90: “Used” homes / Things happen for a reason

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, guys, what's up? So, today I want to talk about some of the things I've been hearing from some of my clients, specifically about, like, the housing market right now and trying to find a place to live. And secondarily with that tying in some things that have happened to me over the years that have kind of led me to the right place. I'm a super big believer of things happen for a reason. That's just. I've always kind of been that way. Actually, I haven't always been that way. But then some things happened that I was not super thrilled about. And then time went by and I was like, man, I'm super glad that happened that way. Right. Otherwise this wouldn't have happened in the future. And so there was a number of instances when I look back kind of my, you know, my life and things that have gone on with me where I see, I see that, right? I see kind of like that fork in the road moment. And if something happened, this whole series of events would have gone on the other way. And some of it's actually tied to buying houses. And so I just thought, like, the two things were kind of, you know, connected. So I'm going to just chit chat about that for a little bit and hopefully you guys could take something away from that and maybe learn a lesson or two on maybe how to approach the house buying home buying process, condo buying process, whatever. So, so that's what today's is going to be. It's probably not going to be super long, but I thought that I just had this talk with a client the other day. That's why I thought of it. And as you guys know, I like to share a lot of what I share with my clients with you guys. So here we go. So my client was looking into a new house and there was a bunch of competition on this house and there was multiple bids. And so they were thinking of dropping their contingency period in part of their, in their offer to make it seem more appealable or appeal. That's not even a word, guys. Come on. To make it seem more appealing to the seller. Like, oh, these guys Will just come and they won't even care what the house is like. And I was, they told me they were thinking of doing that. I'm like, do not do that. If there's one thing that you don't do when you're buying a house is you drop your. Your contingency. You, you're just, you are just begging for problems if you drop your contingency, right? You're walking into this building that you're going to own that depending on where you live, could cost anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for this thing. This massive, like, financial burden that would be put on you, you know, and, and you're not even going to like kick the tires on it and make sure that it works. Like, think of it this way. Like, would you ever really buy a car if you didn't at least take it for a test drive, right? Like, yeah, you would take it for a test drive. You want to see how it feels? You want to see, you know, what's going on. When, when I was younger, it was more than test drives. I don't think it happens as much anymore. But before, like, before carmax, all these places came where you could buy, you know, just used cars that are all easier to find. They're pre certified, all this stuff. There was a lot of this, like, for sale by owner business, right? Where like, hey, you know, there's a truck sitting on the street corner that you're driving by all the time and has a for sale sign. And you're like, oh, man, that truck looks nice. I want to buy that truck. That's actually how I got my second car, which I got. A 1991 Chevy Silverado was my second truck, or my second car, which was a truck. My dad finds this when he's driving. He sees it, calls the guy, brings it over, right? We do a test drive. And then after the test drive, my dad's like, all right, so this feels pretty cool. It looks pretty cool. I need to have my mechanic look at it. And you know what? At that time, for whatever reason. So this is mid-90s or so. Mid, actually probably late 90s. Yeah, probably like the 98, 97, 98 range. You know what? The guy who owned the trucks, they said, yeah, that's fine. You know why? Because that was super normal to do. It was super normal to say, okay, this thing looks good, But I know nothing about how trucks work. I should probably go take this to a mechanic and make sure that it looks good. And so that's what we did. Right. And we had found that there were some issues and they had to get fixed. And guess what happened? The guy sold it to us for a little bit cheaper so we could go get it fixed. Okay. This is something that's been happening for a long time, and it's been happening with homes, too, right? Because the same thing, the equivalent of the test drive of my car in your house is walking in your house and liking what it looks like and checking out the view in the backyard and, like, all that stuff, right? And maybe for us, for the people listening to the show, maybe it's a little more about kind of doing a quick look around, maybe seeing how you feel in the house if you smell anything weird, right? I feel like you guys are a little more attuned to that than maybe the normal home buyer might be. But that's kind of the equivalent of the test drive. You don't know anything that's going on behind the walls, right? The same way that I didn't know anything that was going on in the engine or my dad didn't know anything was going on in the engine of that car. That's why he brought a mechanic in to look at it. So you guys need to. You. You have to do that, right? Like. Like, if you bought a car and there was a massive, like, alternator problem or the engine was going to go out, which was. Which could have been really obvious if you just had someone look at it and then you didn't and you spent, like, 10 grand on this car, and then all of a sudden it was done, and you basically lost all that money on top of having to invest a whole lot of more money to try to fix the problem in the first place, until you realize it's, like, not fixable. Right? Think of all the money you lost not only in the purchase price of the truck, but then in the mechanic and all the other stuff. And then you realize, oh, my God, I can't fix this thing. And now you're in maybe twice as much as what you bought the car. Right? The same thing happens in houses, except the dollar amount that we're talking about losing is exponentially higher than what you'd be losing on a car. Nobody would ever want to do that on a car, let alone you go into a house that's a few hundred thousand. Even more than that, whatever it might be, Right. I just did an inspection the other day for a client. They. They've been in this house for, like, six months, and by the end of it, I went through, we found all These problems in this house, they had a general inspector, but general inspectors don't look for this stuff, right? They don't. They don't understand the environmental impact on things. General inspectors are looking for mechanical, for functionality, for a different set of stuff. They're not looking for the indoor environment. They're not looking at it through the lens of a health perspective. And so this general inspector just missed all this stuff. And then I come in, find all these problems, basically using literally the exact same process that is mold finder's method. Like mold finder's method is literally how I walk through a house. So that's exactly how I went through it and find all this stuff. And then we kind of start going through the process like, okay, so what would it cost, maybe for remediation and this and that? So the client did some homework on her end. We have a phone call a couple days later. She's like, I think between all the remediation and then the rebuild and then all the stuff, this might cost me $250,000 to do all of this, right? She just bought the house six months ago. That would put her underwater on the house. Because, you know, you didn't buy a house with that much of a discount, right? You don't have equity in the house yet. It's six months old, or not that it's six months old, but you're six months into your mortgage. So now she's underwater in this place, and now she's trying to think of, you know, can she offload it, can she sell it? You know, all the other conversations come up, but all of this would have been avoided if the proper inspections were done up front. Now she actually had it in a general inspector come in. Now imagine if she just waived her contingency inspection period completely when she bought the house, then any of the other things that a general inspector would find. And listen, guys, there's value to a general inspector. I don't know what I'm looking for when I'm looking at, like, electrical or plumbing or like all this other stuff. There's different components of a house. Like, you need different experts to look at different things, right? You need the roofer guy to look at the roofing. You need a drainage guy to handle the draining, the drainage stuff around the house. You need a general inspection, right? I'm not saying that you don't, but the mold piece of it, they just don't cover. But what if she just said, okay, no inspections at all, and maybe there was something going on in the general that was bad enough. That would have. That would have just kept her from buying a house in the first place, right? Now, granted, she didn't do the mold piece of it, so that would have been there. But if something came up in the general inspection, that was a big red flag. She might have passed and not even been in this situation. Now imagine if she did the general inspection and did mole finder's method version of an inspection through the house and then really knew everything that was going on. She definitely, definitely would have passed on this house. Okay? If you waive your contingency period, and for those of you who don't know, contingency period is the time that you have usually is somewhere between two to three weeks. Once you agree on a price and you put the house under contract, you have an inspection period. It's called contingency. You literally could cancel the deal for any reason. It doesn't have to be inspection related. You could walk in and be like, oh, you know what? I didn't see that the carpet was this color in this room. I'm out of this house. I'm done. Right? You could walk in a room, be like, oh, man, I feel like. I feel like there's a ghost here. I'm out of here. You can do. And it's fine. You're in. Your contingency period. Doesn't matter, right? You need that out. You need that window. I know the home buying market is really rough right now, right? And I get it. But if you in an effort to get a place and you get caught up in this emotional, like, tornado storm of wanting, you know, you've been. You've seen a bunch of places. None of it worked out. You got outbid on a bunch of places. Now you find this other house, and you. And you like this house, and you're like, eff it. I'm just gonna. I'm just gonna waive contingency and bid and try to get this house over everyone else, guys, more often than not, you're gonna get screwed when you do that, all right? You can't do that. Try to avoid the emotional, like, the pull, the motivation that comes from that, the frustration from maybe looking at other houses and not getting them and then just finally breaking down and just doing it, you know, and saying, well, we're just gonna get it, and it is what it is. Don't do that, okay? It literally could be the biggest mistake of your entire life. You cannot pass up on contingencies, okay? And so the reason I'm kind of getting into this is because. So let's say you're going through this process. Let's say you missed out on a bunch of houses. You're getting super frustrated. The same thing happened to me when I lived in Vegas before I moved to California. So this is when I'm like 25, 26, something like that. The time and what was happening in terms of the real estate market was so super similar to what's happening right now. It was around 2008 that, if you guys remember, there was a. There was a big recession that hit around 2008. It was all around the housing market. It was around all these subprime mortgages, and they're just lending money out. The house prices were skyrocketing. People were just taking all kinds of money. My dad's house, the house I grew up in, originally bought it for $150,000. Before all this started, it was valued around 250. And then through that spike and, you know, Vegas was the hottest housing market in the entire country when all this happened, at the peak of the housing spike and when everything went up, his house was worth $750,000. And. And so that's what was happening to houses everywhere, right? I being 25 and thinking it was time to buy houses. And this is what you do in life, right? The next thing you do in your life is you buy a house. So for me, I was thinking that I needed to buy a place. So I was looking at different condos and I put in an offer on one and it didn't go through. And I was super, super frustrated. And then some time goes by and then I found another one and I went through that process and this one was even nicer. It was in, like the super new area and it had, like a little community in it, and it was even more overpriced than what the first one was that I looked at like three or four months beforehand. And I put an offer in on that place and that place went through too, right? And I was, like, super frustrated and super upset. In the meantime, a friend of mine did the same thing, and one of his did go through. Okay, so he did buy something at the wrong time, right? And so just like, remember that. Cause I can come back to that. So then a little time goes by and all of a sudden I decide I should be moving. I should move to la. I should move to California. So that all happened, and that kind of stuck me on the road that put me to where I am now. But if any of those. If any of those Two places I put offers on went through. I'd probably still be in Vegas. I'd probably still be working at an ad agency. Not thrilled. And I never would have come here. I never would have got into this industry. This podcast wouldn't exist. I never would have met my wife. I never would have had the daughter that I have right now. Everything would have been completely different. Like, that was a very sliding doors moment. And I look back at that, I'm like, wow, man. All of that happened for a reason. Because now I'm here, and this is what's going on on the flip side. So my buddy, he got. He bought a house at that time, his went through. And you fast forward a couple years, market crashes. He's underwater on this house, and he's trapped, right? He's stuck there. He can't go anywhere. He doesn't want to be there. He had a new job opportunity come up. He couldn't go take it, right? And so he did something at the wrong time. It went through, that didn't work out. So now you say, well, Brian, that doesn't really tie into the everything happens for a reason thing. Well, for him, it kind of did, right? So his path ended up turning different. It was actually kind of a good thing that his house purchase went through because the job that he was going to take, the company went under very soon after that. So he would have uprooted his life, moved to another place, company falls under. He'd been completely there with nothing, right? Starting over in a city where he knows nobody. Instead, he stayed in Vegas, right? At the time, he wasn't super thrilled about it. He ended up having to wait it out. Then the. The banks in the country start bailing everybody out of their mortgages. Now he got to get out of jail free, pass on his mortgage, moves to California, right? Soon after I did. And then he and I started doing stuff together and working on, like, for those who don't know, I produce some movies and films and stuff. Before all of this, we started working on that. That jumpstart his career. He is now one of the top. He literally runs the film and talent agent department in one of the largest talent agencies in Atlanta. He is like the man in terms of being an agent for an actor there. All right? All of this happened. You backtrack it back. If he picked up and went somewhere else, right? So if his home didn't purchase, if it didn't go through, he ended up going to this other city, and then that company fell under. He wouldn't have Come to California with me. We wouldn't have dabbled around and making movies just because. And then he wouldn't have been put on that path. And now he's loving life, living in a place that he loves, has a. Has a girl that he loves and is basically top of the entire industry. And what he does. Right. Again, one of these moments, this things happen for a reason kind of moments, right? And so, you know, the reason that I'm just saying all this stuff I've seen, these things happen with me, I feel like stuff like this happens for a reason. But if you shortcut things and try to, like, work your way around it. So getting back to you buying a house and waiving your contingency period, that's not the way to do it, right? You're cheating. You're cheating that. You're cheating. It. It feels like. And you're kind of setting yourself up for almost like the protection that might. That, you know, that would come from that, you know, and then you stick yourself in a situation where something not great happens at that time. And, you know, for me, there's just like a bigger. There's a bigger process and flow. If you're doing everything the right way and you're going through it like that, then it's okay. But listen, if you waive contingency and you're independently wealthy, that's awesome. Wave contingency, get the house, buy it in all cash, gut the entire thing and start over and that's cool, then it doesn't matter, right? But most of us aren't in that situation, and you're kind of just setting yourself up to fail.

If you waive a contingency period like that, because you're gonna miss things. Just think back to the car and how you used to take your car to the mechanic and get it looked at before you would purchase it. Right. The way it works now is that you go to CarMax or something and they have like, you know, it's. It's certified used and there's warranty on it. You could bring it back. So you don't necessarily need to get that entire look up front because you've got. You got a parachute now, right? You got a safety net that you can bring it back to. But when you used to buy a car from, you know, for sale by owner, that's how it worked. When you're buying houses, you're basically buying for sale by owner. This isn't like a large corporation that owns a bunch of houses that they're selling used and in turn is warrantying all of their houses that they're selling used, right? There is no pre lived, certified home thing where you're getting a warranty on it, right? So we have to look at homes the same way that you looked at buying a used car back in the day before CarMax existed, when you would see a car on the side of the street with a phone number and call it, you have no idea what's going on in that place. And there's no safety net. Or in that car. And there's no safety net. You had to get it looked by. At my mechanic. You have to do that with homes that you're buying. Okay. With, with, you know, new homes have warranties, right? So maybe that's a little different. But if you're looking to. Most people aren't buying brand new homes, right? Most people are buying used homes. I know it sounds really weird, right? Like I live in a used home, right? I. I used to have a used car, but then I bought a new car. Most of us guys, we live in used homes. It's just the reality of things. So if we live in a used home, we're not getting the warranty that comes with like a brand new construction and all this stuff. And you need to know what you're getting into. The same way if you buy a used car in the 90s, you had to know what you're getting into and getting a mechanic to look at it first. Okay. So that's kind of what I just wanted to talk about. Right. Like I said super quick today. I just wanted to kind of tell some stories that I really do think things happen for a reason. So if you're trying to find something right now and you're getting outbid and all this stuff is going on, try not to be too discouraged. I know you get really excited about it and you find a place and you love it and you want it to work and it doesn't, it doesn't go through. And maybe it happens three or four times, you get super frustrated. Just keep in the back of your mind like those. That's all probably happening for a reason, okay. And so just think, like, I'm gonna look back at this five years from now. I'm gonna be really happy that all those fell through. Cause this is literally what happened with me. That's what happened with my buddy. I have so many other stories like this, so try not to get too caught up in that. Right? So the first thing, things happen for a reason, okay. The second thing now tied to that don't try to bypass that process and buy a used house without any sort of inspection or comfort that the house is going to work for you. Right. The same way that you wouldn't buy this used car in the 90s on the street corner without getting your mechanic to look at it. So you don't give up your contingency period. That's the equivalent of saying, I'm going to buy this used car on the street corner and not have a mechanic look at it, cross your fingers, hope it doesn't break down five weeks later. Right? You don't want that to happen in your house the same way that you wouldn't want that to happen in a car when that used to be a thing. So that's it, guys. Things happen for a reason. And, you know, we lived in used houses, so you have to treat them that way. Okay? So we have to do these inspections. You can't skip those. So that's what I got for you today. I hope you guys, you know, pull a little something out of that and we'll talk to you later. Thanks.

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