At AmeriTop Roofing in Wilmington, the roof is sometimes only the first job
Raised among his father’s contractor friends, Richard Linville runs a Wilmington roofing company that will also build the deck or the retaining wall.
Wilmington, NC
Richard Linville had come out for a shingle repair, and his crew was partway through it when the homeowner asked for more: clean the gutters and fix a loose downspout. Linville did both and made them look as good as new, the homeowner wrote afterward in a Google review. The same customer planned to call Linville back to seal his crawl space.
Saying yes to the next job over is a habit at AmeriTop Roofing Contractors. Roofs are the core of the work, but customers also describe back porches, decks and a retaining wall built after a pool went in. The company seals crawl spaces, too.
Linville comes by the range honestly. His father was a contractor, though not a roofer. “He did more framing and flooring, stuff like that,” Linville says. “All his friends were contractors.”
“I’ve just been around it my whole life,” he says.
He worked in the trade for others before he started his own company. “I was actually in the business before I went into business for myself,” he says. The company’s site puts his background in roofing and siding at more than 15 years.
AmeriTop started in Eden, in Rockingham County near the Virginia line. Linville later opened an office on the coast, and the company’s listed address is now on North Front Street in downtown Wilmington. The service area runs through the eastern part of the state, from Navassa and Topsail Island to Jacksonville, New Bern and Havelock. The list still names Eden and Reidsville, and the office number still carries the 336 area code of the Piedmont Triad.
On the residential side, the work is shingle and metal roofs, gutters and siding. One customer noted that the company installs CertainTeed shingles; another had a metal roof put on in Supply, in Brunswick County. AmeriTop works with insurance companies on storm claims. One family whose roof was replaced that way wrote that the crew held to its contract and its schedule, and that when the old roof turned out to be hiding rotten wood, Linville did all he could to see them treated right as the entire roof deck was replaced.
The commercial side is bigger than the reviews suggest. Linville says he has one crew of about 45 people, most of them on commercial work. A commercial roof of 500 or 600 squares, or 50,000 to 60,000 square feet, takes that crew about eight days, he says. The company lists the flat and low-slope systems it installs: TPO, EPDM rubber, PVC, modified bitumen and built-up roofs.
He doesn’t favor one side over the other. “We take them all,” he says.
Roofing is not his only business. He has a partner in a second company that builds houses. “We develop houses, too,” he says. He does not plan to stop at two. “I really want to do eight companies,” he says.
What customers mention most is how he explains things. The shingle-repair customer wrote that Linville pointed out exactly where the water was getting in, and why, before any work was scheduled. The retaining-wall customer wrote that he was patient through what the customer counted as ten thousand questions. In its public reply, the company said it loves questions and told the customer to keep them coming.
Linville tries to be done with his own day by 4:30 or 5, he says. The crews stretch when a job calls for it. One customer was glad to find roofers who would come on a Saturday, and another wrote that the crew building a back porch kept working through the rain to stay on schedule.