Bensalem Quality Roofing has spent more than 20 years on roofing in Riverside and the towns along both banks of the Delaware, and a good share of the roofs we see here sit over two households at once. That changes the job before a single shingle comes off. Someone owns the building, someone else may live under the half that leaks, and both of them need the work done without a lost week of rent or a wet bedroom.
Our approach starts with a straight answer. When a call comes in about water on a ceiling, we go into the attic as well as onto the roof, because the stain a tenant reports is rarely directly under the spot where the water gets in. Only once the entry point is traced do we price anything, and we tell you whether a repair will hold before replacement comes up at all.
Riverside sits on the New Jersey side of the river, so we write every job here to New Jersey’s rules rather than the Pennsylvania rules that govern our Bensalem work. The permit question, the contract and the sales tax treatment all differ across the bridge, and we check them for the house’s own municipality before the estimate goes out.
One Roof, Two Households: Riverside’s Two-Family Houses
How common two-unit homes are here
Riverside is a two-family town as much as a one-family one. Census estimates count 488 of the township’s 3,298 housing units in two-unit buildings, about 14.8 percent of the housing stock. Those are units rather than buildings, so the figure describes how many households live in this arrangement, not how many structures there are.
The tenure picture is what makes the roofing different. Of the 450 occupied two-unit homes, 421 are rented and 29 are owner-occupied, and across the whole township 1,300 of 3,012 occupied homes are rented, or 43.2 percent. A roof over a two-unit home here is usually covering a tenant rather than an owner.
Who decides and who lives with it
On most of these houses, a landlord makes the call and a tenant lives under the result. That split shows up in how a roof problem reaches us. The tenant notices the stain, the owner hears about it secondhand, and by the time anyone climbs a ladder the leak may have had weeks to soak the decking.
We work with that reality rather than around it. The owner gets the inspection photos, the written findings and the price, while the tenant gets a clear time window and a plain description of what will happen overhead. Nobody has to translate our report for anyone else.
What a shared roof means for the work
A two-unit building has one roof, one set of rafters and usually one attic, even when the inside is split side by side or stacked floor over floor. A leak above one unit can travel along a rafter and show up in the other. That is why our attic check covers the whole space, not just the side that called.
Ventilation is shared the same way. A ridge vent only works with soffit intake along the eaves, so we figure net free area for the full roof rather than half of it. Two households under one deck means two kitchens and two bathrooms sending moisture into the same attic, and the vent plan has to account for both.
Looking for roofing closer to Willingboro? See Roofing Services in Willingboro.
Re-Roofing an Occupied Rental: Landlords, Tenants and Timing
Scheduling around the people inside
Most two-family re-roofs in Riverside happen with people at home. We plan the tear-off in sections so the open deck at the end of any work day is covered and dry, and we give the owner a schedule that can be passed straight to the tenants. Noise, a dumpster in the driveway and a crew overhead are easier to accept when everyone knows the start and finish dates ahead of time.
Weather moves dates, and we say so up front rather than promising a day we cannot control. When a forecast turns, we reschedule before the tear-off starts instead of leaving a half-stripped roof under a tarp above someone’s bedroom.
Itemized scopes a landlord can compare
Owners of rental property tend to collect more than one estimate, and they should. Our written scope lists tear-off, decking, underlayment, flashing, ventilation and gutters as separate lines, so a second bid can be laid next to ours and compared item by item instead of total against total.
Decking is the line that surprises people. Once the old shingles are off, any rotted or soft sheet is photographed and shown to the owner before it is replaced, at the per-sheet price already written into the contract. On a rental where a leak went unreported for a season, that photo record also shows the owner exactly what the tenant was living under.
Flashing and the joints that leak
Many older Riverside houses carry a chimney, a dormer or a porch roof tied into the main slope, and each of those joints is a place for water to get in. We replace step flashing, counter flashing and chimney flashing with the new roof rather than bending the old metal back into place. A wide chimney gets a cricket, and a roof edge that dies into a wall gets kick-out flashing so runoff lands in the gutter instead of behind the siding.
Pipe boots, drip edge at the eaves and rakes, and a self-adhering ice and water barrier along the eaves all go on the same roof. None of them is glamorous, and all of them cost less to install during a re-roof than to chase later as a service call from a tenant.
Cleanup when people live on site
A rental yard is someone’s front door. At the end of every work day we clean the driveway, the yard and the gutters, including a magnet sweep for roofing nails, so tenants are not stepping over debris or driving onto loose nails overnight. The same goes for shared walks and the entry to the second unit.
What Riverside’s Housing Checklist Says About Shingles and Gutters
Resale and rental occupancy
Riverside Township’s Housing Inspection Checklist governs two moments that matter to a landlord. For a resale, a Certificate of Occupancy is required for transfer of title, and all repairs must be completed before the property can be occupied. For a rental, the checklist calls for proper zoning, Annual Landlord Registration and a Certificate of Habitability before a tenant can occupy the property.
That makes the roof part of the turnover between tenants, not only a repair for the day something leaks. An owner preparing a unit for a new tenant or a sale is working toward an inspection, and the roof is on the list.
Shingles, gutters and roof trim
The checklist is direct about the roof. It states that deteriorated, missing or broken shingles must be replaced. A roof that has lost tabs along the rake or has cracked shingles around a vent will not clear that line, however dry the attic happens to be.
Gutters and downspouts get their own entry: gutters must be free of leaves, properly secured and free from damage, and downspouts must be in place. The checklist also calls for peeling paint to be removed from painted surfaces including window frames and roof trim, which puts the fascia behind the gutters in view. On a house built before 1978, disturbing that painted trim falls under the EPA lead-safe RRP rule, and we plan the trim work accordingly.
Getting ahead of the inspection
We can look at a two-family roof before the inspection rather than after it. The written findings separate what the checklist names, such as broken shingles or a loose gutter, from what is simply aging, so a landlord can decide what must be handled now and what can be planned for later. When a repair is all the roof needs, a repair is what we quote.
Two-Family Re-Roofing Under New Jersey’s Ordinary Maintenance Rule
Permits and the two-family house
New Jersey treats replacing the roof covering on a detached one- or two-family dwelling as ordinary maintenance under its Uniform Construction Code, in the New Jersey Administrative Code at 5:23-2.7. A two-family house in Riverside is handled the same way as a single-family one, and no permit is needed to replace the roofing. The timing is set by the house, the tenants and the next inspection rather than by a permit office.
We still confirm the rule for the specific address before pricing, the same check we run for every municipality we serve. If tear-off uncovers framing trouble that goes beyond replacement sheets of decking, we raise it with the owner before anything else is scheduled.
Contracts and sales tax on this side of the river
Because Riverside is in New Jersey, the contract and the tax paperwork follow New Jersey practice rather than Pennsylvania’s. A full re-roof is typically handled as a capital improvement, documented with a Form ST-8 capital improvement certificate, which is a different arrangement from the materials tax we work under in Pennsylvania. We set that up in the paperwork from the first estimate so the owner is not sorting it out at the final invoice.
Older river-town houses near the watchcase factory
Riverside’s housing is old. Census estimates place 1,390 of its 3,298 housing units, about 42.1 percent, as built in 1939 or earlier. Roofs on houses of that age often hide board sheathing, earlier layers of roofing and framing that has settled over decades, and each of those shapes how a tear-off goes.
The older streets near Pavilion Avenue carry the town’s industrial history. The Philadelphia Watch Case Company Building at Pavilion and Lafayette Avenues began as the Pavilion Hotel, started in 1852 by Samuel Bechtold, and Theophilus Zurbrugg moved his watchcase business into the former hotel during 1892. He is described as building low-cost housing and rowhomes for workers, and the larger factory building went up between 1906 and 1908.
Gutters sized with the roof
On a two-family house, the gutters carry runoff from a roof over two households, and the checklist holds them to the same standard as the shingles. We size and pitch seamless aluminum gutters and downspouts with the roof itself, set so water leaves the eaves and is carried away from the foundation rather than spilling at the corners.
Downspouts on a shared lot need somewhere to discharge that does not empty onto the other unit’s entry or a neighbor’s walk. We place them with the whole building in view, the same way we approach every part of a roof that two households depend on.
- 20+ Years Experience
- Attic Checked on Every Leak
- Itemized Written Scopes
