The roof repair scene in Sydney is forever changing – so we have to update continuously.

Do roofers bet on the weather?

In Sydney (and the rest of Australia), anyone can make bets on the weather using their favourite bookmaker. So, what do they use for their ‘form guide’?
I bet most of they will use the ‘BOM’ (Bureau Of Meteorology). It is the organisation with the most weather data for Australia.

The BOM just did a ‘dirt’ on us this past week. It told us that rainy days were the norm. Instead of rain, we got sunny days. Our trust on the BOM just went down a few notches. We had bet on doing only a little bit of roof repair work and steeled ourselves for a flood of bookings for roof leaks.

We just lost our bets.

But what are our other choices? When next week comes around, we will log back into the BOM weather app and make our bets again. Suckers for punishment.

How does the new roof repair booking calendar work?

The BOM was ‘spot on’ last February. It warned us of a large rain event and it arrived as forecasted.
I was not ready for it.

This website got hit with so many roof repair enquiries through the contact form – that to this day, there is still about 100 enquiries that I have not been able to respond to. This is a massive failure on our system. Throughout last year, we struggled to get on top of the roofing enquiries. We never succeeded.

But we did build on our roof inspection capacity. We now have two additional roofers trained up to look at leaking roofs with expert eyes. Training up Geoff and Mason for roof inspection work has more than doubled our capacity.
And we have to put new systems in place make this possible.

That is why we have introduced our new calendar booking system. It automates the insertion of your booking into our roof inspection calendar – making sure that you are not left out. You can now go into the calendar and find a time slot that suits you and make a firm roof inspection booking. Our internal allocation system then books in the most appropriate roof inspector for you.

The old contact form is still available for certain circumstances. You will be booked manually once we make contact with you.

Is our new roof inspection booking system an improvement?

It has been a week, and the majority of our potential clients are using the booking calendar.

A couple have used the ‘old’ contact form. And we even have a couple of people directly email us using the ‘info’ email.

If you have made a booking and want to give us some feedback, make a comment on the bottom of this page.

If you want to try out the new roof inspection booking system, just click on this link.

Bluescope has a monopoly on steel roofing products in Australia, and they are just about to jack up their prices. That means that every business downstream of the Bluescope steel mill will need to update (raise) their prices.

We order a lot of our zincalume and colorbond roofing materials from Stramit and they have advised of a 4.5% price increase on colorbond and a 9% increase in zincalume products.

What does that mean for homeowners who have roofing work to do?

We have a lot of roof repair and roof replacement work booked in already. These clients are locked into our currently quoted pricing. These clients are the lucky ones. They will get their roof work done at the current price.
We are quoting for work at the moment and all quotes accepted before March 1st will be at the current price structure.
From 1st March, our pricing program will be based on the new increased prices.
That means all work quoted or accepted from March will be at the more expensive rate.

So, if you are on the verge of booking in some roof repair or roof replacement work, you have a couple of weeks to save yourself some money.

Back to our difficult roof repair jobs again:

The inner west and those difficult roof repair jobs are what we are used to.

Back with harnesses and long ladders….

The inner west of Sydney has high terrace roofs, difficult site access and even solar panels. It makes our roof repair work all the more challenging

The ultimate roof repair checklist

We have also tidied up our roof repair checklists and combined it into one ultimate roof repair checklist for use by homeowners and roof repairers.

Checklists make life easier. If your roof has developed a leak, use this checklist to get you out of trouble.

But reality says that we have to do meaningful work for most of our lives.

So, we are dusting ourselves off to re-boot 2021.

We are luck with the weather this week and after doing some tidy up work today, my guys will be replacing a concrete tiled roof with a colorbond roof for the rest of this week.

I have done a bit of tidy up work on this website during my holidays – so much of the functionality of this new website is good.

There is still a bit more content and polishing up to do over the next few weeks.

I  tried to push this new website to LIVE and it kept failing. So I had to spend all night doing the update on a live site. Had to keep going because the site was live.

Then early Wednesday morning we drove down to Thredbo to do a family trip for a few days. Checked this website this morning and most of it was working.

The website is built ‘Mobile-first’ and I checked it on Google Page Speed Insights this morning.

It scored 98! YES!

From May 2021, Google will start insisting that websites load fast and have good vitals. This is a good start in getting ready.

Why do things have to change?

The whole extended family took the trek to the top of Mt Kosciuszko today. 14 degrees and sunny when we took the chairlift at 9.30am. And the sun drifted in and out of the clouds as we started walking.

We had packed for the forecasted ‘mixed’ weather – so we could strip our layers as we got warmer with the effort and as the sun popped out. The temperature drops 5 degrees as soon as the sun is blocked.

We got to the top of the mountain around 12.15pm and the weather was beautiful. We gathered for a picnic and saw dark clouds roll in and out very quickly. We suspected that change was coming and made haste (after the queue for the summit monument photo) and started our return trip.

At the highest toilet in Australia (just at the base of the last climb section), it started to sprinkle. It was big drops. Then the ‘pings’ started as small hail stones bounced off the steel walkway.

We were glad that we had raingear in our backpacks that we could put on. That meant that while we were drenched outside, the inside stayed dry. And after 15 minutes, it all stopped. Our gear started to dry up as we made our way back to the chairlift.

When we got off the panoramic chair ride down the mountain, the operators started telling the mountain bikers that the chairlift was going to be closing due to the oncoming weather. It was ‘Last ride” time.

It took us 10 minutes to walk back to our lodge and the rain started to pelt down a couple of minutes after that. We all started the day prepared for the changing conditions – and when it happened, we were able to take it in our stride.

Unconsciously, Change is what people crave for.

My wife was hooked on her news feed. Victoria was going to lock down its borders on New years day to ‘us people’ from NSW. They did not want our strain of COVID19.

One of our sons had come down from Townsville to the ACT. Was he going to pack up soon before Queensland closed its border to ACT residents? What is going to happen next? And this is what we are hooked on.

We are afraid of change but we dislike boredom a lot more. Life is a story, and it has to keep moving.

What is in store for the roof repair industry in 2021?

Life is getting digital and COVID19 has accelerated the change in the acceptance of a new way of communicating. The roofing industry will follow this new way of life.

Everyone embraced the phone as their ‘face’ to the rest of the world. In this way, all our communications to our potential clients will need to be geared to cater for this device. People do not search for services on the computer very much now.

If they are hooked to watch ‘wide screen’ movies on the mobile screen, then the mobile is the ‘go-to’ device.

The Roofing Professionals Westside are now forced to cater for this change in search and communication usage – and we are going BIG on mobile and this thing that Google calls ‘Core Web Vitals’ (just another way of saying that people want websites to load fast and have good usability on their tiny screens).

That is why I went ‘sleepless’ in Sydney…

So, if you are reading this, it should be a good experience and you will not mind returning. We have planned for a lot more changes in the way that we operate this year… so pop in every now and then.

We are on the journey of redefining how roof repairs will be carried out in Sydney.

• It is the end of 2020 and I am in the middle of a website redesign.

• Mobile devices are outstripping desktop computers for internet use – so everything is now ‘small screen’ centric.

The speed of mobile data has a lot of catching up to do so, this new website is being re-designed to load fast on mobile devices. I am making my new website LIVE before all the finishing touches have been finalised. So, there will be some content missing in the early days – which will gradually get patched in from early 2021 All the best for 2021 and hope to see you if you intend to reach out for roof repair help