panels runs $6.50 to $8.00 a square foot, and PVC $9 to $12. We generally prefer that retrofit to new panels. Where a restaurant sits under a metal roof, a PVC retrofit also stands up to the grease.

New panels are for panels too far gone to keep. Restoration and retrofit are both covered in full on our metal roof coating page.