Scarborough Commercial & Industrial Flat Roofing
Flat Roofing Scarborough, Where One Roof Now Covers Six Leases
✓ Golden Mile · Tapscott · Progress · Milliken · Steeles · ✓ Multi-tenant industrial a speciality · ✓ Leak mapped before it's quoted · ✓ Commercial & industrial only since 1977
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4.8 Star
Rating
Find where the water is really getting in — usually a unit or two over from the tenant who rang you — and get it on a drawing your landlord, tenants and board can all read.
Roofing since 1977 — 50 years in | Google rating 4.8 | Licensed · insured · WSIB | Spring/fall inspection: free
Built for One Tenant, Leased to Several
Scarborough grew faster than almost anywhere in the country. Its population went from 48,000 to 110,000 between 1950 and 1955, then tripled again by 1970, and the industry arrived with it — the 401 opened in 1956, and the munitions plant on Eglinton East had already pulled a workforce out this way during the war.
The former City of Scarborough zoned that industry into named employment districts, and the names are still in the by-law: Golden Mile, Tapscott, Progress, Milliken, Steeles. The Golden Mile is the one people know. Roughly 113 hectares between Victoria Park and Birchmount, it was built out after the war with large-scale manufacturing buildings along Eglinton, and by the 1990s much of that industry had already given way to large-format commercial.
What it left behind is the building type this page is about. Big, low, single-storey plants, put up for one company that needed all of it.
Almost none of them are leased that way now. The floor plate got divided — demising walls in, separate doors cut, separate meters, separate leases. The roof did not get divided. It is still one continuous membrane over all of it.
Before the method, here's who'd be up on your roof.
50 years
Commercial and industrial roofs since 1977, nothing else — and the crew on your membrane is on our payroll, not a sub's.
2 Scarborough jobs
Both from 2024, both in our gallery with roof-level photos the crew took themselves.
4.8 on Google
One reviewer's shop came to us with several leaks. We found one more they didn't know about and fixed it without billing them.
The Tenant Who Calls You Is Rarely the Tenant Under the Hole
A leak on a subdivided warehouse roof behaves in a way that makes everybody's first instinct wrong.
Rain gets in at one point — a split lap, a tired curb, a drain that has been slow for three winters. It does not then fall straight down. It lands on the insulation and travels sideways, following the slope of the deck and the direction of the flutes if the deck is steel, until it finds the first opening: a fastener, a joint, a seam in the vapour layer. That opening might be ten metres away. It might be thirty. It might be on the other side of a demising wall that was built years after the roof went on, and which the run-off neither knows nor cares about.
So unit 4 calls, and unit 4 has a wet ceiling, and unit 4 is quite reasonably annoyed. The roof over unit 4 is fine. The failure is above unit 6, where the tenant stores pallets and never looks up.
That single fact causes most of the money wasted on these buildings. Somebody sends a roofer, the roofer patches the area over the complaint, the invoice gets charged back to that unit's operating costs, and it rains again. Now there are two repairs, no diagnosis, and a tenant who believes the landlord doesn't fix things. We have been called in as the third contractor on roofs where the first two both did competent work in entirely the wrong place.
It gets worse where the units have different interiors. One bay is a dry warehouse; the next runs a paint line or a production kitchen or a wash bay. The humid bay drives moisture up into the same shared assembly, and in winter that moisture condenses inside the insulation rather than on anyone's ceiling. The tenant who reports the problem is downstream of a problem they are not generating.
The only way through it is to stop treating the roof as an extension of the floor plan below. We scan it as one surface. Scanning the entire roof in one pass after dark shows where the wet insulation actually is — not where the complaint came from — and the wet region almost never matches the lease lines drawn underneath it.
Then cores, to confirm the boundary and to find out how wet is wet. And only then a quote, because on a building like this the difference between the right repair and the obvious one is usually the difference between one visit and four.
We Map the Roof to the Units, Then Hand You Both
On a multi-tenant building we survey the roof as a single system and then lay the lease lines over the result, rather than the other way round.
That produces two drawings. The first is the roof: field condition, every penetration and curb, drain performance, the wet regions with their boundaries marked from the scan and confirmed by core. The second is the same drawing with the demising walls on it, so you can see which unit sits under which problem — and, more usefully, which units sit under nothing at all.
Property managers tend to find the second drawing more valuable than the first, because it settles arguments. When a tenant asks why their operating costs include roof work above a neighbour, there is a document that explains it. When a tenant insists the roof above them is failing, there is a scan that shows it isn't.
Most of what follows is targeted rather than total. Replace the saturated region and its cause, re-flash the curbs that are feeding it, correct the drains that made it worse. Repairs done properly on a building like this routinely buy another decade on a field that is otherwise sound, and we will say so when that's the case, because a 60,000 square foot tear-off that didn't need to happen is not a win for anybody.
Where the field genuinely is gone, the map still earns its keep — it tells us the phasing order, which is the difference between a job your tenants tolerate and one they complain about for a year.
The Crown Lease-Line Leak Map, Step by Step
1. Scan the whole roof after dark
One infrared pass over the entire membrane, not just the bay over the complaint. You see where the wet insulation sits, full stop.
2. Core the edge of the wet area
Cores confirm the boundary and tell us how deep it goes. That's where the guessing ends.
3. Lay your lease lines over it
Two drawings — the roof alone, then the roof with your demising walls on it. Which unit sits under the problem, and which don't, is right there on paper.
4. Repair, rebuild or tear off — in writing
Targeted repair, a sectional rebuild over one bay, or a full tear-off to the deck. You get our answer and the reason for it before anyone prices a thing.
Whose Responsibility Is It, Exactly?
This is the question that stalls more Scarborough roof work than money does, and it is worth being straight about: we're roofers, not lawyers, and the answer lives in your documents rather than in a general rule.
What we can tell you is how it usually sits. In a leased multi-tenant building, the roof is almost always the landlord's structure, with the cost flowing back to tenants through operating costs or CAM in whatever proportion the leases set out. That works fine for planned renewal and badly for emergency repairs, because the urgency and the approval sit with different people.
Condominium buildings are the harder case. Under Ontario's condominium framework the corporation is responsible for repairing the common elements and standard unit elements, and the owner for non-standard or decorative elements in their own unit — but whether your roof is a common element, and how much of it, is set by your declaration, not by a default. We have worked on Scarborough condos where the membrane was fully common and others where sections were tied to specific units. Read the declaration before the board votes on anything.
Two practical suggestions, from having watched this go both ways.
First, get the investigation done regardless of who ends up paying for the repair. A scan is a small cost and it converts an argument about blame into a document about facts. Boards and landlords both move faster once there's a map.
Second, if the building is heading for a full tear-off and replacement within a few years, start the reserve conversation now, with a real condition report rather than an age estimate. The systems we'd put back on — and what we actually install is a short list, all of it built for this kind of building — carry material warranties up to twenty years, and that timeline is a great deal easier to fund when it's planned than when a February storm sets the date for you.
Before you call — three things Scarborough property managers ask us first.
Do I need to know which unit it's coming from?
No, that part's on us. Tell us which tenant rang and where the ceiling's wet; we treat that as a clue, not an address.
Who ends up with the bill?
The lease decides that — we don't. What we hand over is the evidence: what failed, where, and whose unit it sits above.
What does it cost to get an answer?
Nothing for us to come and look, and nothing for the line-item quote. If the roof needs the infrared scan, that's priced on its own — a small number next to paying for a third repair in the wrong spot.
Flat Roof Repair, Installations and Commercial Flat Roofing Services
Once the map exists, the work divides into three and the prices are a long way apart.
Flat roof repair is the commonest and the cheapest. A split lap welded back, a curb re-flashe
d, a pitch pocket rebuilt, a drain sump re-pitched so it actually drains. On a subdivided building these repairs are worth doing properly because the alternative is the same repair again in a different place. What makes a flat roof repair hold is that it was aimed with a scan rather than a complaint.
Sectional rebuilding is the middle option and the one most owners in Scarborough are never offered. Where the scan shows a saturated region with a hard boundary and the rest of the field reads dry, we take off the wet section, rebuild the assembly there, correct whatever fed it, and tie the new membrane into the old with a proper transition. That is ordinary roofing, not a compromise, and it routinely defers a full tear-off by a decade.
Full tear-off is the third, and when a field is genuinely finished we say so and quote it. Every full job is a tear-off to the deck — no recovering, because on a building where the insulation has been wet you would be sealing the problem in.
New installations sit alongside all of that. Where a landlord is adding a bay or a general contractor is putting up a new building in Tapscott or Progress, the roofing goes on the same terms: tapered insulation designed for the drains you actually have, the perimeter detailed properly, and the whole thing photographed before anything covers it.
And underneath all three, the cheapest line item in commercial roofing: a maintenance visit twice a year, the drains cleared, the penetrations photographed, the file kept. On a multi-tenant building that file is also what stops the same argument recurring every spring.
Our Experts Don't Do Residential Flat Work — Here's the Whole List
Worth saying plainly, because it saves a call. Crown is a commercial roofing company and the list of what we take on is short.
We do low-slope commercial and institutional buildings: warehouses, plants, plazas, schools and clinics across Scarborough, the rest of Toronto and the GTA. Survey and infrared scanning, repair, sectional rebuilds and full tear-off, planned maintenance, and new installations alongside a general contractor.
We do not do houses. We do not fit shingles, siding or eavestrough. We do not sell skylight units, though the curb and flashing around an existing one is roofing and is ours. We do not install TPO or rubber membranes, although we will maintain either where a building already carries one. And we do not sell coatings as a way of avoiding a repair that needs doing.
Nothing is subcontracted. The roofing crew on your building is on our payroll and the same people come back for the inspections, which on a live multi-tenant site matters more than it sounds: tenants notice who is on their roof, and so do their insurers.
We have run this way from one yard in Toronto since 1977, and the narrowness is the point. A firm doing four trades is doing this one occasionally. We are doing it today, and we did it yesterday.
Two Scarborough Jobs on the Board, Both in 2024
Fifty years of commercial flat roofing, starting in 1977, and nothing else in that time — no residential division, no subcontracted crews, no seasonal hires learning on your building. Brian Sharp founded the company; Joe Ferrier is President.
Scarborough appears twice in our project gallery, June 2024 and April 2024, both posted with photographs taken off the roof by the crew who did the work. Both Scarborough jobs are in the gallery alongside everything else we have finished, listed by city and month.
There is a reason we post them plainly rather than writing them up. Anyone can produce a case study. A property manager deciding who to let onto a live building wants to see what our work looks like when nobody has styled it — the tear-off face at the end of a day, the detail around a curb, the finished field. That is what is up there.
If one of them is near your building, ask. We would rather show you a roof than send you a brochure.
What Customers Have Written About the Diagnosis
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.
Attribution, Phasing, Leases and Industrial Condos
A tenant is reporting a leak. How do you find it on a 60,000 square foot roof?
Not from inside, which is where most people start. We note where the water is showing, then ignore it as a location and treat it only as evidence that the roof has failed somewhere. The survey runs after dark across the whole field, because wet insulation gives up the day's heat more slowly than dry insulation and shows up clearly against it. Once the scan gives us a boundary we cut cores to confirm it and to see how deep the saturation goes. What you get back is a marked-up plan of the wet area and its cause — which is usually somewhere the complaint would never have sent us.
Who is responsible for the roof, us or the tenant?
Your lease decides that and we're not the right people to interpret it — but in the leased buildings we work on, the roof is nearly always the landlord's responsibility as part of the structure, with the cost recovered through operating costs or CAM on whatever formula the leases set. Tenants are usually responsible for anything they put on the roof themselves, which is where it gets interesting, because rooftop units installed for a specific tenant are a common source of leaks and are frequently nobody's clearly assigned problem. Our report identifies what failed and why, which is generally what the lease question turns on.
Can the work be phased so we only disrupt one unit at a time?
Yes, and on a multi-tenant building we plan it that way by default. We work in bays sized so the open tear-off face is always closed and watertight by the end of the same day, and we sequence those bays unit by unit so each tenant has a known window rather than an open-ended one. Access, crane or hoist placement and material staging get worked out against your tenants' loading times, because the fastest way to lose a tenant's goodwill is to block their shipping door without warning. Where one tenant genuinely cannot take any disruption, we schedule their section off-hours.
We're an industrial condominium. Does that change how this works?
It changes who decides, more than what gets done. Read your declaration first — it determines whether the roof is a common element and how much of it, and that varies between buildings rather than following a single rule. Practically, a condo board needs a defensible basis for a decision, so we scope the work as a condition report with a scan behind it rather than as a quote, which is something a board can actually vote on and a reserve fund study can be built from. Once a direction is agreed, keeping it under an ongoing maintenance program is far cheaper than the emergency repairs that tend to fill the years while a board is deliberating. If something fails in the meantime, our emergency line is answered around the clock.
Stop Paying for Repairs in the Wrong Place
If the same leak has been fixed twice and it is still coming back, the repairs were probably fine and the location was wrong. That is the normal failure mode on a subdivided warehouse roof, and it is fixable — but not by patching over another complaint.
Call (416) 744-7788 or email info@crownroofing.ca. We will scan the whole roof, core the wet areas, and hand you a plan with your unit lines drawn on it so you can see exactly what is failing and above whom.
We cover the whole of Scarborough — Golden Mile, Tapscott, Progress, Milliken and Steeles — and the rest of Toronto from one yard. A flat roof repair booked for a Tuesday, a sectional rebuild over one bay, a roof maintenance visit twice a year, or a full tear-off phased so the tenants keep trading. Same roofing crew on all of it.
If you manage several buildings across Scarborough and Toronto, have them surveyed together. One roofing schedule across the portfolio is easier to fund than four separate emergencies, and it lets you put the money where the scan says it is needed rather than where the loudest tenant is. That is the whole argument for doing a flat roof repair programme properly: on a subdivided building, roofing spend follows evidence or it follows complaints, and only one of those gets cheaper over time.
Send us the drawings if you have them and the lease plan if you can. We will bring the roof survey to the same meeting.
One last thing about roofing costs on this stock, because it surprises people. The open field of a flat roof is the cheap part. The expensive part is every interruption in it — curbs, drains, demising-wall upstands, the transitions where a later addition meets the original building. Two Scarborough warehouses of identical square footage can be a long way apart on price for that reason alone, and the scan is what tells you which one you own before anybody quotes a roof repair or a rebuild.
Crown Industrial Roofing · 227 Queens Plate Dr Unit #3, Etobicoke, ON M9W 6Z7
Request an Investigation
One scan, two drawings, and a straight answer about which unit sits under the problem.
The first look is free — inspection and line-item quote both. Licensed, insured for general liability, WSIB covered, with safety-certified crews; the paperwork goes to your landlord, property manager or board whenever they ask. Behind the membrane: manufacturer-backed warranties on materials, and a workmanship warranty of up to 15 years that's ours.