Many property research products pick a side. Commercial tools read parcels and building footprints; residential tools read rooftops and neighborhoods. Many installers and service companies work both, often out of the same yard with the same crews.
We screen commercial and residential properties in the same territory, against the same written criteria. Doing that well means accepting that the two stocks answer the same question from very different evidence.
The question is the same
Whether it is a 40,000-square-foot warehouse or a three-bedroom house, the screening question does not change: is this roof worth a site visit, and what would you need to know first? What changes is the evidence that answers it.
What a commercial roof is ranked on
- Contiguous usable area after curbs, rooftop units, skylights, and fire-code setbacks, measured from imagery and building footprints.
- Roof system and the date of the last permitted roof work, because a replacement due in three years changes what goes on the deck now.
- Ownership path — owner-occupied, single-tenant net lease, or multi-tenant — which decides who can say yes.
- Utility and tariff context, which changes the economics of the same roof from one service territory to the next.
Commercial evidence is mostly about the building and the entity that owns it. There are fewer properties, more to learn about each, and a real risk of trusting a measured area further than it goes — roof area estimates are screening evidence, not a design.
What a residential street is ranked on
- Roof plane orientation and pitch, read from imagery and from elevation data where it exists.
- Shading from mature trees and neighboring structures, which is where residential screens most often go wrong in old imagery.
- The assessor's roof-cover and year-built fields and residential reroof permits, which indicate where a roof is in its life.
- Existing arrays, and how PV permits cluster by subdivision: one installation often marks a street where the builder, the roof type, and the orientation repeat.
Residential evidence is about the plane and the pattern. There are many more properties, less to learn about each one, and far more value in how they group. The same reading drives service work on existing systems, covered in how to find solar panel repair customers.
Why one screen instead of two
One territory screen means one boundary, one set of exclusions, and one drive-time model. A crew's week can pair a commercial site visit in the morning with a residential street in the afternoon when the two are ten minutes apart, and only a combined ranking shows that.
It also keeps the criteria honest. When both stocks are ranked against rules written down in advance, a commercial property cannot outrank a residential street just because its record happens to be richer.
How to write the criteria for a mixed territory
A mixed screen works best when the brief is explicit about each stock. The criteria for a warehouse and for a house are different sections of one brief that share a boundary.
- A floor for each stock: a minimum contiguous area for commercial roofs, and a minimum plane size and orientation window for houses.
- One set of exclusions that applies to both, such as roof systems you do not work on, or property types outside the offer.
- One drive-time model from the yard, so a commercial site and a residential street are compared on the same travel cost.
- A stated weighting between the two, if your crews have a preference, so the ranking does not quietly decide the mix for you.
Written down in advance, those four lines are what make the final list checkable. Without them, a mixed ranking is just two lists interleaved.
Where the evidence differs, the limits do too
Commercial records carry more detail and more complexity: ownership chains, leases, and management companies that the assessor record only partly shows. Residential records are thinner per property, and imagery recency matters more, because trees grow and small arrays appear between flights.
- Neither establishes owner intent, or consent to be contacted.
- Neither establishes structural capacity, electrical service size, or the condition of an existing system.
- Residential screening does not establish household income, credit, or finances, and it should never imply that it does.
Each property in a mixed ranking carries the limits that apply to its own type. That is what lets both be read as one list — and it is why the sample report states a limitation beside every rank rather than once at the bottom.