A growing sector: Metal roofing

By Emma Peterson. 

Brian McLaughlin shares insights on the exponential growth of the metal roofing market over the last 15 years. 

Recently, the metal roofing industry has experienced rapid growth. In this MetalTalk, Karen Edwards sits down with Carlisle Architectural Metals (CAM) Director of Associations, Brian McLaughlin, to talk about that growth. Brian first joined the metal industry in 2009 as a customer service rep at Drexel Metals. He worked his way up through Drexel, before joining CAM two years ago.  

Over his 15-year career in the metal space, he has watched it grow substantially. Brian explained, “Looking back at when I first started 15 years ago on the residential side, our market share was about 7%, give or take. Now we're talking about 18%! And in the last five years, it saw a spike of about 5%.” While the commercial side has always had a bigger market share (23-24%), there has also been significant growth there as more people are learning of the benefits of metal.  

This raised awareness can be credited to a variety of different sources, such as the increase in severe weather events. Brian explained, “Over the last 5-10 years, we've seen an influx of natural disasters. We constantly have hurricanes in the southeast. We have a lot of great standards with Miami-Dade and Florida building code, but you're also seeing a lot of hail. You're also seeing a tremendous number of fires now with the devastation that happened in Southern California and the Carolinas. And so, folks end up looking to metal roofing because it has high wind resistance, it is impact resistant against hail and it's class A fire rated.” 

In addition to this environmental factor, there have also been some distinct initiatives within the industry that have been working towards this growth. Brian shared, “I just saw an article about the great work that Metal Roof Alliance has done. One of the cool things that they're targeting for 24-28% growth on the commercial side and a 19% residential market share growth, which is exciting.”  

Another example of this is the Sherwin-Williams MetalVue program. This program is designed to help contractors who sell metal and those that want to diversify and start offering metal. Brian explained, “It gives access to those companies to gain knowledge on how to sell metal, how to install metal, having sample kits on how to do an in-home presentations. It's creating more demand because you're in a segment that typically wasn't talking about metal before. So we're seeing really good progress and impact because of that.” Overall, this exponential growth of the metal industry can be boiled down to the fact that metal is a high-performance, durable product and people are continuing to realize that.  

Read the transcript, Listen to the episode or Watch the conversation to learn more about the metal roofing industry and its growth.