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Find out what your warranty really covers, and what's actually failing up there, before anybody quotes you a new roof.
50 years on flat roofs · Founded 1977 | 4.8 on Google | Licensed & fully insured · WSIB covered | Free spring & fall inspection
Most of Vaughan Was Farmland Within Living Memory
Vaughan is the newest large industrial economy in the GTA, and the dates matter for what follows.
Concord industrialised first, after Highway 400 opened in 1951, with the real build-out arriving through the 1970s and into the 1980s. The much larger wave came later. In 2002 an Official Plan amendment designated the lands east of Highway 50 for employment use, and the southern portion of that became the Vaughan Enterprise Zone — today around 1,668 hectares, over 560 businesses and more than 18,200 workers, with the City reporting close to a hundred million square feet of industrial inventory.
That makes Vaughan the fourth largest industrial market in the GTA and, by the City's own accounting, more than a third of all employment in York Region.
It also means a very large share of Vaughan's roofs went on between roughly 2002 and 2015.
Which is exactly the age at which a low-slope commercial membrane starts telling you the truth about how it was installed. Published durability studies put average service life for common systems somewhere in the mid-teens to low twenties of years, and they disagree with each other enough that no one should treat any single number as a promise. A roof reaching fifteen is not automatically finished — but it is old enough that whatever was done wrong at the start has now had time to show.
Before we get into warranties, here's who's talking.
1977 · Brian Sharp started Crown that year. Fifty years on, flat roofs are still the only thing we do.
4.8 on Google · That's our rating. A couple of the reviews are further down, unedited.
Woodbridge · Sept 2024 · The most recent roof we've finished in this city, photographed for our projects page.
Our own crews · No brokered labour on your roof. Every crew is on our own payroll.
The Vaughan Coverage You Have Is Probably Not the One You Think You Have
Almost every owner we meet in the Enterprise Zone believes the roof is still covered. Most of them are right, and most of them are still going to pay for the repair. The reason is a distinction nobody explained when the building was new.
There are two different things called a roof warranty, and they cover opposite halves of the problem.
A manufacturer's material warranty covers the membrane itself against manufacturing defects. That is all it does. Read one and you will find language exactly that narrow — one major manufacturer's entry-level Canadian product guarantee covers "manufacturing defects only," while its higher tiers are the ones that extend to installation defects causing leaks. If your sheet is fine and your flashing detail is not, that kind of cover is silent.
A workmanship guarantee covers the installation — the work, the details, the terminations. It comes from the contractor, or from the manufacturer under a full-system guarantee where the installer was certified and the assembly was all one brand. Those system guarantees can be genuinely strong; the no-dollar-limit versions say in terms that there is no dollar limit on covered repairs, and they cover materials and workmanship together.
But read what voids them, because this is where the money goes.
Maintenance is the first one, and it catches nearly everybody. A major manufacturer's guarantee excludes failure to follow its scheduled maintenance checklists and states that the owner must perform regular inspections and maintenance and keep records of this work. No records, no claim. Another requires the owner to inspect at least every six months, preferably spring and fall. Almost no warehouse owner we meet is doing this, and almost none knows it was a condition.
Traffic is the second. One guarantee excludes traffic of any nature on the roof unless the building's own walkways are used — which, on a roof where HVAC and telecom contractors walk wherever they like, is a broad exclusion.
Alterations are the third, and the expensive modern one. Attachments made without written authorisation void coverage outright, and at least one major manufacturer names solar arrays explicitly in that clause. A rooftop solar project signed off by an energy contractor, on a roof still under guarantee, can quietly end the guarantee.
And then the design exclusion, which is the one that stings: warranties generally do not cover defects caused by improper design of the building itself. If the roof ponds because the deck deflects or the drains were undersized on the drawings, that is not a membrane defect, and it is not workmanship either. It is nobody's guarantee. A roof that ponds for days after rain is a design outcome, and design is the one thing nobody insured — which makes it the single most common cause of premature failure we see on young Vaughan buildings.
What Actually Goes Wrong on a Roof This Young
When a fifteen-year-old roof fails, the membrane is rarely worn out. Something else shortened its life.
Drainage is the biggest one. The roofing industry's own guidance treats water still standing forty-eight hours after rain as detrimental to the assembly, and a design that drains slowly was a design problem from day one — it simply took a decade to present as a leak. On big Vaughan floor plates the usual culprits are drains placed for the structure rather than for the water, insufficient slope, and deflection that developed after the building settled into use.
Traffic is next, and it is measurable. Published survey work found service-life reductions on the order of eighteen to twenty per cent on heavily trafficked roofs compared with roofs that saw minimal traffic. On a distribution building with a dozen rooftop units and a telecom installation, that traffic is constant and almost always unprotected.
Then detailing. Terminations, curbs, transitions at parapets and around penetrations — the field of a modern membrane is extremely reliable, and the failures cluster where the sheet stops being a sheet.
So the diagnosis has to separate those causes before anyone spends money, because they lead to completely different work. We start with a scan to find out how far it has gone, then cores, then a proper look at drainage behaviour and the condition of every detail. That report is also what you need if a coverage claim is worth making, because "the roof leaks" is not a claim and "the flashing at fourteen curbs was terminated short and here is where the water is" is.
Where coverage is live, documented maintenance from that point forward is what keeps it live.
The Crown Warranty-Gap Review
Here's the order we work in on a young Vaughan roof. Paperwork first, then the roof, then the money.
1. Read the paperwork
You email the guarantee ahead of the visit, and we go through the exclusions (maintenance records, roof traffic, unauthorised attachments) before we're on site.
You find out early whether a claim is even on the table.
2. Scan, then core
An infrared scan shows where the insulation has taken on water. Cores then confirm it and show how far down the water's got.
A map of the wet areas instead of a guess from the ceiling stains.
3. Watch where the water sits
We read the drainage: where it ponds, where the drains really are. That's the failure no guarantee picks up.
You learn whether this is a membrane problem or a design one.
4. Two prices, one page
Repair and full replacement go on the same written quote, with the scan attached.
You decide with both numbers in front of you, and you've got the report if a claim is worth making.
What We Do Differently on a Vaughan Flat Roofing Replacement
If the roof is genuinely at end of life, the job is to not repeat the first one.
That starts with drainage, before membrane selection. If water stood on the old roof, putting a new membrane over the same drainage arrangement buys you a newer version of the same failure. Tapered insulation, additional or relocated drains, and proper overflow provisions are the part of the quote worth scrutinising — and the part a cheap bid leaves out.
Then the system. Our PVC single-ply work suits most Vaughan distribution buildings: dimensionally stable, welded into a continuous sheet, and it handles the wide clean field these roofs have. Materials warranties run up to twenty years. Where the deck is concrete and service traffic is heavy, SBS modified bitumen's two torch-welded plies give redundancy where it counts, and we install that ourselves. Hot-asphalt built-up roofing still suits some of the older Concord stock, with our fifteen-year workmanship guarantee behind it.
Traffic protection goes in as part of the job, not as an upsell — walkway pad along the routes people actually use, from the hatch to every serviceable unit. It protects the roof and, on a guaranteed system, it protects the guarantee.
Two things we will not do. We do not install TPO or EPDM. We service both where a building already has them, but they are not what we put down. And we do not recover — replacing it properly means a tear-off to the deck, which on a building whose first roof failed early is the only way to find out whether the deck and the drainage were ever right.
One last thing worth saying plainly, because it is where we differ from a bid you will get elsewhere: if the field is sound and the problem is drainage and forty flashings, we will tell you that and quote that. A premature failure is not automatically a replacement, and selling you one when a repair would do is how a roofer gets one job from a building instead of thirty years of them.
Before you pick up the phone
Shouldn't the original installer be fixing this?
Maybe. If what you hold covers workmanship and its conditions were kept, they're the first call, and once we've read the document we'll tell you that straight.
Is this going to turn into a replacement pitch?
Not unless the cores say so. On a roof this age it's often drains and a handful of details, and the repair figure sits right next to the replacement one.
What does the first visit cost?
In spring or fall, the inspection is free. Anything past that comes as a written, line-item quote before any work starts.
Flat Roof Repair Vaughan Owners Call For, and When It Isn't Enough
The call we take most often from the Enterprise Zone is not about replacement at all. It is a flat roof repair request: one bay is wet, the tenant has put a bucket under it, and somebody wants a price by Friday.
That is a reasonable place to start, and on a building of this vintage it is very often the correct answer. A membrane that is fifteen years old and was installed properly has a sound field. What has usually gone is a set of details — a curb that a mechanical contractor reflashed badly, a pitch pocket that shrank away from the pipe, a lap that was welded cold on a January afternoon in 2009. Repairs to those, done once and done correctly, buy a decade.
What makes a flat roof repair fail is doing it blind. If nobody has established where the wet insulation actually ends, the patch goes on over saturated boards and the water simply reappears four metres away in March. So the sequence matters: scan, core, map, then price. We would rather spend an evening on the roof with a camera than sell you three rounds of repairs that each solve a symptom.
There is a second kind of flat roof repair that Vaughan buildings need more than most, and it has nothing to do with the membrane. It is drainage. Adding a drain, re-sloping a low area with tapered insulation, clearing and enlarging an overflow — these are repairs in the sense that they come in at a fraction of a replacement, and they remove the cause rather than the evidence. On a wide distribution floor plate they are frequently the highest-value work anyone can do on the building.
Replacement earns its place when the field itself has gone: when the cores come up saturated across a wide area, when the same flashing has been repaired three times, or when the assembly was built so far out of specification that no amount of local work changes the outcome. On those buildings a partial fix is money spent twice, and we will say so in writing rather than take the smaller job.
Either way the commercial decision belongs to you, and you should have both numbers. We quote flat roof repairs and full replacement side by side on the same document, with the scan attached, so you can see what each one buys and over what period. What you should not accept from anybody — us included — is a replacement price with no diagnostic work behind it.
Maintenance is the cheap end of the same conversation. Two inspections a year, debris cleared from the drains, every penetration photographed, and a written record kept — those services cost very little and they are also, on most guaranteed systems, a condition of the cover you already paid for.
Commercial Flat Roofers, and Nothing Else
It is worth being precise about what Crown is, because the word roofer covers a very wide range of businesses in this region.
We are commercial flat roofers. Industrial and institutional low-slope work — warehouses, distribution buildings, plants, schools, clinics. That is the entire scope of what we sell.
We do not do residential flat work and we are not the company for homeowners. We do not fit shingles, siding or eavestrough. We do not do skylight installation. We do not sell roof coatings as an alternative to doing the work properly, and we do not install TPO or EPDM, although we will service either where a building already carries one.
What we do instead is the whole assembly over a commercial building and every service that goes with it: survey and infrared scanning, flat roof repairs, planned maintenance, tear-off and removal, new construction work alongside a general contractor, and full replacement. One trade, done by our own people, since 1977. Flat roofing is not a division of this company. It is the company.
That narrowness is the product. Everybody on a Crown crew has spent their working life on flat roofs in Ontario, which is why our foremen can look at a twelve-year-old membrane and tell you from the weld pattern roughly how the original job was run. A roofing specialist who only ever works on this kind of building accumulates that. A generalist who spreads across four trades does not, through no fault of their own.
It also means there is nobody between you and the work. No brokered crews, no subcontracted removal, no sales office in another city. The people who quote your building are the people who do it, and the same commercial roofing crew will be back for the inspections afterwards.
Our Woodbridge and Vaughan Roof Repair Work, and Why We're Still Here
There is a reason a fifty-year-old roofing company talks this way about warranties. We have been in business since 1977 — Brian Sharp founded it, Joe Ferrier runs it now — and a firm that lasts that long in this trade does it by being the company an owner calls back, not the one that wins a bid.
Our most recent job in the area closed in September 2024 in Woodbridge, and the Woodbridge and Vaughan work is in the gallery with everything else, filed by city and month. Five photographs, taken on the roof, no commentary attached.
If you have a coverage document and a roof you are unsure about, the most useful hour you can spend is having somebody read the document and walk the roof on the same visit. Those two things together usually answer the question. Separately, they rarely do.
Send us the paperwork before we come. We would rather arrive having already read it.
Most of what we do in Vaughan is not dramatic. It is a survey, a set of flat roof repairs booked for a Tuesday, drains cleared before the autumn, and a replacement scheduled three years out because somebody looked early enough to plan it. Owners who run their buildings that way spend less on roofing over twenty years than owners who wait for the ceiling tile, and it is not close. The services that keep a roof alive are cheap. The ones that resurrect it are not.
Reviews From Owners We Work For
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.
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.
Warranties, Solar, Ponding and Premature Failure
Something is leaking now. Do you attend emergencies?
Yes, and there is a person on the line rather than an answering service that takes a message until Monday. On a commercial building the first visit is about stopping water reaching the tenancy below — containment, a watertight temporary repair, and photographs of what we found. The diagnosis follows in daylight with a scan, because a leak located at two in the morning is located at the ceiling, and the ceiling is almost never where the flat roof actually failed. Emergency flat roofing repairs and the permanent fix are two separate pieces of work and we price them separately, so you are never paying emergency rates for planned services.
Our roof is only fifteen years old. Shouldn't it still be under warranty?
Quite possibly it is, and that is worth establishing properly rather than assuming either way. Send us the document before we visit. What we are looking for is which of the two kinds it is — a materials guarantee covering the membrane against manufacturing defects, or a system guarantee that also covers the installation — and then what conditions sit on it. Maintenance records, roof traffic and unauthorised alterations are the three that most often disqualify an otherwise valid claim. Even where a claim is not available, knowing that before you negotiate a repair puts you in a much better position than finding out afterwards.
We're putting solar on the roof. Does that affect anything?
It can end your coverage, and this catches people regularly. At least one major membrane manufacturer voids coverage outright for attachments placed on the roof without its written authorisation, and names solar arrays specifically. Beyond the paperwork, the structural question is real — panels, racking, ballast and wind and snow loading all land on a deck that was designed before anyone considered them, and municipalities in Ontario generally require a structural review as part of the permit. The other consideration is timing: the City of Toronto's own guidance advises against putting solar on a roof more than about ten years old, and the logic is simple — you do not want to remove an array to replace the membrane underneath it. If anything added to the roof afterwards is on your plan, sequence the roof first.
Water sits on our roof after it rains. Is that actually a problem?
If it is still there two days later, yes. The roofing industry's own standard treats water remaining more than forty-eight hours after rain as detrimental to the assembly, and the reasons stack up: added load, accelerated membrane ageing, debris and growth collecting in the low spot, and a failure that goes unnoticed because the water hides it. It also tends to indicate a design or deflection issue rather than a membrane one, which matters because that distinction usually decides whether anyone's guarantee responds. Ponding is the single most common thing we find on Vaughan buildings under twenty-five years old, and it is fixable — with tapered insulation and drainage work, not with a new membrane over the same arrangement.
Does a warranty mean we don't have to maintain the roof?
It usually means the opposite. Major manufacturer guarantees commonly require the owner to inspect and maintain the roof on a schedule and to keep records of that work — one specifies inspection at least every six months, preferably spring and fall — and failure to do it is an explicit exclusion. So the document that feels like protection is in fact a maintenance obligation with a remedy attached. The practical version of this is unglamorous: get on the roof twice a year, keep the drains clear, photograph what you find, file it. If a claim ever matters, that file is the difference between a conversation and a denial.
Read the Document, Then Walk the Commercial Roof
If you own a building in the Enterprise Zone or Concord and the roof is somewhere between twelve and twenty-five years old, there are two things worth knowing before you spend anything: what your guarantee actually covers, and what is actually wrong up there.
Call (416) 744-7788 or email info@crownroofing.ca, and send the guarantee paperwork over ahead of the visit. We will read it, scan the roof, and tell you which of those two documents is going to pay for the work.
We work right across Vaughan — Concord, Woodbridge, Maple, Kleinburg and the Enterprise Zone east of Highway 50 — and the services are the same wherever the building sits: infrared survey, flat roof repairs, planned maintenance, tear-off and full replacement, and emergency attendance when a flat roof lets go overnight. If you manage several buildings, we will survey them together and give you one replacement schedule across the portfolio rather than a separate argument every spring.
A Vaughan roof that went on in 2006 is not automatically finished, and a building roofed in 2016 is not automatically fine. The only way to know which of those you own is to send somebody up with a scanner and a core cutter, and to read the drainage while they are up there. That visit is the cheapest part of the whole project and it is the one that decides what the rest of it comes to. It is also the visit that tells you whether you are looking at flat roof repairs this year and a replacement in six, or the other way round — and on a portfolio, knowing that across every commercial roof you own is worth more than any single quote.
Crown Industrial Roofing · 227 Queens Plate Dr Unit #3, Etobicoke, ON M9W 6Z7
Send the paperwork, book the walk. No obligation either way.
✓ Free spring & fall inspection
✓ Licensed · general liability insured · WSIB covered
✓ Manufacturer-backed warranties on materials, plus a workmanship warranty of up to 15 years, both in writing
✓ Insurance and safety certificates on request