Repair or replace? How our townhome HOA decides on roofs

In a townhome community where the association maintains the roofs, no question burns more board hours than this one: patch it again, or bite the bullet and replace it?

Our board argued this in circles until we changed one thing: we stopped arguing from memory and started arguing from a repair history. Here is the framework that fell out of that.

The spreadsheet that settles arguments

Ask your management company (or your own records) for every roof repair, by address, as far back as the books go. Ours could pull three years from the general ledger. Put it by building, not by ticket: buildings share roofs, and the pattern you care about is per roof.

The moment the history is by address, the argument usually ends itself. One building with four repairs in three years is not unlucky; it is telling you something. A building with one repair in a decade does not need to be in the replacement conversation at all.

Our rule of thumb

We treat a repair as the right call when all three are true:

• The failure is local: a pipe boot, a lifted shingle course, flashing at one wall. Local causes have local fixes.
• The roof is younger than about two thirds of its expected life. A 12-year-old architectural shingle roof earns repairs; a 22-year-old one is borrowing time.
• Cumulative repair spend on that roof is still under about a quarter of replacement cost. Past that line, you are replacing the roof anyway, just slowly and at retail.

Fail any one of the three and we get replacement bids, even if we then choose to wait a season. The point is to make waiting a decision instead of a default.

Reserve math, briefly

Replacement is a reserve expense, and the honest version of this conversation includes the reserve study. If the study says roofs at year 25 and the leaks say year 19, the study is wrong, and adjusting it now (with the repair history as evidence) beats a special assessment discovered in a panic later.

Where the record should live

None of this works if the history lives in a retiring treasurer's inbox. Every repair should land in one system with its cost and its address attached, and the running summary should be a page the whole board can open, not a file someone has to be asked for. That is the part we automated: every completed work order files its cost against the building and the budget category, so the repair-or-replace argument starts from evidence by default.