Roofing company in College Park, MD

About 63% of households in 20740 rent. In College Park the person who notices a roof leak is very often not the person who pays for the roof.

The housing here is not what the rental numbers suggest. In 20740 there are 5,124 detached single-family homes and only 383 attached ones. The apartments are mostly in large buildings. So the typical College Park roof is a pitched roof on a detached house, and a good share of those houses are rented. Any property in the city housing someone other than the owner’s immediate family needs a Residential Occupancy Permit and an annual inspection from the city.

The houses themselves are mostly mid-century. The 1950s and 1960s are the two biggest building decades in 20740, together about a third of all homes, and the older neighborhoods between the railroad and Baltimore Avenue go back further: Berwyn to 1885, Lakeland to 1890, Daniels Park to 1905. Calvert Hills was mostly built in the early 1940s. By now most of these houses are on their second or third roof, and the question is what earlier crews left underneath.

In a rented house a slow leak can run a long time before anyone reports it. By the time a stain reaches the ceiling, the decking and insulation above it have usually been wet for a while. An owner who lives elsewhere gets more out of a proper inspection with photographs than from waiting for the tenant’s phone call.

Old Town College Park, platted in 1889, is a historic district with its own review process, and many University of Maryland fraternity and sorority chapters own houses there. Its design guidelines treat replacing a roof with like materials of like size and design as ordinary maintenance. Replacing it with different materials or a different design requires a Historic Area Work Permit. Asphalt shingle is the most common roof in the district, alongside metal, tile, wood shingle and slate. The same guidelines point out that slate often outlasts its original nails and flashing, and can be reset once those are repaired, which is worth knowing before anyone quotes a full replacement.

Permit requirements come from Prince George’s County and depend on whether the work is like-for-like or structural, and the City of College Park issues its own building permits on top of the county’s for some residential work. We confirm what your address needs before work starts.

Housing figures are from published census data for ZIP 20740, which also covers Berwyn Heights and parts of Beltsville and Greenbelt. Old Town rules per the district’s design guidelines.