One of the oldest styles of billboard structures in America are what are called “roof mounts” – signs that are physically built into roofs of buildings as their structural support. Dating from around the 1920s to 1960s, most cities will no longer allow you to build these, but they sometimes come on the market to buy. In this Billboard Mastery podcast we’re going to review the history of this type of sign and what you need to know if you are looking at buying or operating one.
Episode 149: All About Roof Mounts Transcript
Have you ever looked at old books about billboards, pictures of billboards back before they invented color photography that are black and white, maybe from the 1920s, 1930s, old Model T Fords or Model A Fords lined up down the roadway with the billboard that they're all looking at? Many of those billboards are not on a steel pole, they're not on steel I-beams, they're not even on telephone poles. But they're attached to the roofs of buildings. That style of billboard is called the roof mount, and there's many interesting wrinkles you need to know about that type of structure. This is Frank Rolfe with the Billboard Mastery Podcast. We're gonna talk all about roof mounts, where they came from, what they are, the things you need to know.
So a roof mount is just that. It is a billboard that is built structurally into the roof of a building. It's got big metal beams, I-beams that are attached to the actual superstructure of the building. Now, it's a strange concept, right, 'cause to do that you had to build the billboard as part of the building when it was built. You can't later go in and add that on. It can't support the weight. So those billboards are probably one of the oldest style signs in America. Those things are as old as the concept of nailing four-by-eight sheets of plywood on trees that they did down on Route 66 back in the day. And the roof mounts are very, very visible because being on top of a building, you're way up in the air, typically free from obstruction. And they typically tried to build them in buildings where you had a nice old curve in the road going straight into the building. So those signs typically have excellent visibility, great locations, right in the heart of downtown. But there's some problems you need to be aware of when it comes to operating these signs.
Now, the first thing you have to know about roof mounts and the reason we don't see any new ones anymore is because most cities in the United States banned them from new construction. They realized by having that sign on the roof, if that building caught fire, that 15 or 20 or 30,000-pound sign could come tumbling through the building, risking death to the firemen or the people in the building. But yet most of the time those signs were grandfathered. The city said, "You can't build any more of them, but I guess we'll go ahead and let the ones that are there exist." And that's why you still see roof mounts today, but you don't see any new ones going up. I haven't seen a roof mount go up in three decades. So it is by far the rarest, rarest form of outdoor advertising.
But because it's on top of a roof, there's some certain wrinkles that come with that type of structure. First one is access. To get to that billboard, you have to get onto the roof. And that makes things very, very complicated. Now, it's much easier today than it used to be, because back in the olden days, if you wanted to change out the copy on the sign, you had to get all that painter's equipment on the roof of the building. That means you had to basically drop ropes with pulleys from the roof to try and haul all that stuff up. Today, with vinyl, it's different. You can carry a vinyl up the stairs. You can carry the ratchets up the stairs. You can actually now service billboards just using the conventional way that people get onto the roof. That's a huge plus. But you'll have to arrange for access. You can't just show up when you want. It has to be on a specific day at a specific time. And additionally, you may have to pay some kind of fee to the building to have somebody there to let you up on the roof and perhaps even watch over you. So access becomes a big issue with roof mounts.
Another does any kind of structural work. Let's say you wanna change out the panels on the billboard. Well, you'll have to get a big old crane to lift those panels up there and to lift the other ones down. Your operating expense typically on roof mounts goes much, much higher than any other type of sign because of all of these different access issues. And then you have the insurance problems, because when you have a sign on a roof way up in the sky, it gets a lot of wind load, and if anything goes wrong, if that sign face comes flying off that billboard, it will do massive amounts of property damage. I once had a billboard in downtown Dallas, right in the heart of downtown. It wasn't a roof mount. It was an I-beam, an older structure in a parking lot. And there was one of those big old storms that went through Dallas like happens from time to time, and it took that billboard face off that sign and it threw it through the lobby of an office building. Just smashed out all the windows, smashed all the lobby furniture, came to a rest right by the front desk. Lucky it didn't kill the guy who was the security guard overnight. Very, very expensive claim.
Now, the good news was I had insurance and my insurance covered it. But you better make sure you've got good insurance at the right amounts or do not touch a roof mount, because there's many, many ways that if there's a wind issue, it will be much worse in that building. Also, you have to understand how your lights work when you have a roof mount, because typically your wiring is not being fed power from the power department, it's coming from something inside the building itself. You've got to make sure you have adequate amounts of power to operate those lights, and you gotta find out who you're gonna pay, how the bill works, how you ultimately get money in the hands of the person who actually was inflicted with the bill that comes in. You also have to make sure when you have a roof mount that you understand the issues of blockage, because that building over time, if it wants to update itself, it may change the roofline with a false roof, something like that. You have to make sure that you have in your lease the ability to stop anyone from building something in front of your sign, which would in fact destroy the value.
And you have to make sure you really understand your permittings and where you sit on permits. It's possible the city has some kind of sunset provision of trying to remove all the roof mounts. You've got to make sure that you have a good permit, full in force and effect, such that when you buy that roof mount sign, you don't realize, even though you put a 10-year loan on it, that in year two the city is making you remove it. Now, roof mounts can be wonderful, just like wallscapes. You're taking all of the force of mother nature and applying that to a physical, inanimate object like a building, so your engineering and construction costs are much, much lower. So I have nothing bad to say about roof mounts at all. I know that some of them are the most remarkably high-visible signs that you will find. But it's critical if you're gonna dabble in the roof mount market, if you're gonna look at buying those, that you fully understand what you're getting into. This is Frank Rolfe with the Billboard Mastery Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.