The roof is the part of the building subject to the harshest conditions Mother Nature can mete out including ultraviolet light, rain, snow, hail, high winds, extreme temperature swings, foot traffic, and more. Just as a new car depreciates the minute it is driven off the lot, new roofing membranes degrade as soon as they are installed.
From a 2010 research paper “Life Cycle Costs of Commercial Roof Systems” by Coffelt and Hendrickson, roof maintenance data collected for 38 Carnegie Mellon University buildings totaling nearly 100,000 square meters revealed an average of 200 leaks per year, or 5.2 leaks per building per year for the buildings. Once water leaks develop, without a place for the water to go, it becomes trapped within the membrane assembly, and is unable to escape. It accumulates and migrates, causing damage far from the location of ingress. The Carnegie Mellon study authors calculated an average cost per leak of $1,232, nearly $250,000 per year for the 38 buildings evaluated. Without regular inspection and repair, roof leaks can cause much more—often irreparable—damage to the roofing assembly elements, costing far more. This is a common scenario, one that every low sloped roofing building owner must deal with.