03: New Home Inspections & 3 Dealbreakers

Hello again, everyone, and welcome to today's show. If you're one of the 130 million people that are dealing with Sirs Lyme disease, autoimmune disease, or other conditions that are impacted by mold on a daily basis, and you need to learn how to eliminate that exposure, then you're in the right place. My name is Brian Carr, and you're listening to Mold Finders Radio.

Hey, everyone. Today I have an assessment with one of my favorite people. It's a client I've worked with a few times. Her name is Jessica. She's looking to buy a new house. And so I'm gonna go look at this new house for her. Her story is so, you know, it's so interesting, and I feel like that maybe a lot of people can relate to in some way. So just briefly about what's been going on with her. So over the last several years, she's found out that she had Lyme disease, she has chronic inflammatory response syndrome. And then a few years back, she also had a brain tumor that she had to deal with. She's had so much that she's had to overcome, and mold exposure is a major, major problem for her. And so I was working with her in her current place, and now they're deciding that they want to buy a new place. And this is not the first place I've looked at for her. This is now going to be the third one that I've looked at with her. And it's super, super important for her to be finding a place that doesn't have a mole problem. And so that's what we're going to go do. And what I wanted to just briefly touch on today is the idea of a home inspection when you're, like, purchasing a new house, right? And so with a lot of clients that I've worked with, they may have, like, recently purchased their house, and then they move in, and, you know, a few months go by and they're not feeling well. And then we come out and we find that there's a lot of hidden mold problems in the house. And the question I always get from them is, Brian, like, I just had a home inspection. We just bought this. How could the home inspector miss this stuff? What you're showing me is so obvious to me. I can't understand how this guy missed it. You know, do we have any legal recourse? Like, it's so obvious to them, once they see the pictures that they feel like that the home inspector just, like, brutally failed their job. And what I tell them is Part of a home inspection, if you're looking at a new home, has to include a mold specific assessment. Okay. You can't rely on your general home inspector to be able to do that. And the reason is.

It'S a lot like when you go to the doctor, like your general practitioner doctor, you know, let's say that you, you know, you're not feeling great, you have like a fever, maybe you have the flu or something, and you go to your kind of, you know, your family doctor and you know those guys, that type of doctor, they know a lot about, or, excuse me, a little about a lot of different things, right? So they're not specialists, but they're people who can help you with general stuff. And then if they run some tests on you and they're like, oh, wow, there's maybe something going on here that I'm not too sure about, let me refer you to this specialist who is then going to be able to focus on that for you and really figure that out. Right? So that's how it works for the medical community. And it's like a very common practice for that. It's very common for a general practitioner doctor to understand that they aren't a specialist in every single thing. And it's okay to refer someone out. Like it doesn't look bad on them to say, I don't know what is going on with this specifically. So I'm going to refer you to someone else who's an expert there, okay? And so that's how it works on the medical side. It doesn't work that way on like the home inspection, environmental side of things. The home inspector comes in and they look at the electrical and they look at the plumbing and they look at all these things and they kind of do everything. They're like this one stop shop that looks at everything. But the reality is that they're not an expert at any one of those things. Right? Like the home inspector is not the guy that you would call in if you had a plumbing leak. You would call a plumber. The home inspector is not a guy that you would call in if he had some sort of electrical issue. You would call an electrician, right? So you would call the specialist to handle these things once you're already in the house to figure out how to fix it. So why are we not having those people look at this stuff during the initial home inspection to see if there's any problems? And that's the really big disconnect in how new home purchases are handled. And so I explain this concept to People and it just is like this light bulb that goes off. You're like, oh, of course. That makes total sense. This is why, right? So home inspectors, when they go through, they have this idea that, like, you know, water damage is not a thing. They don't know anything about mold. Right. They know the very bare minimum kind of current belief about mold, which is as long as something isn't wet, there can't be mold, which is 100% not true. And as long as I'm not seeing like physical darkness, like black mold, like the pictures you see on the Internet when you search toxic mold, as long as they're not seeing that, they don't even bring it up because they don't think it's an issue. So a lot of times there's actual mold growth that they see and they don't even know that that's what it is, so they don't call it out. And other times there's water damage that has occurred that they don't call out because it's normal for houses to have leaks as far as they're concerned. So they don't think it's a problem as long as it's dry. Okay? These are two major, major, major, major problems. And so when I, you know, when I go through a house, it's looking for signs of previous water damage, it's looking for suspect looking, mold growth. That might not be the obvious thing that you see online, you know, and that's the entire process. And that's why relying on a home inspector to do your initial inspection of the house is not the only thing you should be doing. If you're mold sensitive, you got to bring in a mold specific person. If you know the house is a certain age and you're concerned about the plumbing, then you got to bring in a plumber to look at that stuff. Right? This is going to be the biggest investment that you probably make for most of us in our lives. And to rely on one set of eyes to look at this stuff, when you think about it logically, like, that doesn't make any sense at all. You know, you've got drainage issues that are a potential problem at a house. So you need to be bringing in a drainage expert to evaluate the grading. And do you have French drains where they're needed? How are the roof gutters positioned? Where are they releasing the water? These are all important things from a drainage perspective that again, a home inspector is not going to call out for you. From a mold perspective, it's where is the previous signs of water damage and they need to be tested. You got to figure out what's going on in those areas. And a home inspector's not going to call that out. So there's a lot of different things that go on during a home purchase that you need to be thinking about and use the idea. Keep the idea of the general family practitioner versus, like the cancer specialist or the brain, the neurologist or the guy who does, you know, who fixes broken bones. Like, those are all specific practices in medicine and you get referred to those people, okay, so keep that idea in your head and say, okay, we need to have the experts in this particular area come and look at these specific things. And that way we're going to protect ourselves as much as possible when we're looking to buy our new place. So that's what I'm going to do with Jessica today. She's having her general inspector. One other thing to share with you on this concept is for people that are mold sensitive, which is probably a lot of you, if you're listening to this, What I recommend to my clients is to have me come into their house first. For them, the mold issue is the most important thing in a house. And if we find problems in the house, they're not going to move forward. So it doesn't matter what the general inspector finds. It doesn't matter what the plumbing looks like. It doesn't matter what some of these other things are, because ultimately, if I'm telling them that there's something going on in this house that's not going to work for them, that's what's going to make their decision. So what I recommend for all my clients is to put the mold specific assessment on the very front end in your inspection period, your contingency inspection period. When you're buying a house. What I tell my clients is if they know that they're going to be moving forward and purchasing a house, figure out when the expected contract kind of execution date is, that's when their contingency period is going to start and get me on their schedule. That very first day we're going to come in, we're going to do the assessment, we're going to look at stuff, we're going to do some testing. If we feel like visually things look like they're manageable and it takes some time to get the testing back. So what I want to do with them is I want to give them as much time in their contingency period to be able to make these decisions. So if we're on the very Very first or second day of their contingency timeline, then we can get the testing back and we can get everything with the report maybe put together for them in like a week or so. And they might still have another four or five days on their contingency. And if that's the case, then what they do is if we give them the go ahead, what I have them do is schedule the general home inspector, the plumber, the roofer, like all the people that they need to come out and look at stuff. Schedule them after my report would have been delivered to them and give them the expectation that says, listen guys, you're going to come in, when you come in, I'm going to have five days, I'm going to have four days, whatever it is left on my contingency. I, I need to have your report and results from you within that timeframe so I can make my decision for them. It's a lot easier because they're just doing visual assessments, right. So they're not waiting on like lab results and stuff. They're just going through, they're looking at stuff. They could get that done and report to you in a day or two. So put them on the back end because you're going to be paying for them. Right. If I'm telling the client up front once I go through the whole house that it's not a good fit for them, there's no reason for them to pay for the general inspector and the plumber and the roofer and all these other people to come out. She could cancel those appointments and save the hundreds and hundreds and up to maybe even a couple thousand dollars between like the home appraiser and all these people that have to come out. She could save all that money. Right. And then you could apply it potentially to looking at the next house. So that's the flow and the order that I recommend that my clients go through when they're looking to buy a new house.

And yeah, hopefully that piece is helpful for you. One other thing I'm going to share on like looking for a new place and this kind of goes for whether you're looking for a new house or you're looking maybe to even rent something or so, I mean purchase or rent is the type of house and building to look for A couple really top end things that I recommend that my clients avoid. Try to avoid houses that are old. Right. I know that depending on where we live in the country, that might not be an option. But the older a house, the longer the history that house has, the longer the history, the more potential for leaks and other things that could have occurred over that timeline. And. And that could be impacting the house. If we could look for newer buildings, that's gonna help us with that. On the flip side, if it's super new, you might have to be dealing with, like, VOC and chemical off gassing. So the sweet spot for me is really like a place that's like three to five years old. If you could swing that, that's ideal. And if that's not possible, just try to get as new as you can to limit the history. The other thing is try to avoid having a home with a crawl space or a basement, if possible. Now, again, certain parts of the country, it's. It's more common to have basements than not, but areas under the house is where water accumulates. If you have poor drainage problems or you sit on a high water table, and what happens is that your home starts to basically sit on, like, a petri dish of mold and bacteria and stuff, and that moves upward to the house. So that could cause a really big problem in terms of exposure in the house. If you could find a home that doesn't have that, then that's one thing off the list that you don't have to worry about down the road. Okay. The third thing is if you can avoid a place that has a flat roof. So the reason a flat roof is an issue is because water doesn't drain off the roof properly. It ends up accumulating, and over time, it can deteriorate like the membranes in the roof that are sealing it, and you can actually start getting roof leaks. So roof leaks and flat roofs are pretty common. If you can avoid that, you're going to avoid a potential problem in the future. Those are three super, super easy things that you can kind of put on a checklist when you're looking for a new place. Now, there's more things that we could be talking about, but I don't have time to go into all of that on this podcast or on this episode. So between the concept of what a home inspector really does, looking at specialized inspectors to come in and supplement that, and then understanding the type of places maybe to target for you to live in, these are two things that you can think about when you're looking for a new place to live that should have a really big impact on. On how you would be able to react in that place.

So that's it for today's show, everyone. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, please take a moment and subscribe and give a rating wherever you get your podcasts. It'll help spread the word to those who really need it the most.