(214) 807-0414Request an assessmentCollin County
Collin County's housing went up fast and recently, which makes the roofs young and the failures specific. A roof still inside its expected life that is letting water in is nearly always failing at a detail rather than wearing out — and that is a different assessment from the one an older roof needs.
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What is different here
Three things that decide how a roof job goes in this city, and that are not the same one town over.
Inside city limits, the city does — not Collin County. Each city in the county publishes its own roofing permit rule, and in this metroplex those rules genuinely differ from one another. The county's own permitting applies to unincorporated land, so for an address inside any city limit it is the city's rule that governs and the city's inspector who attends.
Within Collin County we cover Plano, Frisco and McKinney. Frisco extends into Denton County; the permitting authority remains the City of Frisco either way.
Collin Central Appraisal District carries build years that are unusually reliable here, because most of it went up recently and in large phases. That makes the recorded year a decent proxy for when the original roof went on — which is a useful starting point and still not a finding about the roof itself.
Local context
Overwhelmingly post-1980 and much of it post-2000: two-storey brick and stone traditionals, steeper pitches than the county's older housing, stacked gables and dormers, and on the larger plans turret sections and multiple valleys. McKinney is the exception with a genuinely old core near the square, where pre-war frame and brick sit alongside additions that were made later and lower.
Clustering and complexity together. Whole streets were roofed within a season or two of each other and reach the end of their service life together, which is why a replacement is easy to sell here on the strength of the neighbours' skips. Age is a reason to look. The condition of the planes, the flashings and the valleys is what settles it.
Several cities in this metroplex sit across a county boundary, and a few sit across three. It changes nothing about who permits the work — that follows the city limits, not the county — but it does change which appraisal district holds the property record, and it is a common source of confusion when someone is trying to find out what is on file about a house. If an address is near a line, check the city first: the city is the one that will inspect the roof.
Questions
In construction terms it is usually a detail that was not built correctly, which is a different thing from a covering that has worn out — and on the young housing across this county it is much the more common of the two. What we can do is document where water is entering and what the assembly looks like at that point. Who is responsible for it, and whether any warranty reaches it, is a contractual question and not one we advise on.
Two things. Nothing has been hidden under a second layer, so what is on the deck becomes knowable at tear-off rather than staying a guess. And there is usually only one set of documents to find, because only one roof has ever been installed — often by the builder, sometimes with a manufacturer registration behind it. It is worth looking for that paperwork before assuming none exists; on a house of this age it frequently does.
Only if you are near it, and there it matters a great deal. The core around McKinney's square holds pre-war frame and brick with later, lower additions, and those roofs behave nothing like the post-2000 houses that make up the rest of Collin County: different pitches, different assemblies underneath, and in places an overlay controlling what the roof is allowed to look like. It is the one part of this county where the county-wide description stops being useful.
Not if the property is inside a city. The city that the address belongs to runs the inspection, under whatever code cycle that city has adopted, and two neighbouring cities in this county can be on different cycles. County inspection applies to unincorporated land. The seat of Collin County is McKinney, and that is an administrative fact rather than a routing instruction — do not send a permit question there because a property is in the county.
Assessment request
Short, routing-only questions. Nothing here asks you to diagnose the roof yourself.