Territory Intel drop · Roofing
Cook County roofs are a one-product market.
The assessor codes a roof material on 1,114,270 residential parcels. Almost nine in ten of them say the same thing. When every competitor sells the identical product onto the identical substrate, the season is decided by who reads the replacement clock better, and the clock is on the public record.
89.4%Asphalt shingle share, countywideAssessor · n=1,114,270
23 of 38Townships at 90%+ asphaltAssessor
95.3%Of asphalt homes built 2001 or earlierAssessor
876,704Asphalt homes 25+ yrs with no roof permit on fileAssessor × county permits
01 · The mix
Six materials on the file. One of them is the market.
The Cook County Assessor records a roof material for 1,114,270 of the county's 1,114,335 residential parcels. Sixty-five are blank and sit outside every percentage on this page. Of the rest, 996,375 carry asphalt shingle. That is 89.4%.
Tar and gravel takes 8.2%. After that the tail falls off a cliff: shake at 0.79%, a catch-all "other" at 0.63%, tile at 0.56%, slate at 0.38%. Combine tile and slate, the two materials a roofer would call a specialty line, and you get 10,431 homes in a county of 1.11 million. Under one percent.
The read for contractors
Product differentiation has almost no surface to work on here. Every crew is quoting the same material onto the same kind of deck, so the sales advantage has to come from somewhere other than the shingle: from knowing which blocks are due, and which already bought.
Roof material mixAssessor roof_material · n=1,114,270
02 · The exception hunt
We went looking for a premium pocket. It isn't there.
County averages hide local markets, so the objection writes itself: somewhere in 38 townships there must be a tile enclave or a slate corridor worth specializing for. We tested it directly, ranking every township on every non-asphalt material and taking the maximum.
Tile peaks in River Forest at 8.87%, which is 263 homes. Slate peaks in the same township at 8.84%, another 262 homes. Shake does better and peaks in Barrington at 22.92%, 1,319 homes out of that township's 5,755. Barrington is the closest thing this county has to a material-mix market, and it is one township of 38 with roughly thirteen hundred homes in play.
The read for contractors
A specialty-material strategy in Cook County has a ceiling of a few thousand homes spread across two or three townships. That can be a fine niche business. It cannot be a growth plan, and it will never be the thing that decides a season.
Peak township share, by materialAssessor · best township for each
| Material | Peak township | Share | Homes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shake | Barrington | 22.92% | 1,319 |
| Tile | River Forest | 8.87% | 263 |
| Slate | River Forest | 8.84% | 262 |
03 · The second material
Tar and gravel is a roof shape, not a roof choice.
The one place asphalt genuinely loses share is the dense city stock, and the reason is geometry. Flat and low-slope buildings cannot take shingle, so they show up as tar and gravel. North Chicago township is 62.5% tar and gravel and only 32.0% asphalt, the single township in the county where asphalt is a minority material. Lake View is 41.2% tar and gravel. West Chicago, 34.4%.
Those are different trades with different crews and different economics, and a shingle contractor does not compete for that work. Strip the flat-roof stock out of the picture and the pitched-roof market is close to uniform: 23 of the county's 38 townships are at least 90% asphalt, and the top of that list sits at 99.0% in both Bremen and Schaumburg.
It is worth saying plainly how unusual that is. In tile and metal regions, the Gulf coast of Florida or the desert Southwest, material is a live commercial variable: crews specialize by product, warranty structures and price points diverge sharply between lines, and a contractor's material mix is part of how it positions against the shop down the road. We have not measured those markets in these datasets and we are not putting a number on them here. The structural contrast holds on the Cook figures alone. A contractor elsewhere can win by owning a product category. In Cook County that category is already everyone's.
The read for contractors
Know which side of the geometry line your territory sits on before you buy a list. A campaign built for pitched asphalt that lands in North Chicago or Lake View is spending most of its postage on buildings that structurally cannot buy what you sell.
Asphalt share, extremesAssessor · 38 townships
04 · The cycle
With product fixed, the clock is the whole variable.
The median asphalt-roofed home in Cook County was built in 1955. Of the 996,361 asphalt homes carrying a build year on the file, 949,667 were built in 2001 or earlier. That is 95.3% of the county's dominant-material stock sitting at 25 years or more.
The era breakdown is blunt. 28.9% of asphalt homes predate 1940. Another 31.9% went up between 1940 and 1959, the postwar bulge that still defines this market. 23.9% are 1960 to 1979. Only 10.5% were built 1980 through 2001, and a thin 4.7% since 2002.
Here is why that matters more than it looks. When 95% of a single-material market is past 25 years, build age has stopped sorting anything. Everybody's list is old. The homes that separate a profitable campaign from a break-even one are the ones that are old and have no replacement on record, and only the second half of that test does any work.
Cross the two layers and the cohort appears. Of those 949,667 aged asphalt homes, 72,963 carry a roof permit in the county file. The other 876,704 do not: 92.3% of the aged asphalt cohort, and 78.7% of every residential parcel in Cook County. Push the age band out to 40 years, built 1986 or earlier, and 809,273 asphalt homes still show no roof permit on file.
The read for contractors
876,704 homes is not a target list, it is the raw pool before any real filtering. What makes it useful is the direction of travel: in a one-product market the only durable edge is subtraction, and permit history is the cheapest subtraction available.
Asphalt-roofed homes by build eraAssessor · n=996,361
05 · The honest caveat
What "no permit on file" is actually worth.
Two limits on that 876,704, and anyone selling you a list off this data should state both.
The first is the window. The county's roof-permit file holds 94,645 records, and 94,612 of them are dated 2018 or later. That is 99.97%. Only 33 records predate 2018. So an absence of permit means no roof permit inside roughly an eight-year window. It does not establish that the roof was never replaced.
The second is coverage, and it is the bigger one. Permit density varies by two orders of magnitude across townships because it depends on which municipalities report into the county file. Calumet township has 4,651 parcels and zero roof permits on record. Norwood Park has one, across 8,203 parcels. Proviso has 105 across 42,151, or 0.25%. At the other end, Palos sits at 29.2% permit coverage and Evanston at 26.6%.
That spread measures municipal filing practice, and only incidentally measures roofs. Rank townships by "homes with no permit" and you will hand your best score to whichever town simply doesn't report, which is how a targeting model quietly starts optimizing for bad data. The defensible move is to compare suppression rates only inside comparable coverage. Eleven townships have permit coverage at 15% or better; among them the aged-asphalt cohort is measurably worked over at very different rates, from 29.5% already permitted in Palos down to 16.4% in Lemont.
The read for contractors
In a permit-dense township you can genuinely net out the buyers before you print. In a permit-thin one you are working blind on that layer and should lean harder on stock age, storm history, and ownership. Knowing which situation you are in is worth more than any single number on this page.
Permit-dense townships · aged asphalt cohortAssessor × county permits · coverage ≥15%
| Township | Asphalt 25+ yrs | No permit | Permitted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Palos | 12,442 | 8,770 | 29.5% |
| Evanston | 10,820 | 7,803 | 27.9% |
| Worth | 41,844 | 33,253 | 20.5% |
| Cicero | 10,858 | 8,658 | 20.3% |
| Berwyn | 11,174 | 8,966 | 19.8% |
| Hanover | 21,519 | 17,392 | 19.2% |
| Rich | 19,954 | 16,227 | 18.7% |
| Riverside | 4,953 | 4,027 | 18.7% |
| Bremen | 30,945 | 25,316 | 18.2% |
| Oak Park | 9,814 | 8,073 | 17.7% |
| Lemont | 5,703 | 4,769 | 16.4% |
Method & sources
Every figure on this page was computed for this brief from two official public-record datasets: the Cook County Assessor's residential property-characteristics file (1,114,335 parcels, fields used: roof material, year built, township) and the county roof-permit record (94,645 parcels with at least one roof permit, joined on parcel identifier). Roof-material percentages use a denominator of 1,114,270 parcels with the field populated; 65 blank values are excluded. Build-era percentages use a denominator of 996,361 asphalt-shingle parcels with a year built populated; 14 asphalt parcels lack one and are excluded. "25+ years" means a recorded build year of 2001 or earlier as of 2026; "40+ years" means 1986 or earlier. Township figures exclude the 9,465 roof-coded parcels carrying no township name on the file.
The permit layer carries two documented limits, both stated in section 05 rather than buried here: 99.97% of its records are dated 2018 or later, so absence of a permit describes an eight-year window only, and permit density varies from 0.0% of parcels in Calumet township to 29.2% in Palos because municipal reporting into the county file is uneven. No figure on this page is a statement about any individual property, and nothing here is a claim about the condition of any roof. All counts are aggregate at township level or higher, built from public county records.
The same layers, scored neighborhood by neighborhood alongside storm history, roof size modeled from public LiDAR, and ownership, are what a Territory X-Ray runs on.
Cook County Assessor · roof material, year built, township
County permit records · roof permits by parcel
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