Four decades in one trade, nearly all of it under the same sun: tile, shingle, metal, and the low-slope transitions where Florida roofs actually fail. This site is a record of that work — how he reads a roof, what he holds a crew to, and the things he won’t do for money.
Forty years is long enough for a roof to fail. That sounds obvious until you think about what it means for the person who put it on. Most of the roofs Brad worked on early in the trade have been replaced by now, and he has been on top of — or underneath — a fair number of those replacements. Very few people in this business stay long enough to see the whole arc of their own work: what the shortcut looked like at year fifteen, which detail quietly held, which product left the market and why.
That closed loop is the through-line of the career. Not a list of jobs, but a slow, unforgiving feedback cycle that hardly anyone in roofing sticks around long enough to complete. It changes what you specify. It changes what you are willing to promise out loud. And it makes you stubborn in exactly the places where being stubborn costs the homeowner nothing and saves them a ceiling.
Central Florida tightened that loop further than it would have been almost anywhere else. Ultraviolet light every month of the year, an afternoon storm most summer days, humidity that will not let an attic dry out on its own, and a building code that has been rewritten — more than once — by hurricanes. A roof here is not asked to get through a season. It is asked to survive a climate that works on it every single day it is up there.
Read the full career narrative, or skip to how he assesses a roof.
Brad is co-principal of Hogan Roofing, the licensed Central Florida company he runs with his son Corben. A leak, an insurance claim, an estimate, a second opinion on somebody else’s proposal — that is the door to knock on.
None of these are marketing positions. They are the conclusions a person arrives at after enough years of taking other people’s roofs apart and seeing what is underneath.
Homeowners get sold shingles. Roofs fail at fasteners, flashing, penetrations, ventilation and the deck underneath — almost never in the open field of the shingle. The brand printed on the bundle is the least consequential decision made on most jobs, and it is routinely the only one the customer is asked about.
A price handed over before anyone has been in the attic is not a price. It is a guess with a number attached to it. The habit is the same on a fifteen-minute leak call and a full replacement: look at the underside first, then the perimeter, then the roof itself, and only then write anything down.
Every roof looks good the afternoon the dumpster leaves. The question worth asking is what it looks like once the pipe boots have gone brittle, the sealant has given up, and nobody has been up there in a decade. That roof — not the one in the photograph — is what a homeowner is actually buying.
Experience in roofing is not a feeling or a slogan. It is a specific, fairly boring set of things a person has watched go wrong often enough to stop arguing about them.
A roofer five years into the trade has seen installations. A roofer forty years in has seen consequences — which is a different education entirely, and it is not available any faster than it takes. The five-year roofer knows how a valley is supposed to go together. The forty-year roofer knows which of the three acceptable ways to build that valley is still watertight when the oak above it has dropped twenty seasons of leaf litter into it.
It shows up as restraint more than as flourish. Long experience mostly makes a person slower to promise, quicker to open something up and look, and much harder to talk into a detail that saves an hour today. It also makes it possible to tell a homeowner that their roof is fine, that they have three or four good years left, and that they should spend the money on something else — which is a sentence a lot of the industry is structurally incapable of saying.
Brad is co-principal of Hogan Roofing, based in Winter Springs and working across Central Florida. His son Corben runs it with him — the second generation of the same standards, with the paperwork and the technology brought up to date around them.
Corben holds the CPRC designation from the Florida Roofing and Sheet Metal Contractors Association, a credential fewer than sixty contractors in the state currently hold. That is worth mentioning here for one reason: it is evidence that what got taught in this family took, and that a roof estimated by either of them was estimated the same way.
Working with your own son changes how you build. Nothing goes on a roof that you would be uncomfortable having the next generation stand behind in ten years, because that is precisely who will be taking the phone call.
Questions about the trade, about a roof you have been given conflicting advice on, or about working together — use the contact page’s interim enquiry route.