The Bid Was Lower. Then We Looked at Their Photos.

The Appointment

I was at a house this week and the homeowner already had another bid. It was lower than mine. That happens, and it is a fair thing to bring up, so I asked if I could see it.

The scope said two layers of felt paper. I asked him if he knew what that meant. He did not, which is normal. Nobody buys a roof often enough to know.

Then he said the thing that people always say, and he was not wrong to say it. The other company is rated really well. So I pulled up their website on my phone, mostly to see what they say about their underlayment.

Every photo on the site was generated by AI. Not one real roof. Not one real person on a roof.

I want to be careful here, because I am not in the business of trashing other roofers and I am not going to name them. Plenty of good companies compete with me and I lose jobs to them fairly. But I showed the homeowner what I was looking at, because he was about to hand somebody a lot of money based on it.

The work truck in one picture had lettering on the door that was not a word. Close to a real brand, letters in the wrong order. The dumpster in another picture was sitting on the front walkway, basically against the front door, at an angle no truck could ever have set it down. A crew member had a tool in his hand that does not exist.

He saw it himself in about fifteen seconds. I did not have to sell anything. He signed with us the same day, and I do not think that was because I am a better talker. He just wanted to see one real roof before he paid for one.

Why This Is Worth Two Minutes of Your Time

For most homeowners, photos are the only proof they ever actually look at. You are not going to climb up and inspect someone's finished work. You are not going to call the manufacturer. You look at the pictures, you read a few reviews, and you make a decision.

So if the pictures are not real, you are deciding on nothing. It does not automatically mean the company is bad at roofing. It means you have no evidence either way, and you thought you did.

Here is how to check, on any contractor, in about two minutes, on your phone, in your driveway.

Read the Words in the Picture

This is the fastest one and it catches most of them. AI still cannot spell reliably. Look at the truck doors, the yard signs, the street signs, the shingle wrappers, the bucket labels, the license number on the tailgate. If the lettering is almost a word, or the license number has too many digits, or the brand name on a bundle of shingles is a brand that does not exist, you have your answer.

Look for People, and Look at What They Are Doing

Real roofing photos have real crews in them, and real crews look like they have been working. Dusty. Mismatched shirts. Knee pads. Somebody squatting in an awkward spot because that is where the work is. Generated people tend to be clean, evenly lit, posed, and strangely relaxed for somebody on a steep slope in July.

Count the hands and look at the tools. That is where these images usually fall apart.

Check Whether the Job Makes Physical Sense

Ask where the dumpster is, where the ladder is, and where the debris went. Real jobs are ugly while they are happening. There is a pile of old shingles somewhere. There is a tarp over the plants. There are footprints in the dust. A picture of a roof in progress with no mess anywhere is a picture of something that never happened.

Follow the Lines

Roofs are repetitive, and that is hard to fake. Shingle courses should run straight and stay parallel all the way across. Tile should hold one profile down the whole slope. A ridge should line up with the ridge on the other side of the valley. When rows wander, merge into each other, or change size halfway up, that is generated.

Same with shadows. Find the sun. If one side of the house is lit from the left and the tree is casting a shadow to the left too, you are looking at a picture with two suns in it.

Ask Why Every Photo Is Perfect

A real portfolio built over years has bad photos in it. Overcast days. A thumb in the corner. A shot taken at 6 a.m. because that is when the crew got there. Before pictures of a roof that looked terrible, because that is the whole point of the after picture.

If every image is golden hour, perfectly composed, and the house is always beautiful and always empty, ask yourself when a working roofer would have had the time.

Two Things You Can Do Without Leaving the Page

Reverse image search one photo. On a phone you can usually press and hold an image and search it. If the same picture shows up on contractors' websites in four other states, it is stock at best.

Then ask the roofer a simple question: what street was this one on, and do you have a photo of it from the curb. Every real job has a street view, a date, and a person who lives there. Nobody serious will be offended that you asked.

Now the Part That Actually Cost Him Money

Come back to that lower bid, because the fake photos were not really the problem. The photos were just the thing that made him look closer.

The bid was lower because of the layer you will never see again once the roof is on.

Felt paper is not a scam and it is not illegal. It is code-legal, it is what almost everybody used for decades, and there are plenty of roofs in this valley sitting on felt right now doing fine. I want to be accurate about that, because you are going to hear roofers talk about felt like it is a crime, and it is not.

What I will tell you is what I see when we open roofs in the Inland Empire. Our heat is hard on felt. It dries out, it loses its flexibility, and it tears at the fasteners. In my experience the felt under most of the tile roofs we open here is finished somewhere around 20 to 30 years, and the tile sitting on top of it is still perfectly good. Concrete tile can go 50 years or more.

That gap is the whole problem. When the underlayment quits before the tile does, you pay to have every tile lifted off, the underlayment replaced, and the tile set back down. That is a tile lift and relay, and it is not a small job. So the money you saved on the underlayment the first time gets spent again, plus labor, plus a dumpster.

Self-adhered and synthetic underlayments cost more up front. That is the honest reason a bid using them comes in higher, and it is most of the difference you are looking at when two roofing quotes are far apart.

So here is the one thing I would make every homeowner do, including with me.

Make every bidder write the underlayment product name on the contract. Not "premium underlayment." Not "high quality underlayment." The actual product name, in writing, on the document you sign. We name ours on ours. If a bidder will not put the name of the product in writing, you already know something useful about how that job is going to go.

If you want the rest of the questions worth asking before you sign anything, I put them in this post.

Where GAX Uses AI, and Where We Do Not

It would be pretty weak of me to write all this and not tell you where I stand, so here it is.

Every job photo on this website is a photograph of a roof we worked on. Every single one. If it is on the gallery, on a city page, or in one of these articles, there was a real house, a real crew, and a real day. That is the entire point of posting them.

I do use AI tools for some marketing art. A background on an ad, artwork on a door hanger. That is decoration, and it is not pretending to be a job we did. I will also brighten a photo or fix the exposure on a picture I took at dusk, the same way anybody does, because the light was bad, not because the roof was.

What I Would Do in Your Driveway

You do not need to become an expert. You need about two minutes and a little bit of suspicion.

Read the words in the pictures. Look for real people doing real work. Look for the mess. Follow the shingle lines. Ask for an address and a curb shot on one job. Then make them name the underlayment in writing.

Do that with every bid you get, mine included. The good contractors in this valley will not blink at any of it, and you will find out very quickly who is which.