A couple of years ago, our Amarillo team received an unusual warranty request. Instead of it being from a homeowner, they got a message from a third-party inspection company related to a home built four or five years earlier. The customer who originally bought the home from us was selling it, and the buyer hired a third party to inspect the property before closing. That inspection discovered that the roof didn’t have a starter shingle installed. The inspector was concerned the new buyer may not be able to get the roof insured unless that was fixed, so that report made its way to us.
A starter shingle is a special type of shingle installed on the bottom row of a roof. It’s designed to prevent wind and water from getting under the regular shingles that come next.
The issue was strange because the home hadn’t had any leaks or roof issues, but our warranty team went out and confirmed that it was indeed missing a starter shingle. While the home was years outside our warranty period, and we had no legal obligation for any repairs, we decided to pay to reroof the home.
The truth is the roof was not installed properly. While we had paid for starter shingles to be delivered during construction, the roofer clearly missed them on that home, and we also missed them in our inspections. Ultimately, it is our job as the builder to ensure the work is done properly. That’s why our warranty team operates under the principle that if we believe there is even a 1% chance that the original work wasn’t done correctly, we want to fix it.
Because the starter shingle is the first row that goes down, and other shingles lay on top of it, you can’t simply replace that row. We could have just replaced the bottom three rows of shingles, but the color didn’t match the rest of the roof. If we lived in the home, we wouldn’t be happy with that repair. So, we paid to completely tear off the original roof, haul it off, and then install a brand-new roof – this time with a starter shingle!
A year or so later, we were made aware of another home in Amarillo that was also missing a starter shingle. The warranty manager in Amarillo had changed since the last reroof, but the new manager arrived at the same conclusion: even though the home was well outside of the warranty period and there was no actual leak or damage, the roof should have had a starter shingle – so we took care of the customer and replaced the roof.
In late 2023, the Amarillo warranty team got a few messages from third-party inspectors related to roofs. “If we have several homeowners reaching out saying the same thing, there’s probably something there that we need to dig into,” shared Corey Lusk, vice president of operations for Betenbough Homes. So we did just that.
That’s about the time that Corey Lusk and Ryan Whitworth, Lubbock South/Amarillo area director for Betenbough Homes, brought Cal Zant, president of Betenbough Homes, up to speed on the situation, and the three discussed how we should handle it. Again, none of the homes actually had any leaks or damage, and all of them were closed more than three years prior. In fact, some were built as early as 2015 when we first started in Amarillo!
In that discussion, they eventually asked the question: “If it was your mom living in one of those homes, what would you hope we would do for her?” The answer was pretty clear: we should make it right – on all of them.
But we didn’t stop there. There was clearly a pattern, and now we were concerned with how big the problem might be. We researched who we paid to roof the homes that were missing starter shingles, and they were all the same trade partner. We pulled a list of every address he ever roofed for us, which ranged from 2015 to early 2020, and decided we’d go knock on doors to proactively inspect every one of them! We didn’t want to wait for customers to find a problem or hope that maybe we’d get out of fixing it. We wanted to make it right, even if the customer wasn’t aware of the problem to begin with. If we were living in one of those homes, that is what we’d hope someone would do for us – so that’s what we’d do for them.
We knew that approach would likely mean we’d get the opportunity to pay for over $1 million in roofing repairs, which we were in no way obligated to do. Remember, we were discussing these issues in December 2023 and the homes were built between 2015 and early 2020. One hundred percent of the homes were far outside our two-year warranty. But, if there were more homes where the roof wasn’t installed correctly, we wanted to take responsibility for that. We didn’t want to leave the customer stuck with the expense.
We also didn’t want our Amarillo warranty team to be haunted for years by old homes with roofing issues. We thought if we could hire a roofer and coordinate all the repairs together, it would make it much easier on our Amarillo team long-term. It wasn’t just about caring for our customers but also caring for our team.
Our construction coaches volunteered to travel to Amarillo and help go door to door performing the roof inspections.
WITHIN A COUPLE OF WEEKS, WE INSPECTED ALL 474 HOMES THAT SPECIFIC ROOFER INSTALLED FOR US AND TOTALED THE ONES THAT WERE MISSING STARTER SHINGLES: 149!
We partnered with an expert roofing company that could purely focus on all the reroofs so that we didn’t stretch our current Amarillo roofer too thin.
When contacted to schedule repairs, many homeowners had the same question: “What’s the catch?”
“Ninety-nine percent of people weren’t having issues with their roofs,” shared Ryan Whitworth, Amarillo area director. “They were shocked that we would offer to fix something they didn’t even know was wrong.”
Over the course of 2024, we paid $1,605,304 to reroof all those homes in Amarillo – which were all well out of warranty. We never threatened to sue the original roofer or even ask him to share in the cost because we knew that he couldn’t. We simply accepted responsibility and made it right. “I feel like this story shows the heart of our company,” Cal explained. “Most builders try hard to limit their liability and minimize warranty expenses. I honestly don’t believe there is another builder out there who would’ve proactively fixed all those roofs if they were in the same situation. But, if we see this as God’s business that He’s simply asked us to steward, then ‘Loving your neighbor as yourself’ would be at the center of decisions like this. God is all about restoration, and I truly believe that is how He would’ve handled it! It’s never about minimizing expenses to maximize profit. At Betenbough, we can ask: ‘If we were in their shoes, what would we hope someone would do for us? What would the flourishing of everyone look like here?’ Making business decisions like that can seem normal around here, but it isn’t normal in the marketplace! What a great example of the Kingdom of God being revealed in the middle of our everyday work.”
On a related note, our construction coaches did go spot-check homes in all our regions to ensure we’re installing roofs properly today, and they were all great! It was simply a season in Amarillo where a roofer was skipping a step, and we failed to notice. We also established some new processes where our construction coaches will proactively check a few high-liability items (starter shingles, flashing, drainage, etc.) in each region on a recurring basis to prevent something like this from happening again.
