Roofing in Irving, TX: Hail Country Over a City Built Mostly Before 1990

Irving fills about 67 square miles of western Dallas County, a dozen miles from downtown Dallas, with DFW International Airport against its western edge and some 258,000 people inside it. It is really two cities stacked on one map: an ordinary postwar suburb platted in the 1950s and 1960s around the old townsite, with two very large planned districts laid over the top — Las Colinas, begun in 1972, and Valley Ranch, built out from the 1970s behind levees on the Trinity floodplain. Roofs in the two halves are rarely the same age and rarely need the same thing.

The census puts numbers to it. Irving holds 103,492 housing units with a median year built of 1987. The single largest wave went up in the 1980s: 22,883 units, about 22 percent of everything standing. Add the decades before it and 56 percent of Irving’s housing was finished before 1990, with a third of it built before 1980. This is not a new-construction city, and the roofs reflect it.

Most of Irving Is Not on Its First Roof

Run that arithmetic against an asphalt roof and the picture gets concrete. A house from Irving’s 1980s peak has stood for close to forty years, and nothing in the composition-shingle world lasts that long. Almost every one of those homes is on a second covering, some on a third, and the ones that are not are conspicuously overdue. In the older southern core — Plymouth Park, Irving Heights, the streets around the Heritage and Hospital districts — what is nailed down now was often chosen by a previous owner in a hurry after a storm.

The newer clusters in Las Colinas and Valley Ranch have the opposite problem: their roofs went on in batches. When a district is finished in a few concentrated years by the same builders using the same product, the whole neighbourhood ages together, and “three houses on my street just got new roofs” is a fact about your roof rather than gossip about theirs.

One Irving-specific wrinkle saves people a wasted phone call. Of 93,239 occupied homes here, only 33,405 are owner-occupied — about 36 percent. This is a majority-renter city with a great deal of condominium and townhome stock, and in most of those communities the roof is common property belonging to the association rather than the person living under it. If you own a detached house, the roof is yours to decide about. If you are in a townhome or condo, the first call is to your board, and we are happy to talk to them.

What North Texas Weather Does to an Irving Roof

Irving is North Texas, not the Gulf Coast, and the difference matters. Nobody here is boarding up for a hurricane. What arrives instead is hail, and it arrives with a bill.

Hail. Texas leads the nation comfortably: NOAA data published by the Insurance Information Institute recorded 902 hail events in Texas in 2025 against 375 in second-place Kansas, out of 5,432 nationwide. Dallas–Fort Worth has also produced two of the costliest hailstorms in American history — the Mayfest storm of 5 May 1995, softball-size stones and roughly $1.1 billion in insured losses, and 13 June 2012, about $900 million. Afterwards, the damage that matters is the damage nobody can see from the ground: a stone bruises the asphalt mat under the surface, knocks the granule cover loose, or fractures a shingle that goes on lying perfectly flat. Soft metal tells the truth first, which is why we start on the gutters, vent caps, flashing and ridge caps.

Wind. The same North Texas supercells that drop hail bring damaging straight-line winds with them, and wind concentrates its work on edges — ridges, hips and rakes. A shingle that gets lifted, creased and then set back down looks entirely normal from the kerb and is no longer sealed to the course beneath it. It waits for rain arriving at the right angle.

Heat. May is Irving’s wettest month on average, putting the worst of the storm season squarely in spring — and then July arrives. The record here is 112 degrees, set in 1980, and summer cycles an asphalt roof thermally every day: sealant strips dry out, the mat turns brittle, granules let go more easily. A roof cooked through August meets the following April’s hail in worse shape than its age suggests.

Repair, Replace, or Leave an Irving Roof Alone

Three genuinely different answers, and an Irving roof can honestly need any of them. A few wind-lifted shingles along one rake and a split pipe boot on a 2006 Valley Ranch house is a roof repair, and anyone saying otherwise is selling. A 1987 roof in south Irving that has given up most of its granule cover is a different conversation, where patching the visible spot buys a season and may cost you the roof replacement your policy owed you. And plenty of roofs simply want leaving alone a few more years — an answer we give often.

What decides it is the condition of the mat, how many slopes are involved, and how many hail seasons the covering has already absorbed — none of which is visible in a photograph. That is why the roof inspection comes first and costs nothing. While we are up there we look at what is moving air through the attic too, because poor roof ventilation quietly shortens a shingle’s life in a climate this hot.

The Claim Is the Other Half of the Job

In hail country the shingles are often the easier part. Our founder, Remington, came into roofing from the insurance industry, which is why this company works the way it does: we photograph what is genuinely on the deck, show you what those photographs mean, and handle the roofing insurance coverage side alongside you. If the honest finding is that there is no claim here, that is what you will hear, before anyone pulls anything off your house.

Two things worth knowing in a city this exposed. A post-storm inspection is worth doing even when the roof looks untouched, because on a hail roof it usually does. And a big spring storm pulls crews in from several states within a week, so it is entirely reasonable to ask who is standing on your driveway. Our hail damage assessment and wind damage assessment pages set out what we look for; the longer hail damage guide walks through the process.

Irving Is Covered From McKinney, and We Will Say So

R&S does not have an office in Irving, and we are not going to invent one. Irving is worked from our Dallas–Fort Worth office in McKinney, roughly thirty-seven miles away across the northern arc of the metroplex, the natural run being the Bush Turnpike and SH 121 corridor. We are not going to promise you an arrival time from that distance either, because the tollway decides that and we do not. What we will do is set a real appointment and keep it.

Once we are actually inside Irving, the map does most of the work. SH 183, the Airport Freeway, runs east to west through the middle; I-635 caps the north; SH 114, the John W. Carpenter Freeway, cuts through Las Colinas and crosses the President George Bush Turnpike in an X near its centre; Loop 12 and Irving Boulevard carry the older south side. On the ground people navigate by MacArthur Boulevard and Belt Line Road, then Walnut Hill, Royal, Story, Valley View and O’Connor. For landmarks: the Mustangs at Williams Square, the Mandalay Canal and Lake Carolyn, the Toyota Music Factory, the University of Dallas, Irving Mall, and the ground where Texas Stadium stood.

School districts are the local detail outsiders get wrong, so for the record: Irving ISD covers most of the city and runs Irving, MacArthur, Nimitz, Singley and Cardwell high schools — but not Valley Ranch or parts of Las Colinas, which fall to Coppell ISD and Carrollton–Farmers Branch ISD, with Grapevine–Colleyville and Dallas ISD taking slices as well.

Irving Neighborhoods We Work In

These are neighbourhood and homeowner associations registered with the City of Irving, from the older south side through Las Colinas and Valley Ranch:

• Las Colinas
• Valley Ranch
• Hackberry Creek
• Cottonwood Valley
• University Hills
• Plymouth Park
• Irving Heights
• South Irving Heights
• Barton Estates
• Bear Creek
• Sherwood Forest

• Garden Oaks
• Grauwyler Heights
• Northgate Heights
• Nichols Park
• Meadow Lark
• Stonegate
• Woodhaven
• Timberlake
• Trinity Oaks
• Fox Glen
• Emerald Valley
• Granada Hills

• High Point Estates
• Ranch Oaks
• Turtle Lake Estates
• Valencia Estates
• Graff Farms
• Alto Vista
• Revere Place
• Hillcrest Oaks
• Broadmoor Hills
• Beverly Oaks
• Pioneer Hill

We work the older core inside the Heritage, Hospital and Arts districts too, and the streets still carrying the names of the farming settlements Irving absorbed — Kit, Sowers, Union Bower, Twin Wells and Estelle. Registering an association with the city is voluntary, so that list is real but not complete. If your subdivision is not on it, give us the name; we cover it anyway.

Start With the Symptom, Not the Shingle

Describe the symptom — a brown ring on a ceiling, grit at the bottom of a downspout, a shingle that lifted in an April storm and never sat back down, or a 1980s house whose roof nobody has looked at in a decade — and somebody from R&S will come out, get on it and tell you what is up there. Our Google rating stands at 5.0 across 294 reviews, and the reviews put it better than we can.

Irving is part of the Dallas–Fort Worth side of the business, worked alongside Dallas next door, Richardson and Plano up the LBJ corridor, and Flower Mound north across SH 114.

What Irving Homeowners Ask Us Most