176: Tips for Home Buyers to Avoid Mold

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.

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Hey, how are we doing today? We are talking about a topic that came in through my email community. I've been sending out emails to you guys and asking for stuff that you want me to talk about on the podcast. So before I get started, if you guys want to get on that list, so then you can respond to those emails and ask me questions that I will then answer on the show. All you have to do is go to yesweinspect.com join it's yesweinspect.com join and join and then you'll get the emails where I asked for topics and that's what we're at today. So topic we're talking about today is what is the difference between inspecting a new home that you're looking to purchase as opposed to, like a home that you currently live in? Is it different? Is it not different? It's a really common question. I've heard. I've heard it a lot. And so I thought I'd talk about it because we're all in these places. I'm actually in the. In that place of looking for a new house right now. I think in the next year we're probably going to move. So I'm starting to kind of put my eye out, see what's happening, what's going on with the market, blah, blah, blah. But then I'm looking at pictures online. I'm like, nope, nope, yes, yes, nope, nope. Like, very easily, right? I'll even tell you what my plan is on trying to buy a place right now. Maybe I'll start there. My plan on trying to buy a place right now is I actually want to wait for the market to come down a little bit because I think we're at that point. But this podcast isn't about real estate trends. So I am waiting a little bit. But what my, what my goal is, and I think what I want to do, and I've always wanted to. I've talked about this on the show before. I don't really want to buy a place that is finished and done because a couple reasons, One, if you buy a place is finished and done, you're Paying top retail dollar on that because they think everything is fine. But I know coming in, and you guys all know coming in that even if a place is supposed to be done, there's going to be mold problems or water damage problems in those places and the sellers are not going to think it's a problem. And then you're going to be in this position where you need money for remediation but there's no credits or discounts on the house available to you because they don't think there's any problems. And then if you do move into that house, you end up paying more for some of the remediation that has to happen to just make it a healthy place for you. And now you're over invested and overleveraged in a home where the value of the home doesn't equal the money you've put into it. So you're coming into the home underwater almost, right? So I don't want that. Right. So what I want is to be able to go into a place. I know that I'm going to have to remediate. I've said this many times. At minimum, at minimum three to five areas in a new house that I go into. At minimum that's just what you're going to have to do. Sinks, cabinets, areas I showered. This just stuff that happens, right? And so I know that if I'm doing that then I need to be coming into a property where I'm getting a discount off of retail pricing where, where at minimum I could cover those remediation costs right. Now the nice thing about that, a little bit if you think about it, is usually the places where the mold problems are at least most frequently are going to be in areas that you may want to update and fix anyway. In a house, right? A kitchen, a bathroom, you know, maybe they're, maybe they're outdated a little bit. Maybe it'd be nice to have them look a little nicer or do whatever you want. And we also know that kitchens and bathrooms and those types of areas drive value up on a house, right? So like if you're ever going to resale it, sell it. Those are the places you want to do work in. You don't want to do work on your electrical. Like that's not helping you sell your house, right? But making a kitchen pretty or a bathroom pretty, that will help you add value to your house. So my mindset going into a place is I want to find a place that's in a good neighborhood but is outdated. I want to find a place that's been on the market for a little bit because something's, you know, it's not easy for somebody to come in and just do turnkey. Turnkey places fly quick. Places that have like weird floor plans that people don't know what to do with those sit around for a while. I was just looking at one that was on the market for like 90 days. The lot was huge. The floor plan was a complete disaster. And I understand why it was sitting there for so long. But like if I went in that place, I'd be gutting almost the whole thing, which is perfect because then I could find the mole problems and get them remediated, right? And if I did that, I'm not paying extra out of pocket for remediation because the property was already discounted enough for me to fix those places anyways. Right. So now you're kind of building that cost in together and you're not incurring additional costs above and beyond. So if you're looking for a new place to buy and you're targeting a place, my suggestion, what I am doing is looking for something that's kind of like the lesser, you know, the quote, the worst house on the block, like that corner sort of thing. It doesn't mean a complete disaster, but just something that you can get a bit of a price discount on because there are things in there that need to be fixed or updated. And then you could in your mind understand that those costs are going towards remediation. And you would then be able to build back on top of that and, and kind of increase the value of your home after that, which would then give you equity back into the house to offset the difference that you purchased it for. And if you think of it like that, like if you had $100,000 discount because the house was kind of a disaster and it just wasn't selling, and you come in and you're remediating, let's say three or four areas and that costs you, let's say 20 grand, let's say 25 grand. And you have let's say 75,000 leftover of discount before you get to retail equity. That gives you 75,000 if you wanted to spend all of it to redo a couple areas of the house if you needed to, which frankly you could probably do it cheaper. And so let's say you do it for 50, that means that you've just built yourself in $25,000 worth of that worth of equity and you've remediated areas in the house because you knew you'd have to do it. And you upgraded areas of the house that increase the value of your home. That is my thought process. Going into a space, I just want to lay that out for you guys and maybe that's helpful if you're looking to buy something. As far as the difference between an inspection for a new home and a home that you live in, the the process is actually not any different. You want to know, are there sources in the house? You need to know where they are. You need to know what you need to remediate, right? Like it's all the same. It's just sort of how you go about it and the steps and the flow of it might be a little different when you're looking to buy versus if it's a place that you already own and you're not leaving, right? It's a place you own, you're not leaving. You just go through the inspection, figure it all out at once, know what you're up against and then make your plan on how to move forward. If it's a place that you're looking to buy, you don't necessarily have to invest in all of the testing and all of that stuff right up front because you might not end up with that house. Right. It's not yours already. So you don't want to necessarily like blow money on testing and stuff in a house you're ultimately not going to do. So what I recommend here is that you really need to learn and teach your eye how to go through a home and look for, for signs of water damage, look for areas where there may be problems, right? I said minimum three to five, probably in any home, right? How do you do that? It's tough, right? Like, like. So we inspect, cannot do new home purchase inspections. It just doesn't fit within how we can serve people because we'd be flying out to people, there'd be a cost you'd have to incur. And at the end of the day you might be like, well, I'm not even going to move forward with this place. And yet you're still out of cost for us coming out there and the inspection fee and all that stuff. So it really doesn't make sense for our potential clients and we don't want to put them in that position. So we don't offer it in that way. Instead what we did is I created a program called Mold Finders Method. Mold Finders Method is the way that you go through a house and you start filtering out the bad houses. This is exactly how you do it. So what Mold Finders method is, is a program that I. A training program I made initially for my team internally to teach them how to inspect houses. So this is our internal training program for a while, and then I kind of repackaged it and cleaned it up a little bit and turned it into a program to be available for you guys, which, you know, I think we released a couple years ago. And there's been a lot of people that have gone through it and a lot of people that have found a lot of problems in their homes just based off this program. The program basically breaks out every room type in your house. You know, bathrooms, bedrooms, kitchens, this, that or the other. And it tells you exactly what to look for and where to look for it. And if you see it, then you have a potential problem. And it's like that easy. It's almost. I built it with the idea of paint by numbers. In my mind, that's what I wanted it to be like. Go in a kitchen, look here, here, here, here, here. And then if those areas look anything like these five things. So the way it works out is, is there's five signs of water damage. So part of the program teaches you what those five signs look like. So you kind of have that in a document on the side. And then you say, go into your kitchen and look in these five spots in your kitchen. And if any of those spots have any of these five visual signs that. That are of water damage, then that's a potential area that there could be a problem. Right? And so, like, when I used to go and do inspections for. For new home purchases when I was. When we were local, before we inspect was a thing, I would go into a house. That's exactly what I would do. I would go through the house and I would basically flag everything that I found. And if I got through the house and I was flagging like 10 things, no matter where I was in the house, I would stop, go back to my client and be like, listen, I already found 10 things. So what are you doing here? Are you. Are you remedia entire place? Like, what's the plan? And they'd be like, oh, no, like, that's not going to work. The seller's not going to do that. I'm like, cool. And we would just walk away and it'd be that easy. And then all it would be was a visual walkthrough and you wouldn't spend a dollar. Right? I mean, they would pay me to come out to do that. But in this case, with Mole Finder's Method, you could go through that and not spend a penny for the inspection. This is what I would recommend in going through new house. So what I would do first is I would get Molefinder's method. You could get it@molefindersmethod.com and I would get the program and I would go through it and I would do it in your current space that you live right now. The reason you want to do that is two things. One, you want to kind of train your eye how to look at something a little more quickly, right? So if you go do it in new houses, when you're touring the house, you're going to feel pressured for time. Your eye isn't going to be used to looking for certain things and it's just not, you're going to feel like anxiety and pressure and stuff. So what you do is you do it through your own house. Go and inspect your house with mold finders method in every single room, right? And it's a step by step process. It's super, super easy. How to do it, go and do that. One is to train yourself how to do it. Two is I want you to document everything as if you were going to use this for your home. And what you're going to do is you're going to find out how many problems there are in your home, okay? And then the goal here is that wherever you're moving, less problems. That's the goal, right? So now you have a baseline, you have an understanding of how many potential issues there are in your space. And you know, if I'm going to move somewhere else, even if you're renting, this is even for renting, not just for purchasing guys. Like, if you're going to move somewhere else, rent or buy, you don't want to be in a place that has as many problems, right? The goal is to reduce that load. So like, if you had 10 problems in your current place, I'd love to move into a place that only has five, right? Like, let's reduce that, let's cut that down, you know what I mean? And so that's the, that's like the difference. So mold finder's method is our inspection process. The difference is how you sequence it out and how you execute it, right? So if we were coming in your house, we would do it all that day, inspect, collect all the tests, do all the things and it goes, right? And you're, you're, you're paying for the samples, you're doing all at the same time. Cause you own the house, you're not leaving. You want to move forward. If you're looking for another place, the first step is let's weed out the places that are a hard no. And not spend any money on those. Right. Like, that would be great. Right. And then you can go through it. When I was not in the house I'm in now, but the last apartment that I lived in in LA, we looked at 12 different apartments before we got the one that we moved into. Didn't spend a dollar. Now, granted, I know how to look through stuff, so I understand if you're saying, well, Brian, you're looking at it. But. Yeah, I get that. But molefinder's method, I wrote the. In every single word and created every single piece of molefinder's method myself. So it is the exact same way that my eyes go through a space. Right. So you're getting, you're getting it. You just have to kind of train your eye to look at it the same way that I do. And if you're going to do that, you can do what I did with those apartment situations where we went through and looked at, like I said, 12 different apartments and yeah, it sucks, right? You're spending this time like, I'm never going to find a place. There's something, there's something. There's always something out there and it's not perfect. The place we ended up moving into in that apartment had one problem. Yeah, it had one problem near the air conditioning system. And I was really hesitant about it because I didn't. It's like, well, is my air conditioning system a problem? That's a big deal. But at the end of the day, like every other place that we looked at had a bunch of problems. Right Now I didn't even do any testing in my H vac system. I was like, here's the situation we're in. This is place number 13. This has one problem. I haven't found a place with less than like seven or eight coming up to it. So I made the decision that we're going to come in here. This is our best option. And then we got air filtration units in the house to help, you know, counteract anything that was going on. And I had a baby in that house and she's fine and we were healthy in that house and it worked. Right? So just because you have water staining doesn't always necessarily mean there's a massive mold problem. And truth be told, there probably was a mold issue around where that problem was. Right in my current house. Now I have one problem in A bathroom, I know it's there. There's water damage on a baseboard behind a toilet. I know it's there. But the rest of the house is great, right? So again, one problem in a house, when you're looking at other houses that have 5, 10, 15, you gotta balance it out. You're never gonna find perfect. Your goal should never be perfect. Your goal should just be significantly better than where you are. That's what the goal should be. Okay? So that's how we look at it. So now let's go. Now, if you're renting, you say, cool, I found the place, great. I'm moving in. They're probably not gonna allow you to do, like, any testing because the timing is pretty tight on rentals. So you're kind of just gonna have to go off your eye on that one. That's where Multinder's method can be really helpful. If you're looking to buy a place, you have a little more flexibility because you get time and inspection periods and different things like that to look at stuff, right? So the first thing go through, find a place that kind of meets your criteria. Maybe you're thinking the way I am. Like I talked at the beginning of a place that needs some work so I can build in some equity. That's like the math side of it, right? The math side is if a normal house in this area sells for, let's say, $500,000, and the house that I'm looking at has some work that needs to be done this, that or the other, and I can get it for 450 because of that. And then I'm like, okay, I've got $50,000 here now that I can use and apply to remediation of, let's say, three areas. And then I could rebuild those three areas. And if I could get all of that done for $50,000, then I'm at. I'm still at market value. But I've created the money that I needed to do the remediation without coming out of pocket above and beyond, right? And so that's kind of the thought process. And if somehow you can shave the cost cheaper than maybe you come into equity at ten grand or something like that on the back end, which would be even more amazing, right? So let's say you find the place, you do the visual, you use mold finder's method, which guys, seriously, I like, really, really recommend using it. It. It's so helpful. It is so helpful.

You go through, you say, okay, this place looks good. You put your offer down. Typically you then have an inspection period, right? So the next thing that, that I would do immediately off of that is I would do, I would do dust testing in the house to understand sort of what the load is in the house. And then you, even after molefinder's method, the cool thing about it is you build out your entire testing plan in there. I tell you exactly how to do it, and then you can find somebody to execute those tests for you locally if you need to, right? And so you say, hey, I have my testing plan. I explain exactly how to do this in the program. So I'm not gonna go super into it. We're like, here's my testing plan. Come out and do my plan right? And it's easy for them. They don't have to do anything. Just tell em. I literally don't want you to inspect anything. I want you to come in and collect the samples that I have identified here. This is the easiest job you'll ever do in your entire life. I don't even want to report from you because I have all the remediation protocols in mold Finder's method that I want. So it's like, it's pretty easy that way. And what you do is like you get the offer in first, you do your dust testing and you kind of get that the source testing all done. Now what you could do is stagger that out too. You could do the dust testing first. If the dust has come back and they show that there's problems, which there will generally probably be some elevations in your dust testing, especially if there's a couple issues in the house, you may be able to extend your inspection period then beyond that to then get into the source level testing to figure out exactly where the problems are. And then off of that, you're then going to get information to then go to a remediator and get a bid for remediation to fix stuff. And then you come back to the table with your testing information that's showing there's mold issues and your remediation bid. And now you try to fight for credits to cover your remediation bin because they have mold problems in their house. Now it's the nice thing about this that nobody wants to have like mold problems on record. But as soon as you test and you get that information and you then provide it to the homeowner, they have to disclose that they have mold issues and that there's been remediation recommended in most places. I'm sure certain states are different, but the general thing is you have to disclose this stuff, right? And so now what you've done is you've sort of placed like a scarlet letter on the house a little bit. And then you say, well, listen, I'm, I'm willing to do this, right, but this is what it's going to cost for remediation. Now, keep in mind, the house is hopefully already discounted a little bit because it needs work anyways, right? And now you're coming in and saying, I have to do this, that and the other, and trying to get the cost down a little more. But you've kind of put a scarlet letter, like this place has a mold problem that needs to be addressed and that might scare people away, right? And so now you're sort of like diminishing the competition on the home. You're. You're kind of leveraging what you've done and you're pushing your leverage a little bit to get what you need, you know? And so this is a strategy that you can use to try to get into a place. And you use your dust test up front as a way to extend your inspection window, right? Most inspection windows are like seven to 10 days right now, probably. So you get that in, get that result back real quick, like immediately, and say, oh, there's mold elevations here. We now need further investigation based off of this first inspection we did to further diagnose the problem, to understand what we're in for, right? Then you do that. You get your source testing done based on what you did on mold Finder's method. You get the information back in and then you leverage that the way I just talked about and try to reduce your purchase price even more and get some more credits, which would then help you apply to remediation and to reworking the house a little bit. And if nothing else, that might increase your equity you end up with at the end of the day, which is a much better situation than buying a house at full retail and then coming in and having to do remediation on top of that. And next thing you know, you're, you're, you move in underwater on the house. You don't want to do that, right? So anyways, that's the difference between how you approach like a new house versus your house, right? Same inspection process. You just phase it out a little differently. Start with a visual, nix everything that doesn't pass the visual. Once you get past the visual, then you put an offer in on a place. This is if you're purchasing then, right? When you do the offer, you do dust test, right? Away, you get that information back, you leverage that information to extend your inspection window, and then you come in and you do your source testing. You get that information back, you get your remediation protocols back, and then you take all that to the seller and you try to leverage that to get price discounts. If you're a renter, you kind of lose that last piece of it in most cases. So what you're doing is the visual and you're just kind of nixing places that don't fit. And then when you finally find a place where it's like minimal visual, you know, minimal issues on the visual, then that becomes, you know, the thing that. The place that maybe you consider like I did for the few places that I did. So that is the. That's the approach that I did. That's the approach that I've taken with clients for a long time, especially when we were not we inspect and we were, you know, years and years and years ago, just a local company in L. A when I was working with people that way. So hope that helps.

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