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Etobicoke Commercial & Industrial Flat Roofing
✓ Rexdale · South Etobicoke · Northwest Etobicoke · ✓ Our shop is on Queens Plate Drive · ✓ PVC, SBS & BUR — tear-off to deck · ✓ Commercial & industrial only since 1977
Flat Roofing Etobicoke: Repair, Maintenance, and the Third-Roof Problem
Know how many roofs you're really carrying, and how wet they are, before anyone puts a price on the next one.
50 years · Founded 1977 | 4.8 on Google | Licensed, insured · WSIB covered | Free spring & fall inspection | Our shop is in Etobicoke
Three Employment Areas, and All of Them Have Some Age On Them
Etobicoke carries three of Toronto's twenty-three designated Areas of Employment. Rexdale-Airport is the big one — roughly 1,024 hectares bounded by Highways 401 and 427 to the south and west, Islington Avenue to the east, and Rexdale Boulevard to the north, holding about 1,600 businesses and close to 27 million square feet of rentable industrial space. South Etobicoke runs a similar job count and has been growing; the City's employment survey has it up from 39,400 jobs to 44,360 over the last four years. Northwest Etobicoke is smaller and has been going the other way.
That's the map. The part that matters to a roof is the date.
The City's own planning report puts it plainly: the Rexdale-Airport lands were largely developed through the 1960s and 1970s, and even the newer buildings there carry clear ceiling heights of only sixteen to twenty feet. Low clear height is the giveaway of that era. If your building has it, the flat roof deck under you was poured or laid somewhere around the time the 427 was being finished.
Which means almost nothing on it is original.
A roofer from up the road, not across the city.
227 Queens Plate Dr
That's our shop, not a mailing address. The trucks head out from Etobicoke every morning.
Since 1984
Luis Amaral joined as a foreman that year and still runs crews on roofs like yours.
4.8 on Google
What Google reviewers rate us. Two of their reviews are below, word for word.
Etobicoke · Aug 2024
The last job we closed here. The photos are up in our project gallery.
How Many Flat Roofs Are Actually on Your Roof?
Ask a property manager in Rexdale how old the flat roof is and you'll usually get the date of the last work order. That's not the age of the roof. That's the age of the most recent layer.
A building that went up in 1968 has had somewhere between forty and fifty-five years of roofing decisions made on it, usually by different owners, usually under budget pressure, and usually in a hurry. The pattern repeats across the whole district. Original four-layer built-up asphalt goes on at construction. Twenty-odd years later it starts leaking at the laps, and rather than tear it off, somebody recovers it — new insulation, new membrane, straight over the old one, because a recover is cheaper on the day and doesn't need a dumpster. Another twenty years and that one fails too.
So what you're standing on is often two membranes, sometimes three, with the insulation from each era sandwiched between them.
Here's why that matters, and it isn't aesthetics. Every one of those old layers is still absorbing water. When the top membrane splits, the water doesn't stop at the layer below — it gets into the old insulation and stays, because there's nowhere for it to dry to. A saturated board holds that moisture through every freeze the winter has, and each cycle breaks the board down a little further. You end up with a flat roof assembly that is heavier than the drawings say, colder than the R-value on paper, and structurally softer than anyone has checked.
The weight is the part people miss. Wet insulation is dramatically heavier than dry, and it's sitting on a deck that was designed in the sixties for the roof that was originally specified — not for that roof plus two more. It's worth knowing the roof's remaining load headroom before anyone adds a rooftop unit, a screen, or a solar array to it.
And none of it announces itself. Nothing is torn, nothing is pooling, nothing has come through a ceiling tile yet. Walk the field and you'll read it as a tired roof with life in it. The failure is four inches down inside the assembly, and no amount of walking around on top will find it.
That's why we don't quote these buildings off a visual inspection. Crown runs a thermal survey of the field in the late evening, when the temperature gap between wet insulation and dry is at its widest and the saturated areas light up against the cold deck. Then we cut cores to confirm what the scan says. Two or three holes in a flat roof you're about to replace is not damage — it's the only way to find out how many roofs you bought with the building.
What the Cores Come Back With
Most of what we pull out of an Etobicoke core barrel falls into one of three stories, and which one you are in decides whether this is a repair, a partial job, or the whole field.
The first is the good one. Two layers, the upper membrane tired but the lower assembly dry, deck sound. That one gets a targeted repair of the wet area and a maintenance plan, and it has years left. We say so, and we've walked away from full replacements on that basis more than once.
The second is the common one. Saturated insulation through a defined region — usually downslope of a drain that has been slow for years, or around a unit that was set on the roof after the fact and flashed by whoever installed the unit rather than by a roofer. The field is fine. The wet zone is not, and it's spreading laterally because water tracks sideways through wet board far more readily than it drips through a deck.
The third is the one nobody wants. Three assemblies, water in all of them, and a steel deck that has been wet long enough to lose section. On a sixties building where the deck was never re-coated, that's a structural conversation, not a roofing one, and we bring an engineer into it rather than quoting around it.
What we won't do is guess between them. The difference between story one and story three is roughly an order of magnitude in cost, and it is not visible from the parking lot or from a drone photo. It's visible from a core.
When a Repair Is the Right Answer, and When Replacement Is
Most of what we are called out to in Etobicoke starts as a leak, and most leaks do not mean the roof is finished. That distinction is where the money is, so it is worth being plain about how we decide.
A targeted flat roof repair makes sense when the assembly around the failure is dry, the deck is sound, and the cause is something we can point at — a split at a lap, a curb somebody flashed badly, a drain that has been slow for three winters. On a building like that we do the repair, document it, and leave the rest of the flat roof alone. Repairs of that kind routinely buy another five or ten years on a roof that a replacement quote would have written off entirely.
It stops being the right answer at a fairly clear point. When the wet region has spread through the insulation, when there are three assemblies stacked with water in all of them, or when the same two square metres have already been patched twice, further repairs are just rent — and each round of repairs costs more than the last, because the assembly underneath keeps getting wetter while you pay for them. A full roof replacement costs more on the day and considerably less across the decade that follows.
The awkward middle is where most Etobicoke buildings actually sit: a defined wet area, and a field that is still perfectly serviceable. There the honest answer is neither — replace the saturated section down to deck, correct whatever caused it, and put the remainder on a schedule with a date to look again.
What we will not do is quote a tear-off because it is easier to sell than a repair. The same crews do both, and a company does not last fifty years in this trade by replacing what could have been repaired.
Before you call: what owners round here ask first
Won't the cores damage my roof?
They're small, and on a building this old they're the only honest way to read the layers. Skip them and you're pricing a guess.
We've got tenants working underneath.
Our health and safety program is written for occupied, operating buildings, so the businesses below keep going while we're up top.
I don't want to be talked into a tear-off.
Fair enough. When the lower assembly is dry we recommend a repair and a maintenance plan instead, and we've turned down full replacements on exactly that basis.
What Goes Back On a Rexdale Warehouse — and What We Won't
Once the old assembly is off — and it does come off; we don't recover, anywhere, ever — the question is what belongs on that specific Etobicoke building.
PVC single-ply is the usual answer on a warehouse or distribution roof with a clean interior and a lot of open field. It's dimensionally stable, it handles grease and oils that most single-plies don't, and ours carries material warranties up to twenty years. On a wide Rexdale floorplate with few penetrations, it's fast to install and it's the cheapest square footage to maintain over a twenty-year life.
Concrete deck, constant service traffic, equipment everywhere you step — that's a fair description of the older multi-tenant stock along Carlingview and Attwell, and on those buildings we usually spec SBS modified bitumen instead. It goes down as two torch-welded layers, so there is a second line of defence built into the assembly rather than promised by a warranty, and it shrugs off the boots and dropped fasteners that come with a busy roof. SBS is one we install ourselves.
Built-up roofing hasn't gone away either. On the older plants, where an owner would rather rebuild the mass and multi-layer redundancy they already trust than move to one sheet, hot-asphalt BUR is still the right call. We lay it hot, layer over layer, and stand behind the workmanship for fifteen years.
Two things we don't do. We don't install TPO or EPDM — we service both on buildings that already have them, but the sheets we tear off exhaust-heavy and older industrial buildings are a large part of why they aren't in our install catalogue. And we don't leave the old roof in place. On an Etobicoke building with two assemblies already stacked, recovering a third time buries the exact thing you're paying to remove.
If you want the comparison in plain terms before you decide, read the honest comparison first — and the membrane systems we actually install are all listed with what each is good for.
The Crown Layer Count
The short version of everything above, in the order it actually happens on your roof.
1. Evening thermal pass
We scan the field late in the day, when wet insulation stands out against a cold deck.
You see where the water is, not just where it dripped.
2. Cut and count
A few cores show how many membranes are stacked up there and which layers are holding water.
You know what you actually bought with the building.
3. Name the story
Dry underneath, a defined wet zone, or wet right down to a tired deck: we tell you which one, in a written report.
Repair, part-replace or full field, decided on evidence.
4. Back to the deck
Whatever comes off goes right down to the deck, then PVC, SBS or BUR is chosen for that building.
No third roof buried over the first two.
Commercial Flat Roofing Is the Whole Business
A short list, because the scope of our roofing services is part of the argument.
We do flat roofing on industrial and commercial buildings. Our services run to tear-offs, repair, infrared moisture surveys, planned maintenance, emergency call-outs, and the detailing around rooftop equipment. That is the full list of services, and it has not changed since 1977.
Here is the other half of it. We do not do eavestrough or gutter work. We do not replace skylights. We do not do residential, we do not do shingles, and we will not send a crew to a house. Phone us about an eavestrough on a plaza off Kipling and we will give you the name of somebody who does that work properly, because it is not going to be us.
That matters more than it sounds. The flat roofs on Etobicoke's employment lands are large, old and layered, and reading one correctly is a specialist job rather than a line item on a general roofer's list of services. Flat roofing on this stock is its own trade. A contractor who does eavestroughs on Monday and a warehouse flat roof on Tuesday is not going to core your assembly before quoting it.
Fifty years on commercial flat roofing, in the City of Toronto, on this kind of building. That is the whole qualification on offer, and it is the only one that matters here.
The Maintenance Programme That Stops You Needing Us
The cheapest work anybody does on a roof is the work that stops a small thing becoming a tear-off, and on Etobicoke's older stock it is the single highest-return line in a building budget.
A planned maintenance programme is not complicated. Twice a year somebody competent walks the whole field, clears the drains and sumps, checks every curb and termination, looks at the sealant at transitions, and photographs anything that has moved since the last visit. Small repairs get done on the spot. Bigger repairs get quoted before they become urgent rather than during a storm.
What that buys is time, and quite a lot of it. Published work on service life consistently associates neglected and heavily trafficked roofs with materially shorter lives than maintained ones. Our own experience on Etobicoke buildings matches it — the ones that reach the far end of their expected life are almost always those somebody looked at every spring and autumn.
It also changes the conversation when the day does eventually arrive. An owner with six years of maintenance records and photographs knows what happened to that roof and when. An owner without them is taking a contractor's word for it, which is an expensive position to negotiate from.
Two specific things we would ask you to do between visits, neither of which needs a roofer. Keep the drains clear after autumn leaf fall. And insist that any trade going onto the roof — mechanical, telecom, window cleaning — signs in, so that when a new leak appears you know who was up there and when.
Our maintenance services are sold as a programme rather than a call-out, because roofs do not fail on a schedule that suits anybody's invoicing.
What to Do the Morning It Starts Leaking
Call early, and do three things before anybody arrives.
Move what is underneath. Water tracks sideways through a wet assembly, so the drip you can see is rarely above the thing it is going to damage next — clear a wider area than looks necessary. Photograph the ceiling and the floor before the buckets go down, because that record matters if there is an insurance conversation later.
Then, if it is safe to do so, get somebody up to clear the drains. A surprising share of the emergency repairs we run out to in Etobicoke turn out to be a blocked drain rather than a failed membrane, and clearing one takes minutes.
What we do when we arrive is stop the water and nothing else. Emergency repairs are meant to be temporary, and we are straight about that: we make it watertight, photograph what we found, and come back in daylight to work out why. Roofers who try to diagnose a flat roof at two in the morning in the rain are guessing, and the repair that follows a guess usually has to be done twice.
The line is answered around the clock, right across Toronto — but the honest advice is that the cheapest emergency is the one the autumn inspection prevented.
Etobicoke First, Then the Rest of Toronto and the GTA
Etobicoke is where we are based and where we do most of our work, but it is not a boundary.
From the yard on Queens Plate Drive our crews cover the western half of the city comfortably — Etobicoke, North York, the downtown core, and across to Scarborough when the work warrants it. West of the city we are regularly in Mississauga, Brampton and Oakville. North, we work through Vaughan and Markham. East, out to Pickering and Oshawa. The same crews and the same standards travel; only the drive changes.
What does not travel is the type of building. Flat roofing for industrial and commercial buildings, right across the GTA, and nothing else — which means the roofers who arrive at a plaza in Etobicoke are the same people who were on a distribution roof in Mississauga the week before, reading the same assemblies and cutting the same cores.
The practical consequence for an Etobicoke owner is response time. Being ten minutes from most of the employment lands means an emergency call here gets a truck faster than it would from a contractor based across Toronto — and on a roof that has just opened up in February, that difference is measured in ceiling tiles and stock, not in convenience.
If your portfolio spans several of those cities, say so at the first visit. We would rather plan the roofing services across all of them than quote them one at a time.
We're Ten Minutes Away, and the Work Is on the Board
Fifty years is a long time to only do one thing. Brian Sharp started the company in 1977; Joe Ferrier is President now. Luis Amaral came on as a roofing foreman in 1984 and is still running crews, which means the man who may walk your building has been doing it here since before most of these assemblies were last touched.
Our shop is at 227 Queens Plate Drive, in Etobicoke. That isn't a mailing address in a service-area list — it's the yard the trucks leave from, and for most of Etobicoke's employment lands it's a ten-minute drive rather than a dispatch from the other side of the city. On an emergency call that's the whole difference.
The last Etobicoke job we closed was August 2024. It's posted like the rest of them: pictures taken on the roof, nothing written underneath. The jobs we've finished nearby are listed by city and month if you want to see the pattern. Phone us and we'll walk you through that one — the building, the assembly we took off, the system that replaced it — and if it's near you, we'll take you up on it.
What Customers Actually Wrote in Their Reviews
Our business in Aurora had several leaks in the roof to our shop. Crown Roofing was amazing to deal with. Their worker Arvin was such a great guy and was really thorough in explaining where all the leaks were. He took photos to show us where the leaks were coming from. They also found a forth leak and fixed it in good faith without billing us. I can not express just how much we loved working with Arvin.
Amanda Helps · Google review
I waited for all seasons before giving this review as I wanted to give a transparent and accurate review. I received multiple quotes and decided to use them to replace the roof on our building.
Susan Mahabir · Google review
Rated 4.8 on Google.
Permits, the Green Roof Bylaw, and Why We Never Recover
Do I need a building permit to replace a commercial roof here?
Usually not, and the City is specific about it: a permit is not required for replacing existing roofing material provided no structural work is required. The qualifier is where commercial jobs land. If we're replacing deck, cutting new openings, setting new curbs, or changing the assembly in a way that alters the structure, that's structural and it needs a permit — and on the sixties buildings around Rexdale, deck repair turns up more often than owners expect. We confirm it against your actual scope before we quote rather than quoting a general rule, and where a permit is needed we prepare and file it.
Does the green roof bylaw affect a re-roof here?
Not a straight replacement, no. The green roof bylaw bites on new building permit applications for buildings of 2,000 square metres of gross floor area or more — so it's an issue when you're building or adding, not when you're re-roofing what's already there. Worth knowing if an addition is on your capital plan: industrial buildings get an alternative to a green roof, which is cool roofing materials across the full available roof area plus stormwater compliance. That's a spec decision best made before the drawings are done, not after.
You're based in Etobicoke. Does that actually change anything for me?
On a scheduled replacement, not much — any competent roofer can get to Etobicoke. On everything else it changes a lot. Our yard is on Queens Plate Drive, so for most of the employment lands we're a short drive rather than a cross-city dispatch, and that shows up in emergency response, in how quickly we can get someone up to look at something before it becomes a claim, and in our willingness to send a foreman out for a twenty-minute look that isn't going to turn into a job. We also know this building stock, because it's been our own backyard for fifty years.
My roof has already been recovered once. Can you just add another layer?
No — and this is the one thing we won't negotiate on. Every replacement we do is a full tear-off to deck. Recovering a second time is cheaper on the invoice and more expensive on the building: it seals wet insulation into the assembly where it can never dry, adds load to a deck designed for one roof, and leaves you with no reliable way to inspect what's happening underneath. It also makes the next replacement worse and more expensive than this one. If the assembly is genuinely dry and the failure is local, we'll say so and do a targeted repair, and we'll keep it under a maintenance agreement rather than sell you a roof you don't need yet.
Get a Straight Read on Your Flat Roof
If your building went up when the 427 did and nobody can tell you how many roofs are on it, that's the question to answer first. Not the price — the number of layers, how wet they are, and whether the deck is still what the drawings say it is.
Call (416) 744-7788 or email info@crownroofing.ca. We'll scan the flat roof, core it and come back with a number. Sometimes that number is a replacement. Often enough it's a repair and a date to look at it again, and we'll tell you that just as readily.
Crown Industrial Roofing · 227 Queens Plate Dr Unit #3, Etobicoke, ON M9W 6Z7
Want proof of insurance and WSIB coverage with the quote? Ask, and the certificates come with it.
✓ Free inspection every spring & fall · ✓ Licensed · general liability insurance · WSIB · ✓ Safety-certified crews · ✓ Manufacturer-backed warranties on materials + a workmanship warranty of up to 15 years