What would you guess the cost to replace the roof on a 500 square ft home would be?

Here is the house

Looks nice from the outside, and nice yard and area. Would be nice for just you and the hubby, you all don’t have 87 grand children living with you. 4 to 5 grand for roof replacement sounds kind of steep though. But keep us posted please.

I thought it was steep too. I have an official roofer who will take a look at it.

Sounds like a plan, maybe he can do it cheaper. Worth a shot.

We paid 17,000 for a reroof about 18 years ago. 1,800 square foot house but 2 story so roof about half that footage. I think that was the middle estimate.

Two years ago I paid 6,000 for a roof that is about 1,250 square feet.
Congratulations and good luck!!!

We won’t have insurance is the biggest problem. I don’t think our insurance agent would agree to insure it.

How many layers of old shingle are there? If there are two, you’ll have to strip it all off, replace the asphalt paper, and then reshingle.
Does the sheathing need to be replaced?
If there is only one layer of shingles, you need only to recover the roof with a new layer.

OH. yeah…if you have to strip it all down to sheathing, building code might require you to bring it up to code. It’s not a big deal, usually improved attic ventilation.

Right. I know all that. I’ve replaced roofs before…but I had insurance. This is out of pocket.

I just paid $13,600 for my roof the beginning of this year and I have 2,961 total square feet under roof. The living square feet is only 1920. I had to do a peel and stick layer of some sort beneath the shingles, because the code changed, your county might not require it. It was one of the lower bids, the highest was $16,000.

I would have guessed $3,000 – $4,000, but I am guessing it can vary widely from state to state. Plus, roofing materials have increased in price over the past year. I actually dragged my feet picking a color and by the time I was ready to sign everything I had to pay a few hundred more than I had been quoted a few months before.

Let us know what your roofer says.

We paid around 9k for 2k sq foot.

You do have to factor in any damage you may find being repaired, tear off, etc… For that price, it sounds like a good deal!!

Can you negotiate with the owner for him to pay half and you pay half? You may have already tried this though.

I thought the current owner is having the roof done with their insurance and the OP is just curious about the value of how much she came up in price.

I don’t really understand why insurance would pay for a new roof in any case unless the damage was the result of an insured peril. Usually, a new roof is just regular maintenance on a house. Which is not to say it can’t be part of the negotiations.

@janbb Honestly I was wondering the same thing. Insurance only pays out, usually reluctantly, if there is quantifiable damage, and then there’s still a small deductible usually.

I would make him do some tree trimming though, looks like old trees too close to the house to me. :)

It would be difficult to guess an amount required to replace a roof with all the variables I noted. No one here can do it. But, since you’ve done this all before, you knew that.

Hail damage will get you a new roof through insurance.

Out here the price of a new roof is a truly depressing revelation each and every time the necessity arises. 2 years ago it was time to replace our roof which had lasted 30 years. I tried to locate the roofer responsible for the last job. He had closed his business 15 years ago and died at age 95 some 3 years back. The first estimate we received was from an outfit with a stellar reputation recommended by a mechanical contractor friend I’ve known for decades. They went over the roof and gave us a video presentation and promised us a roof guaranteed to last 40 years, but they wanted $40,000 for the effort. That’s double the price of the house I grew up in, and twice what I anticipated as the worst possible expense. It seems no one works with tar on roofs here any longer. It’s apparently been outlawed as a process. We wound up with a contractor who replaced our roof for $17,000 with a warranty for 25 years.

Jesus Christ!

Here’s an additional FYI: If you’re planning on getting a home warranty, have a certified roofing inspector go over the roof. If you don’t, and there’s a problem down the road, the home warranty folks won’t accept the claim. This happened to an old landlord. The poor guy got screwed.

This means that the form a “house inspector” provides (such as the type who inspects houses before they sell), might not cut it with the home warranty folks. If they can avoid servicing a claim, they’ll certainly do it. If this is true of roofs, I wonder if it might be true of other parts of the house (certified electician, certified plumber, etc)? Perhaps this may vary from warranty company to warranty company, but it pays to read the fine print.

@Dutchess_III I think it sounds good! Even if your estimate of how much the roof would cost was off by $500—$1,000 you will be moving into a house with a new roof and the seller is taking care of it.

Seller refuses to take care of it.

@Dutchess_III How long has the property been on the market ? If it is months . . . . wait him out or negotiate the cost of roof repair into the price you pay.

Get a home inspection no matter what ! And make passing the inspection a requirement for sale.

He has another buyer and another a renter in the wings. Or so he says.
The house never made it to the market! Our realtor learned of it through the Realtor grapevine.

Oh, I misunderstood. I thought his insurance was taking care of the roof.

Buying a house right now is terrible. Bidding wars and so much stress. All price points it’s really bad. I put an offer on a house in TN and there were 37 offers.

I just had our roof replaced a few years ago. 1900 sqft house, $10k. Looking at the house you have in the picture, you could almost do that yourself.

I’d kill myself. So would Rick.