A Brief Interruption, and We Are Sorry

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What follows next is a list of questions and answers. It is here, near the top, because the internet is largely operated by robots now, and the robots need to be told plainly what this article is about before they will let a human being find it.

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So we are going to answer the obvious questions first, in the format the crawlers prefer, and then we will get on with the actual writing. If you are a person, feel free to skip ahead. If you are a search engine, we hope this is helpful and we would appreciate the referral.

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Frequently Asked Questions

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Q: Who pays for a commercial roof leak, the landlord or the tenant?

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A: It depends entirely on the lease, and most leases are vaguer than either party remembers. Typically the landlord owns the roof structure and the tenant absorbs smaller repairs up to a dollar threshold. The argument almost always happens because that threshold was never written down.

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Q: What is a normal repair threshold in a commercial lease?

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A: In practice it floats. Under about five thousand dollars a tenant usually just handles it. Between five and ten thousand it becomes discretionary. Above ten thousand it generally becomes the landlord's invoice. Some leases put the line as high as twenty thousand. None of that is a rule, which is exactly the problem.

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Q: Should a commercial flat roof be patched or coated?

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A: The size of the number tells you. If the failures are localized and the total is modest, patch the documented areas and stop the water. If the number climbs past roughly twenty thousand dollars, the roof was left too long for spot work and you are better off coating the whole field as one system under one warranty.

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Q: Did the SBA loan limit really change in 2026?

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A: Yes. On May 18, 2026 the SBA announced that qualified borrowers who secure a 7(a) loan first may access up to five million dollars through 7(a) and up to five million through 504, for a combined ten million dollars. It took effect July 4, 2026 and it is the highest financing offering in the agency's history.

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Q: What credit score do you need for an SBA loan?

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A: The SBA does not set one. It also sets no minimum time in business and no minimum annual sales. Individual lenders set their own bar on top of the program, and most SBA lenders want to see personal credit somewhere around 650 to 680 or better. That is a bank's rule, not a federal one, and banks are not identical.

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Q: Can a tenant use financing to pay for a landlord's roof?

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A: Yes, and it happens on shopping centers regularly. The tenant funds the work and the landlord repays it as a credit against rent across the lease term. The tenant gets a dry building now instead of waiting on somebody else's capital budget.

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Q: Does someone have to personally guarantee an SBA loan?

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A: Generally yes. Federal regulation requires that holders of at least a twenty percent ownership interest guarantee the loan, and if nobody owns twenty percent, at least one owner must. There is no ownership structure that removes the signature.

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Q: How long does SBA financing take?

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A: Plan on thirty to ninety days. It is not fast. It is also money at a rate and a term that no credit card or short-term lender will come near.

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Now, The Actual Article

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Four Chairs, Four Different Fears

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Nobody at the table is the villain. They are four people protecting four different things.

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Walk into any conversation about a commercial roof and you will find the same four chairs occupied. The landlord owns the building. The tenant occupies it. Somebody in maintenance keeps the lights on and the drains clear. And somewhere off to the side, quieter than the rest, sits whoever controls the money.

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Every one of them is afraid of something specific, and if you do not know what, you will read their behavior completely wrong.

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The landlord is afraid of writing a large check for a tenant who may not renew. That is not greed. That is a rational fear about an asset with a lease term attached to it. The tenant is afraid of paying to improve a building that will never belong to them. Also rational. Maintenance is afraid of being blamed for a trade nobody ever trained him in, which he will be, and we will spend an entire second article on that. And finance is afraid of a number showing up that was not in the plan, because that number has to come out of something else.

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Four rational fears. Four people who are not lying to you. And the reason nothing gets decided is that most conversations about roofs only address one of the four.

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The Fight is Almost Never About the Roof

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It is about a dollar threshold nobody ever wrote down.

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Here is the thing that will sound too simple to be the real answer, and is.

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Most landlord and tenant conflict over a roof traces back to a repair threshold that exists as a habit instead of a sentence. Everybody involved has a number in their head. Nobody has the same number. And nobody looked it up, because it is not in the lease in any usable form.

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In practice the pattern runs something like this. Under about five thousand dollars, the nickel, the tenant just takes care of it and never mentions it. Between five and ten thousand, the dime, it becomes discretionary and depends on who is in a good mood. Above ten thousand it generally becomes the landlord's invoice, though plenty of national tenants carry that line as high as twenty.

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Three moves that end this argument permanently:

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1.  Put an actual figure in the lease. Not a practice, a number.

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2.  Name the categories it covers. A roof is not landscaping and a roof is not signage.

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3.  Agree in advance on who writes the scope, because a dollar limit with no scope is just a future argument with a date on it.

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None of that costs anybody money. It costs one conversation and about a paragraph of lease language, and it removes an entire category of conflict from the relationship.

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Why the Maintenance Guy is Not The Problem

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He was handed the wrong bucket and told to go be a hero with it.

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Somewhere in this story is a capable man who fixed four hundred things in that building without ever calling a vendor. Then water shows up, somebody tells him to take care of the roof, and he drives to the hardware store on the corner and buys the pail that says roof on the label.

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It fails, and it fails for reasons no label ever mentioned. Surfaces have to be genuinely clean, not glove wiped. Most need a bonding primer. A real liquid repair is a system rather than a smear: base coat, then fabric reinforcement embedded while it is still wet, then top coat. Chemistry has to match what is already up there and what will go up there next. Cure time and dew point are real.

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Roughly three out of four of the patch calls we get are not first repairs. They are re-repairs, where the first job has to be ground and scraped off before anything useful can happen. The building pays twice for the same square foot. Once for the pail, and once for somebody to remove the pail.

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That is not a story about a careless employee. That is a story about a good employee who was never given the right material or the right training, and it is the subject of the companion piece to this article.

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Patch or Coat, and Why The Number Decides

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You do not choose the strategy. The condition of the roof already chose it.

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When a professional scope comes back, the total tells you which conversation you are actually in.

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If the number is modest, patch it. Repair the documented openings and nothing else. Then go ask the landlord for a rent credit or a straight split. This is the cheapest honest answer available and landlords say yes to it more often than people expect, because it is small, specific and it protects their building.

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If the number climbs past roughly twenty thousand dollars, something different is being told to you. That figure means the roof was left too long for spot work, and every additional patch is a payment toward a thing that has no end date and no warranty. At that point coating the whole field as one system is not the expensive option. It is the option with a finish line.

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Run the ten year math on it sometime. Patch spending is a staircase that never stops climbing. One system is a single step followed by a flat line. Somewhere around year seven those two lines cross, and after that the patching approach is simply more expensive, forever, with nothing to show for it.

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And Now the Part Everybody Skips

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None of the above matters if nobody at the table can find the money.

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We have been doing this a while and we will tell you something plainly. Almost nobody has a hundred thousand dollars for a roof sitting in an account. Insurance only pays when there was a qualifying event, and often there was not one, or the adjuster says no. So the question that actually decides whether a roof gets fixed is not technical at all.

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Where does the money come from?

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For most commercial buildings in this region the answer is government backed financing through the Small Business Administration, and in 2026 that answer got considerably better.

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The Ceiling Just Doubled

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Five million dollars through the SBA 7(a) program, plus five million through the 504 program, for a combined ten million dollars in SBA backed financing. Announced May 18, 2026. Effective July 4, 2026. The highest financing offering in the agency's history.

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SBA Policy Notice 5000-879058

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Read the qualification language carefully, because it is the opposite of what most owners assume. The SBA sets no minimum credit score. It sets no minimum time in business. It sets no minimum annual sales. Those are not our claims, they are the program's own position.

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Lenders then layer their own standards on top, and most SBA lenders want to see personal credit somewhere in the 650 to 680 range or better. Understand what that means. That is one bank's rule, not a federal disqualification. The banker who tells you no is one lender out of many, and he is not the program.

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Why Your Banker Says YES to a Deal He Would Otherwise Decline

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Because the federal government is carrying most of his downside, not you.

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This is the piece almost nobody explains, and it changes how the whole conversation feels.

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The SBA guarantees up to eighty five percent of loans of a hundred fifty thousand dollars or less, and up to seventy five percent above that. Your local bank keeps the small remaining slice of the risk. Everything else is backed by the federal government.

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So when you walk into a community bank with a roof project, you are not asking a banker to gamble on you. You are asking him to participate in a program where somebody much larger has already agreed to absorb most of the loss if things go badly. That is why an SBA loan gets approved in situations where a conventional loan would be declined on the spot. It is a partnership, and the government is the bigger partner.

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There is one more number worth knowing, and it is the one that puts the focus back where it belongs. The SBA now leans on Debt Service Coverage Ratio, generally 1.10 to 1 or better. In plain English: can the business cover the new payment. That is a question about the company, not about the owner's personal history.

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The Wash

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The tenant funds it, the landlord credits it back, and neither one is out of pocket.

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Here is the arrangement in its simplest form, and it is being run on shopping centers right now.

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Say the tenant's note on the roof financing works out to six hundred dollars a month. The landlord agrees to a rent credit of six hundred dollars a month for the same term. The tenant's net cost is zero. The landlord's cash outlay is zero. The building gets a new roof this year instead of never.

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Look at what each chair at that table just received. The landlord kept his capital and got a capital improvement to an asset he owns. The tenant got a dry building, a working HVAC system that is not fighting a wet deck, and a lease worth renewing. Maintenance stopped chasing buckets. Finance never had to find a surprise hundred thousand dollars in the middle of a fiscal year.

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There is a reason this works so often. Large landlords frequently cannot use SBA financing because they are too big to qualify. The tenant usually can. So the tenant is holding the one key in the building that actually opens the door, and most tenants have no idea they are holding it.

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What to Say When You Walk In

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Ask for a business banker who does SBA lending, and arrive with a scope in your hand.

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Do not go to the teller line and do not talk to a personal banker. Ask specifically for someone who handles SBA lending. Then say something close to this.

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I have a roof problem on the building my business operates in, and I have a contractor scope with real numbers in it. I understand the SBA raised the combined 7(a) and 504 limit to ten million as of July fourth, and that the SBA itself sets no minimum credit score or time in business. I would like to know what your bank's bar is, and whether my debt service coverage supports it.

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That is the entire script. In four sentences you have told a lender that you are prepared, that you have documentation, and that you know which program you are asking about. You will be treated differently than the person who walks in and asks whether there is any money available for roofs.

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Expect thirty to ninety days. It is slow and the paperwork feels intrusive. It is also the cheapest capital most small businesses will ever be offered, over a term no other lender will match.

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Why This Keeps Failing, and it is Not the Money

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Most people quit at the paperwork, not at the interest rate.

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We will be honest about the failure mode, because pretending it does not exist helps nobody. The reason most owners never access this kind of financing has almost nothing to do with qualifying. It is that sixty days feels like forever when a ceiling tile is dripping, and a document request list feels like an accusation.

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So people give up. They patch it again. They wait for insurance to say yes, and insurance says no. Then two winters later the deck is soft, the insulation is holding water, and the number has tripled.

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The people who get funded are not smarter or better capitalized. They started the paperwork. That is the whole difference, and it is worth saying out loud because it is the one part of this entirely within your control.

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Everybody Has To Win

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Any arrangement that leaves one chair losing will fall apart, no matter how good the roof is.

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We do not write proposals designed to squeeze anybody. We have watched too many roof projects collapse at the last minute because one party at the table felt taken, and a deal where somebody feels taken does not survive to the second winter.

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The landlord has to keep his capital and gain an improved asset. The tenant has to end up with a dry building and no net cost. Maintenance has to stay valuable and stop being blamed. Finance has to see a number that fits in a plan. And yes, the contractor has to be paid properly for doing it once, correctly, instead of cheaply and twice.

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Five winners. No losers. That is not idealism, it is the only structure that actually closes.

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If you want to talk through what your own roof and your own lease look like, we will come out and walk it, photograph it, and hand you a written scope at no charge. Text your building address to 219-529-1995. Read part two, on why the maintenance department keeps getting blamed for this, at tenantROOFrights.com.

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Sources and Further Reading

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• U.S. Small Business Administration, SBA Doubles Cumulative 7(a) and 504 Loan Limit to $10 Million, May 18, 2026. sba.gov
• U.S. Small Business Administration, Small Businesses Now Eligible for $10 Million in SBA Financing, July 2026. sba.gov
• SBA Policy Notice 5000-879058, Coordination of 7(a) and 504 for Maximum Loan Limits, effective July 4, 2026.
• U.S. Small Business Administration, 7(a) Loan Program: Terms, Conditions and Eligibility, guaranty percentages. sba.gov
• 13 CFR 120.160, Loan conditions, personal guarantee requirement for twenty percent owners.
• Pristine Industrial Roofing, Maintenance Is a Thankless Job, part two of this pair.

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We are roofers, not lenders and not accountants. Confirm your own numbers with your banker and your accountant before you act on any of this.

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