$1.4M Auto Dealership Re-Roof Aurora, CO — Standing Seam · TPO · Shingles

This is an auto dealership campus re-roof in Aurora, Colorado — $1.4 million in scope across 600 squares of roof and three different roofing systems matched to three different building types. The dealership stayed fully operational for all eight weeks of the install. Customers bought cars, mechanics turned wrenches, the body shop pulled cars in and out — while our crew was on the roof above them in full PPE on a coordinated daily plan. The high-traffic customer-facing sections we worked after business hours so the showroom and the front drive lanes were never under a falling-debris zone during sales hours.

One Campus, Three Roof Systems

Most commercial portfolios are one-system jobs — everything's TPO, or everything's standing seam, or everything's modified bitumen. This dealership wasn't. The campus had three distinct building types, each with its own structural envelope and its own optimal roof system. Rather than force one system across all three, we scoped the right material for each.

• Showroom — Standing Seam Metal. The showroom is the face of the dealership: the architectural element customers see from the street, with the dealer brand sign and the front drive. The pitched showroom roof got standing seam metal — concealed-fastener panels with hidden clips, no exposed screws on the field, Kynar 500 PVDF finish for color retention. A 50-year roof on the building that defines the brand from the road.
• Service Bays + Body Shop — White TPO with Tapered Insulation. The service buildings are flat-roofed — the right home for single-ply membrane. We installed white TPO with heat-welded seams over a tapered polyiso insulation system engineered building-by-building to drain ponding water to the perimeter scuppers and internal drains. White surface drops summer cooling load, tapered insulation eliminates the ponding that kills flat roofs, and heat-welded seams age with the field of the membrane instead of failing first.
• Storage Building — Asphalt Shingles. The dedicated storage building has a residential-style pitched roof. Architectural laminate asphalt shingles were the right call — cleaner aesthetic match to the surrounding neighborhood, lower cost than continuing the metal across, and a long manufacturer warranty when installed by a certified contractor.

Three crews, three foremen, three closeout packets — one project manager owning the schedule, the safety brief, and the weekly check-in with the dealer's facility lead.

The Hard Part: Stay Open

The hardest part of this project wasn't the roofing. It was not interrupting the business. An auto dealership runs on traffic flow: customers walk into the showroom, take a test drive, write the deal, and drive home. Service customers drop their car at the service drive, get a loaner, come back at the end of the day. Anything that pinches that flow pinches revenue immediately.

For the high-traffic customer-facing sections — the showroom standing seam install, the service drive overhead, the front of the body shop — we worked after business hours. Demo, panel staging, fastener install, cleanup, all completed at night so the showroom opened in the morning to a clean campus and customers had no idea a roof project was happening overhead. Lower-traffic back-of-house and rear elevation sections we worked daytime with a phased material-delivery plan that kept the customer parking front lots completely off the staging map.

Every morning started with a brief: where is each crew working today, which bay needs to stay open, which side of the lot is roped off, where are the dumpster swaps and the material deliveries scheduled, and what is the weather doing. We ran with a crew of 8 to 12 in full PPE and RT-branded safety vests, with daily safety briefs led by the foreman before anyone went up on the roof.

Our Equipment, Not Their Lot

We brought our JCB telehandler and a fleet of RT-branded staging boxes to this site. Every material movement — insulation board off the truck, TPO rolls up to the roof, standing seam panels lifted to the showroom slope, demo debris down to the dump trailer — happened off our equipment, not the dealership's lots. That's not a small detail on an active dealership campus. Customer parking is revenue. The lanes leading into the service drive are revenue. Body shop bay access is revenue. We staged off our trailers and our boxes in the smallest footprint that would let us run the work, and we cleaned that footprint down at the end of every day so the lot was sellable in the morning.

The RT-branded staging boxes do double duty: weatherproof material storage, overnight protection for new polyiso and standing seam panels, and a visible marker on the property that says this is a professional commercial roofing job in progress. In the project photos, you can see the 855-ROOF-001 on the side of one of those boxes as we craned it up onto the roof.

Insurance Claim — Documented Per Building

The project was funded through an insurance claim. On a $1.4M scope with three different roof systems, claim documentation is its own line item of work. We documented every building separately: pre-tear-off photos of insulation moisture and membrane condition, deck-condition records during tear-off, code-upgrade scope for items the original adjuster missed (drip edge, ice-and-water at metal-to-flat transitions, fastener pattern updates), and post-install photo records of the new systems. Supplements went to the carrier in writing, building by building, with photo records attached. The dealership owner closed out with three manufacturer warranties (one per system), an RT workmanship warranty, and a single closeout binder organized building-by-building.

How We Ran the Eight Weeks

A campus this size with three different systems doesn't run in a single sequential pass — that would have stretched to four months. The only way it lands in eight weeks is by running the systems in parallel, with each crew owning its own building and the project manager running cross-crew coordination, material delivery, and the dealership communication.

• Weeks 1–2: Service bays and body shop — tear-off down to the structural deck, deck repairs documented and replaced where needed, dry-in with new vapor barrier. The flat-roof scope is the largest of the three systems by square footage, so it gets the head start.
• Weeks 2–5: Tapered polyiso insulation engineered building-by-building to drain ponding water to the existing scuppers and internal drains, then white TPO membrane heat-welded over the top. Every penetration, curb, and parapet detailed by hand. Photo records taken per building.
• Weeks 4–5: Parallel crew on the storage building shingle scope. Architectural laminate over new synthetic underlayment, code-current ice-and-water at eaves and valleys.
• Weeks 6–7: Showroom standing seam install — parallel crew, mostly worked after-hours so the showroom and front drive lanes were clean during sales hours. Concealed-fastener panels, hidden clips, custom flashing on every transition between the showroom roof and the connected service-bay flat-roof scope.
• Week 8: Walkthroughs, punch-lists, supplements written for the carrier on items the original adjuster missed, warranty packets compiled per building, final cleanup of the staging footprint.

By Week 5 we had two and sometimes three crews running in parallel, with a foreman on each building and the project manager moving between them all day. That's the operational pattern that makes mixed-system commercial campuses work without dragging the timeline.

What "After Hours" Actually Means

"We worked after hours" is a phrase a lot of contractors use loosely — it usually means a couple of late-evening visits a week to deal with something noisy. On a $1.4M dealership project it has to mean something more disciplined than that.

For the customer-facing scope on this campus — the showroom standing seam install, the front of the body shop, the service drive overhead — we ran a dedicated night-window crew from late afternoon through early morning, with portable LED light towers staged on the lot after closing and a foreman dedicated to the night sequence. Before sales opened in the morning the lot was swept, debris was hauled, the staging footprint was condensed back to our trailers and boxes, and the daytime crew picked up at the back-of-house. There was a 6:30 a.m. handoff every workday so nothing fell through the gap between the two windows.

Daytime work continued in parallel on the back of the body shop, the storage building, and the rear elevations of the service bays — areas that weren't on the customer's path through the campus. Mixing day and night windows on the same project is what kept the dealership fully open during sales hours all eight weeks.

What This Project Tells Other Commercial Owners

Most commercial campuses we walk are over-simplified by previous bidders — the contractor proposes one system across the whole property because it's easier to bid and easier to install, even when the buildings clearly don't all want the same answer. That's how a flat-roof contractor ends up putting TPO on a pitched showroom (it always leaks at the transition), or a metal contractor ends up trying to run standing seam over a building whose deck and slope can't carry it.

On a mixed-use commercial campus, the right scope is almost always system-per-building. The right contractor for the job is the one with crews trained on each system in-house — not one specialist sub-renting the rest of the work to other companies. And the right project management is a single PM running multiple foremen, not a separate point of contact per building. If your campus is sitting on aging single-ply, an aging standing seam, or a mix of both, that's the conversation we start with.

Eight Weeks, Three Systems, $1.4M, Zero Closed Days

Standing seam on the showroom, white TPO with tapered insulation on the service bays and body shop, shingles on the storage building. Three roof systems running on three crews under one project manager, on an operational dealership campus, with high-traffic areas worked after hours so the customer-facing flow never stopped. Eight weeks, $1.4 million in scope, zero days closed. That's a commercial mixed-system re-roof done right.