The residential roofing market continued to thrive in 2024 as roofing contractors benefitted from a combination of devastating extreme weather events, increased demand in specialty projects, and enhancements in efficiency from lead generation and marketing to sales and installations. There are, of course, a host of challenges that remain.

RC followed up last year’s inaugural survey of homeowners across the country with another set of questions aimed at gaining insights into the rapidly changing home roofing and restoration market as part of the 2025 State of the Industry Report. The questions again focused on homeowner expectations, service delivery,  technology and sales, and were intended to gather information that can better equip roofing contractors in any market with more tools to make an impact.

Join RC staff in a presentation on the full survey’s findings with RC’s research partners from ROOFLE from 11:15 a.m.–12 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 20 on the show floor of the 2025 International Roofing Expo at the Henry B. González Convention Center in San Antonio.

A report on the full survey will appear in a future edition of RC. In the meantime, here are five highlights roofing contractors will want to learn more about from the survey.

• Asphalt in Action: Nearly 60% of homeowners surveyed said they currently have asphalt shingles on their roofs.
• High Expectations: A vast majority of residential roofing contractors (72%) indicated they expect sales volume to increase this year, and even more (77%) anticipate roofing sales to increase over the next three years.
• Old-Fashioned Referrals: Homeowners said word-of-mouth is the top method of finding roofing contractors (79%), followed by online search engines (62%) and repeat business with contractors they know (54%).
• Online Reviews are Still Really Important: A strong majority of homeowners (67%) said online reviews are either extremely important or very important, compared to just 5% of homeowners who don’t find them important. Roughly 76% of contractors indicated they feature online reviews on their websites, and about 13% said they don’t.
• Is the Price Right? More than three-quarters of homeowners (78%) indicated they’re more likely to call a roofing contractor that made pricing transparent on their company website. Conversely, about the same amount (76%) of contractors said they don’t feature pricing online.

Research partners from ROOFLE will also use the data points to provide insights into how homeowners find and choose roofing contractors, the importance of word-of-mouth recommendations and online reviews, and other homeowner preferences.

In addition to reputation and experience, they’ll break down the responses in ways that highlight the generational differences in demand for contractor transparency, pricing, and communication methods.

Among the goals of the research is to offer a comprehensive overview of homeowner-contractor dynamics in roofing projects. 

As we saw last year, there are areas where roofing contractors and homeowners are in line when it comes to their expectations. But there are places where they disconnect, and we look forward to diving into some of that research,” said RC Publisher Jill Bloom.

WHAT YOU WILL GET:

• A better understanding of homeowner expectations for residential roofing contractors regarding the overall experience of purchasing a roof 
• Data-driven insight into where those expectations align with roofing contractors — and where they don’t 
• Market insight related to current and future trends in residential roofing 
• Exclusive viewpoints into current and future growth opportunities for contractors
• Understanding what factors influence the contractor-selection process
• Ideas to improve customer communication and operational efficiency that grow profits.