Hiring a Roofer in Inglewood: License, Deposit and Lien Checks
California caps a roofing deposit at $1,000 or 10%, whichever is less, and a C-39 roofer must carry workers' comp even with zero employees on payroll.
Ask for the license number before you ask for the price. Three minutes on the Contractors State License Board site tells you the classification, whether the license is active, whether the bond is in force, and whether workers' compensation is on file. For roofing, that last one is not optional the way it is for most trades.
C-39 and the workers' comp rule
Roofing in California is the C-39 classification. Unlike most specialty contractors, a C-39 must carry workers' compensation coverage even with zero employees. The board treats roofing as its highest-risk trade and will not renew the license without a current certificate or a valid self-insurance filing.
So I am a one-man operation, I am exempt is not something a legitimate C-39 says. It means the person is working under somebody else's license, working unlicensed, or holding a classification that does not cover the work. If a helper comes off your eave and no comp policy stands behind him, the claim goes looking for the next available policy, and yours is the one sitting there.
Every licensed contractor also carries a $25,000 bond, raised from $15,000 at the start of 2023. It is not insurance for you exactly, but it is a route to a claim, and a license showing a lapsed bond is telling you something before you have spent a dollar.
The deposit is capped by statute
On a home improvement contract in California, the down payment cannot exceed $1,000 or 10 percent of the contract price, whichever is less. Not whichever is more. On a $26,000 tear-off in Morningside Park, the legal maximum anyone can ask for up front is $1,000.
Payments after that have to track the work: a progress payment cannot exceed the value of labor performed plus materials actually delivered. Somebody wanting half the contract before a truck arrives is either funding another job with your money or has a cash-flow problem you are about to inherit.
This rule quietly separates companies. Plenty of otherwise competent outfits ask for 30 percent simply because nobody has ever pushed back on them. Push back.
Door knockers and the clock you did not know you had
After a windy stretch, crews walk these streets offering free inspections. Some of them are good. Some will be on a freeway to another county by spring.
If you signed at your kitchen table rather than at a place of business, that is a home solicitation contract and you can cancel it — until midnight of the third business day after receiving a signed and dated copy, or the fifth business day if the buyer is a senior citizen. For repair of a home damaged in a disaster, the window stretches to seven business days. Those rights sit in Civil Code section 1689.6 and no contract clause overrides them.
The loudest warning sign of all is an offer to cover your deductible. There is no version of that which is not a contractor proposing to inflate the claim submitted to your insurer, and the name on the claim form is yours rather than his.
Do not let the permit go in your name
The contractor pulls it. When a homeowner signs as owner-builder, the party the city holds responsible for the work is the homeowner — the inspection, the corrections, the liability five years later. It also strips away the recourse you would otherwise have through the state board, because on paper you hired labor rather than a contractor.
A roofer who asks you to pull the permit is very often a roofer who cannot.
The local step out-of-town crews forget
A tear-off produces an enormous amount of debris, and the city runs a Construction and Demolition Recycling Program. Covered projects have to divert at least 65 percent of that debris from landfill, or the state-mandated percentage if it happens to be higher, and the C&D application goes to Public Works on the third floor of City Hall.
The back end is what bites. Original recycling receipts have to come back with a final compliance disposal report once the work is finished. Miss it and the deposit is forfeited. Two questions before signing, then: who is posting that deposit, and who is filing the report with the receipts attached. If the answer is vague, assume nobody is, and assume the money at risk is yours.
You can pay in full and still get a lien
This astonishes homeowners every time. Suppliers and subcontractors on your job hold their own lien rights against your property, and those rights survive you paying the general contractor in full. If a roofer cashes your check and never pays the yard that delivered the material, the yard can record a mechanics lien against your house.
You will usually get warning. Subcontractors and material suppliers serve a preliminary notice within twenty days of first furnishing labor or material, and it lands in the mailbox looking alarming. It is not a threat. It is the paperwork functioning as designed, and it tells you precisely who has a potential claim against the property.
The defense is dull and effective. Take an unconditional lien release from the contractor with each payment, and if a preliminary notice named a company you have never heard of, get a release from them too before the final check goes out.
What a real bid looks like
- License number printed on the document, not merely a logo and a cell phone number.
- Scope broken into layers — tear-off to sheathing or recover, underlayment type, ventilation, flashing at each penetration, and what happens if the deck underneath turns out to be bad.
- A price per sheet for deck replacement, agreed in advance. Every old roof has some. A bid pretending otherwise is a change order waiting to happen.
- Start and completion dates, plus a payment schedule tied to stages of the work.
- Manufacturer warranty and labor warranty stated separately, because they are different things, and one of them depends on the company still existing in eight years.
Three bids is the right number. The cheapest is usually cheap for a reason that lives in the deck-replacement line or the permit line. The highest is not automatically the best either. Make all three price the identical scope on paper, or you are comparing nothing at all.
We lose jobs to outfits that take a $6,000 deposit. Some of those homeowners ring back months later, by which point there is a lien on the property and still no roof. Ask us for a written estimate and check our license number against the state records before you commit to anybody. If you are outside the city, we work Lawndale and Gardena on the same terms.