“Honestly commercial work is all about who you know,” an owner on r/RoofingSales wrote in 2023. Nearly all of his commercial jobs came by referral, among them a church roof he got through a family whose house he’d roofed. Another owner who has done commercial work wrote there in 2025, “We got more recommendations from manufacturers than we ever got from Google.” Commercial buyers often skip Google and the review sites, he says, because a consultant, an architect or a corporate standard often specifies the material, so a high place on a manufacturer’s list of recommended installers counts for more.
I sell marketing to roofers, so I’d have liked the answer to be Google. If he’s right, much of what an agency like mine sells won’t reach commercial buyers. I haven’t measured commercial work for any client, so I went through 77 posts and comments about breaking into it, 57 of them from the Reddit roofing subs between 2023 and 2026. Going by what they wrote, 28 of those 57 came from sales reps and 12 from owners, so a lot of it is the sales rep’s view.
With no commercial references yet, start with people who know your work
In a 2023 r/RoofingSales thread on commercial storm deals, one commenter wrote that the question prospects ask every day is what your commercial references are. A residential company new to commercial roofing has none to give, which leaves the people who already know your work. The owner with the church roof also has a cousin at a property management company who tells him when one of its properties needs a roof.
The manager you meet at a building may not be the one who decides. A sales rep on r/RoofingSales found that “pitching to a GM generates little to no traction because they just work there.” In the storm thread, a roofer said multi-family deals often have three to five or more decision makers, and his last one, 18 units, took two years against the insurance carrier.
Ask past homeowners whether anyone in their family has a say over a commercial building, since a past customer’s family is where the church roof came from, and ask anyone you know in property management to tell you when a roof comes up. Roofing Referral Programs: Past Customers, Realtors and Insurance Agents covers asking for introductions.
One owner says manufacturers start recommending you at about $250,000 a year
The owner who credits manufacturers says most of them start recommending a roofer on big projects once it installs about $250,000 a year of their product. That’s one person’s account, and I couldn’t find a manufacturer source that confirms it, so ask the manufacturers you buy from what it takes before you shift volume to chase it.
A spot on a property manager’s vendor list can still leave you as the third bid
Some property management companies approve vendors through a service such as RealPage Vendor Credentialing, which checks your certificate of insurance against the limits each company sets: general liability and workers’ comp, plus auto liability where it applies. It also checks state trade licenses and a W-9, and runs a background check if the manager wants one. RealPage doesn’t say whether vendors pay a fee. If a policy falls short, Roofing Workers’ Comp and General Liability: What It Costs and How Audits Work covers what coverage costs.
An approval doesn’t promise any work. A commercial rep who got onto property managers’ vendor systems, VendorCafe among them, wrote on r/RoofingSales in 2024 that several firms used his company only to make up their three bids while the same contractor kept getting the work. Others didn’t tell him about projects, and his company struggled to get into the bids to re-roof buildings it had originally roofed.
One estimator bid close to 225 GC jobs and usually heard nothing back
An estimator with 18 years in commercial roofing wrote on r/GeneralContractor in 2024 that GCs usually didn’t reply once he’d sent a proposal, and he found them worse to work with than property managers.
PlanHub shows subcontractors projects within a local radius for free and charges for wider territory, with early project access from about $17 a month, billed annually. By its own count it has more than 55,000 general contractors and over 3,000 new commercial projects out for bid each month.
Autodesk’s BuildingConnected, another bid board, claims more than 1.5 million construction professionals and prices its paid plans by quote only, and its pages don’t say whether receiving or answering a GC’s bid invite is free. Neither company’s numbers tell you how often a GC answers. Owners ask which board is worth paying for, Dodge included, and I don’t have numbers to answer that.
US federal rules count a roofer with up to $19 million a year in receipts as small
To bid federal work, you register in SAM.gov for a Unique Entity ID and match your work to a NAICS code. Registration can take up to 10 business days to go active, and you renew it every 365 days.
The SBA counts a roofing contractor (NAICS 238160) as small up to $19.0 million in average annual receipts, affiliates included. Check the code each solicitation names, since commercial building construction (236220) uses $45.0 million.
Being small matters because federal rules set some jobs aside for small businesses. For construction covered by federal wage rules, jobs over $2,000 and up to $350,000 are set aside unless the contracting officer expects fewer than two competitive offers from small businesses, and bigger jobs can be set aside too. The rule is written for “supplies or services,” so ask the contracting office how it applies to a roofing job, and check the thresholds, which move with inflation.
Federal contracts over $2,000 to build or repair public buildings or works also fall under the Davis-Bacon Act, which means paying laborers and mechanics at least the local prevailing wages and fringe benefits.
Federal construction jobs over $150,000 need performance and payment bonds
The Miller Act requires both bonds on federal construction contracts over $150,000. Between $35,000 and $150,000, the contracting officer picks two or more payment protections, such as a payment bond or an irrevocable letter of credit.
The SBA guarantees bid, payment, performance and ancillary bonds for small businesses on contracts up to $9 million, or $14 million on federal work. It charges 0.6% of the contract price for performance and payment bonds, which by my math is $900 on a $150,000 job, and nothing for a bid bond guarantee. That $900 is SBA’s fee alone. The surety company still underwrites and issues the bond after checking your credit, capacity and character, so ask it what the bond itself will cost before you price the job.
For any other public job, ask the purchasing office what bonds it needs.
A commercial contract can leave you carrying costs for 30 days or longer
A residential owner on r/Roofing wrote in 2026 that a commercial contract he took on came with a project manager to report to every week and paid net 30, which his company wasn’t used to. Carrying the costs that long forced his office manager to push back a supplier payment.
The owner who credits manufacturers warns of longer waits on military or government jobs bigger than a young company can carry. A project promised in a year can run three, he says, paid 5% at a time, with change orders unpaid until completion, and he has seen companies in their first ten years go bankrupt partway through one.
Before you bid, ask how the client pays and when it pays for change orders. Then work out how long you can carry payroll and supplier bills before that money arrives, and put the cost of the wait into your price. Roofing Cash Flow: Depreciation Checks, Final Payments and Liens covers the same squeeze on residential jobs.
A low-slope roof allows fall protection that a steep roof doesn’t
If your crews have only worked steep roofs, a low-slope commercial roof changes what federal OSHA accepts at the edge. Where an edge sits 6 feet or more above the level below, a crew on a low-slope roof can use guardrails, safety nets or personal fall arrest, or a warning line paired with one of those or with a safety monitor. A safety monitor alone is allowed on low-slope roofs 50 feet wide or less. On a steep roof the warning line and the monitor drop out, and guardrails need toeboards. State-plan states can set stricter rules, so check the rules where you work before you price the first flat roof.
Local Services Ads can bill a commercial-only roofer for residential calls
An owner on r/PPC asked in 2025 whether Google’s Local Services Ads bring in commercial roofing leads or mainly residential ones. Google doesn’t say. Its LSA page lists roofing among 37 eligible home services without separating residential customers from commercial ones or saying commercial calls are excluded. You pick job types from a fixed list for your trade, and the ad can also show when someone searches the trade’s general name. The roofing list only shows inside an LSA account, so check yours for commercial job types.
You pay when someone contacts you through the ad. Google won’t credit a lead because you listed a general service type and don’t do that specific job, and it no longer credits leads for a job type or an area you don’t serve. By my reading of those two rules, a roofer who only wants commercial work pays for the residential calls the ad brings in. A residential roofer does those jobs anyway, though Google’s help pages describe no way to aim the ad at commercial buyers alone.
Search data doesn’t settle the question either. The commercial searches I can measure come from roofers looking for work: “commercial roofing leads” gets about 110 US searches a month at an estimated $29.42 a click, so an ad on it reaches roofers like you. I have no figures for what property managers search, and Google publishes none. As of October 2026, Google’s page on moving LSA into Google Ads, which began with some roofing advertisers that August, doesn’t separate the two either.
Try the free routes first, and count the replies
Asking past customers costs nothing, and neither does looking at PlanHub’s local projects, so start there and count how many of your proposals to GCs get an answer before you pay for wider reach. Apply to managers’ vendor systems once your certificate of insurance, auto policy, trade licenses and W-9 are in order, and leave bonded and federal work until a surety has looked at your company and you know how long you can carry a job’s costs.
Google is the one part of this I can measure. To see whether a property manager searching near your office would find you, run the free Google Maps heatmap: pick your Google profile and type “commercial roofing” as the search, and in a few minutes you’ll see your rank at 49 points around your office.