I inspected a 2022-built multi-million dollar lake home today with an interesting twist. The seller was home and the buyer’s agent attended. They were both OK with everyone being there during the inspection so I just rolled with it. I looked under the shingles in several locations because the first place I inspected was interesting. And this led to a weird discussion at the end of the day when I summarized my findings for the buyer’s agent.
So this is how it all started…
I found a nice spot for my ladder against the mudroom roof between the home and garage and I started my roof inspection as always by checking the gutter and roof-edge flashing before mounting the roof deck. I lifted a couple tabs with to reveal the drip edge and underlayment and found… some. Tar paper underlayment on the left (house), none on the right (garage). 
Weird.
Needing to see more, I inspected a little to the right and left and found the house roof had underlayment, but the right side of the home (the mudroom and 3-car Garage) had none.
I checked the rear of the home as well because this was odd to find. But on the rear I found synthetic underlayment, poorly installed. It was placed several inches shy of the roof edge and didn’t even reach the top of the drip edge. Crazy.
When I was ready to summarize my findings after the inspection, the buyer’s agent invited the seller to participate because he had agreed to fix any defects. I showed them the picture of no underlayment on the garage roof
and he said “Yes, I was over here when they were putting on the roof and I saw there was no underlayment and I asked the builder why they were putting shingles directly on the OSB and he said they were using a new kind of shingle and it doesn’t need underlayment.”
Not wanting to offend a stranger in the comfort of his own home, I responded “I’m not aware of any such new tech shingles but I’ll go home and look it up… But… the rest of the home has underlayment. Two kinds of underlayment. Tarpaper on the front, synthetic on the back”.
If I were a betting man, I’d wager that the builder started out on the front of the home and ran out of tarpaper, went out and bought a few rolls of synthetic, and eventually said “F-it!” and skipped it on the whole right side of the building, all about the time the man rolled up excited as a puppy to watch the construction of his new home. And that is when high-tech direct-apply shingles were invented.
If I were a betting man.
