A Renter's Survival Guide to Mold with Corey Levy

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Welcome back to another Change the Air foundation interview. My name is Kendra Seymour, and I'm joined today by one of my favorite repeat guests, Corey Levy. Thanks, Corey, for being here.

Hey, Kendra. Good to see you.

I love the mustache. I just have to acknowledge it right off the bat.

So we're asking if it's for Movember or what the deal is. And honestly, it's just a quick seasonal little. How you doing? It's going away pretty soon, actually. I grew it for you, Kendra. That's why I did. Thank you.

Thank you. Your holiday cards will be just very festive, I think, this year.

Exactly.

Well, thank you for being here. You and I had talked, maybe it was last year and we were talking about testing and we did an interview on that and we had said, wow, we really should talk about runners in a little bit more detail because they're in such a unique situation. So for all of you listening, I actually emailed Corey about a month ago and I believe the subject line said something like, feel like being a rebel. And I think that's what it said. Right. Because here's what happens. If you're a renter, this episode is for you. You're going to want to grab a pen and paper because what we're going to talk about this is the stuff that your landlord doesn't want you to know. We're going to talk about everything from finding a rental to breaking a lease and everything in between. And I'm going to ask Corey to talk fast because we don't have a ton of time today. And I know there are so many situations and scenarios and we want to try to get through as many as possible because you guys are really in kind of a unique situation that is only made harder by environmental, you know, obstacles. And so we want to give you those tools. But before we jump in, Corey, tell everyone quickly in case they're not familiar, what's your background?

Yeah, thanks for. Thanks for setting the stage there. So a little bit about me. I'm actually a second generation indoor air quality expert. My family's been in this for over two decades. Myself has been doing this over 15 years. I own a company called We Inspect another company called the Dust Test. And we help individuals identify problems within their home and set the path for bringing. Bringing those homes back to a safe environment so that they can heal. And I've done. I mean, I can't even count tens of thousands of these at this point we've been involved in over the years. Our core focus, however, is working with individuals that are dealing with hypersensitivities. Everything from acute allergies all the way up to chronic illness. And, you know, adults, children. We've seen. We've seen everybody. And it's. It's a passion of ours. It's not work. It's. It's something that we're really passionate about helping with. And when Kendra reached out to me to have this conversation many times, what we think of when we see renters in our space is I can't, you know, there's no opportunity for me to help them there. But there's actually so many tools to. To help individuals that are not owning their home. It's just about having the knowledge on how to talk back. Because when you have a landlord or a management company involved, they're usually looking at one thing, and that one thing is the dollars that come in from every time we pay rent. Right. And it is a business at the end of the day. So they're going to look to reduce their costs as much as possible. I don't think a lot of these companies do this in malice. It's just something that they do. Right. And so if you know how to speak with them or know how to even protect yourself from getting involved in these situations to begin with, it makes it a lot easier of a process if you're somebody that is either concerned about it or directly affected by different exposures like mold or biotoxins within the environment.

Yeah, I love that. And it is possible. It is possible to find a home that you can heal and be comfortable with. So let's. Let's kind of dive right in. So let's talk rental criteria, because obviously you're going to have to compromise more than likely in some area. Either maybe you live in an area of limited inventory. You, you know, it's a densely populated area. Friends who live in cities, you know, deal with competitive areas. Maybe you're in an area that there's just not a lot of options. You know, you're further out, maybe in the country. So what are we looking at in terms of rental criteria? Age, roofs, foundation house, townhouse, apartment, condo. What are you thinking about?

Oh, we could go like an hour on each of those.

I know, I know.

Put them all in one kind of bucket here. So starting with age, because I think that's a really. That's always the most. The first question that comes up when somebody reaches out to our team. It's like, hey, I've got this really old house. Is it safer or should I go through the new home Every Home has a potential to exist or have a problem within it. The first thing that I always want to make very, very clear, it's typically impossible that you're going to find a place that has no mold or zero problems. Right now there's going to be degrees of problems and that's what we're going to try and help coach around today is understanding what the degrees of problems may be. So we have a 70 year old home and we have a brand new two year old constructed home. Okay. Obviously the 70 year old home would have had a lot more time for different water events to happen and, and likely multiple owners, multiple renters that may or may not have taken care of a place that you would as an individual because you know what the effects of acute water damage, meaning like a leak from a dishwasher or refrigerator may look like. So the likelihood of you going into a 70 year old home and finding one or two small problems, unless you've got a great landlord or management company who's really taking care of it, is probably very slim. Now, when you look on the newer construction side, there's likely to be less of an impact on a newer build. Less time, less people in the environment. Right. So it is, it is more likely to be visually in a lot better of shape. What can happen, however, in newer construction? Depending on where you live, there can be things that happen in the build process, right. Where lumber may be left out for a longer time period, There may be issues where the building was open, when it rained, it wasn't dried or cured properly. All these different things. Right. So when you take a step back again, this is part of the realization. You want to focus on age one category. Newer is going to be better, but we need to also look at where it's located, the climate that it's in. If it is a newer build, you know, did you possibly live in the area and watch it get filled? Did you drive by and see things that you didn't like? May not be a good idea. Right. But if it's newer, it's usually going to be a better, a better shop. Now when we talk about type of home, I think this is the next big criteria. It is easier to think about them in different blocks. Right. Homes and townhomes I would lump together, and condos and apartments I would lump together. When you look at homes and townhomes, you know, there's obviously a bigger footprint. There's typically more bathrooms. There's other elements of the building construction that can be a little bit challenging. So if you're considering a home or a townhome, you want to make sure no crawl space or basement. They're usually very, very poorly maintained, very poorly ventilated, and can be a place where a lot of issues occur. If you are living in, again, one of these environments, you want to make sure there's access to attic spaces so that you can peek your head up there and take a look around and see if there's any water damage or any black on the framing that looks suspicious on the condo side of things or apartment side of things, you know, it really depends, again, where you're located in the building. So looking at the structure itself, you don't want to be near the basement level, right? Because if there's a basement level, that you're going to have more of an influence. The challenges with apartments and condos is, you know, you don't know what's going on other than what's going on in your four walls. Right? And there could be a lot of influence from other areas that could impact or bring in what we call like a, a dusting or condition to particles into the space, which is where, let's say, your neighbor has a problem in their home, and those spores, those toxins can be influenced into your environment. So if that is the only option, which in many cities it is, we just need to take a lot of things into consideration. Again, age, right? It's how old is this, Is this building. How close am I to an elevator? Because most of these buildings are going to have a basement. So anytime that elevator goes up, it actually sucks. Everything from the core of the building brings it up with it. So you don't really want to be too close to an elevator, which may make lugging groceries a little harder, but for mayor quality, trust me, it's better. And then you also want to see how the common areas are taken care of, because that's going to give you a lot of insight to what the. How the. How the. The building, apartments, the condos are actually maintained in and of themselves, right? So looking around is, are you walking down the hallway? Is the light really bad? Does it look really old? There's smells, there's carpeting. All of these things are just signs that we're not maintaining properly. And that's going to be the through line for both. Whether you're in a house, townhouse, apartment, condo, you need to really pay attention to how the maintenance is going through each type of these structures. When you're making a decision on which route to go, the. The final thing I will Say on this is when, when like kind of looking at criteria is understanding ventilation as well. You know, ventilation heats us, it cools us. But looking at if they have ventilation in the home can be a key component to decision making. You know, in an apartment, if they don't have ventilation, it's not necessarily a bad thing because you could then bring your own window unit or your own portable unit that you can use to cool, depending on the size of the space, which is going to be preferred. Because if you can afford to buy a new one, it's always better to do that for the environment that you're in than typically a 10 year old air conditioning unit they're going to have and just keep cleaning in a home or a townhome, they're usually going to have a system there. So if you can find out the age of that system or even, you know, if you're on Zillow or Redfin or whatever, looking, you know, look at the vents, do they look really old? You know, are you able to see where the system is if it's in a basement that looks dingy? These are all signs that I, I don't really want to be dealing with that because these tend to be a huge distribution of contaminants throughout the air in the space.

That is all really helpful. I didn't even think about the relation to the elevator and I think that's a, that's the first one for me. So thank you for that. One of the things. And let's segue for a moment. When people are looking at rentals, they're usually looking at a number of rentals. They can't possibly test every rental. It's going to be expensive. What are they looking for? And you know what happens. You know, they can't go into an attic, they can't go into the crawl space. How do they navigate this without then also looking. How do I say this? Like you might be a difficult runner. You know, when you're asking like a lot of questions, you don't want to turn them off. And they'll be like, we're going to go with this guy because he's easier and he asked us no questions. So how do, what are we looking for? How do we navigate this? We can't test everything. What do we do? How do we narrow it down?

Basically crazy that that is an actual thing. And like I know there's some discrimination laws again it but against it. But it's super hard to even prove. So you're right. There's this like dance that you have to play. But it really boils down to the idea of what mold looks like. I think everybody has this, this notion in their head because we see it on the news at night of dorm with black mold crawling up the walls. Or, you know, we move my baby's bed and oh my God, it was covered underneath it. And it's just big circle, black and green and looks gross. Again, I've been doing this for a very long time. Have I seen those situations? Yes. But I can probably counted up to 20 or 30 times where I've walked into somebody's home and I've seen mold crawling up the wall. It. It doesn't represent itself like that on the exterior. Because we live in these buildings, we don't want to look at that. Where it happens is on the interior of the walls where we're not seeing. And it really boils down to looking for water damage, and that is key in this process. So water damage can show itself in a variety of different areas. You'll want to focus on the water areas of impact underneath and around sinks. You'll want to look around windows, you'll want to look on ceilings, you'll want to look around vents. All of these areas where moisture can accumulate. And then you're going to want to look for the sign of water damage. It's one thing of just saying, okay, I understand that water could be in commonly in these places, but what does it look like? And that's what we're typically used to seeing. We have it, we call it the five signs of water damage. And let's make sure we put a link in here for the, for the viewers, which we have a document where they can can see it and even a posting of examples on Instagram.

Oh, I love that. Thank you. That'd be great.

Yeah. So it's, you know, staining, it's buckling, it's separation of building materials, it's bubbling. These are some of the ways that you can kind of visually be able to see what is going on. And if there is damage, the way that I kind of help people understand this when they're looking for a rental or looking to even buy a new place. Because you're right, you can't test everything is if you walk into these environments and you're going around and you're halfway through, you've looked at two windows, you've seen damage around bubbling around two of those windows. And you've been in the sink, underneath the kitchen sink, and they're staining under there. We're at three problems. We haven't made it through the full place. Going back to a management company or a landlord again before you even moved in and said, hey, I'm seeing all these problems, can you address them? Don't even waste your time. I would encourage people to turn around and walk out. Set the number of things that you are going to feel comfortable with asking. Is it one problem, is it two, is it 10? I mean it depends on the relationship. But I will tell you if you have 10 problems, you shouldn't be moving in there. But all this to say like you're, you may need to, depending on your location, inventory could be a problem. You may need to, you may need to ask, you may need to go back to them and say, hey look, there's really bad staining or bubbling under here. Can you replace the base of this kitchen sink? Right. You know what can be done? And this ends up being a, a really good sign of how you're going to get treated in the time that you're renting this place. If you go in and let's say you see one area of damage and you go back to them and say, hey look, I, I don't know if this is active or what's going on here, but can you take a look at it? And they're like, eh, it's not a problem, don't worry about it, it's fine. You know, that may be a sign of an issue or if you go back with multiple problems and they don't answer your phone call anymore, you know, probably a good sign that it's going to be difficult to be there. So we actually have a guide that we, we give out for finding a new place. Again, another link for you here that we'll put in that will allow people to download the link and it will tell them what they should be looking for when they're going through a home and the telltale signs of these problems. And again, I want to loop it back to what I said in the beginning. We need to understand we're likely going to find problems. But we have to know what our threshold of okay is or what our threshold of asking for something to be fixed by them or if they're not willing to do something, what you're willing to do to make the environment okay. It's okay if they say to you, hey, I don't want to remove the base of this cabinet. The, the next question is cool, can I pay to do that? So I know that it's okay, right? If that is an option for you. And if this is a place that you really want to be in, then you. You have that. That path you can go down as well.

Do you think? And just real quick, because I know this would depend on the situation, that people should be upfront with their, like, health history and what they're looking for and say, it's important to me that this home doesn't have, you know, water damage and mold and that kind of thing.

Yeah. I mean, the important thing is that you don't have to do that. Right. And you shouldn't have to. But I have seen it help people in the process, and I've seen it in both scenarios going, like, good and bad for the individual. I've seen it where the landlord has gone back to our client and said, hey, no problem. You guys are. Would be great tenants. If you see something, say something, let us know, we'll handle it. And I've had clients say, I dodged a major bullet by bringing that up because they're like, well, the place is the way the place is. We're not changing anything. So, you know, you don't want to live there, run the other direction. And it could. I'm not an attorney. Maybe you can ask an attorney and further validate this. That may put them in a protected class by mentioning that up front. And if they truly feel they're being discriminated against, there could be something there. I know that's not the goal of this here. The goal is really just finding a place. I truly believe that putting too much emphasis on something that is a bad situation to beginning with is not going to be a good situation of you living in there anyways.

Yeah, you can do it. I love that because you can do a lot on your own when you know what you're looking for. Right. Bring a friend, have them distract the, you know, person showing you the apartment. Go around, look for those five signs, grab a flashlight. Even does wonders what you can find with the flashlight and really start counting and figure out your number. Because you can rule out a lot of places just by doing kind of a visual inspection yourself and save yourself some time and money.

Yeah. I would also say just real quick on the back of that too. You know, if you go down this path and you bring a friend to distract them, it's normal to open up underneath things like, don't, don't be afraid to do these things. And, you know, give yourself the, the grace that you should care and you should be looking underneath and you should be looking for signs of water damage and issues. And that actually if I were a landlord and I saw somebody doing that, I would say this is great. This person's clearly caring about the environment. And if they ask you, that could be a good leeway to going in and having those conversations about what you know, hey, look, just so you know, I, I'm more sensitive to these type of exposures so, you know, really facing it head on and going through it. I think where it gets a little weird is if you're trying to test a place while you're looking at it, like maybe doing a dust test and trying to screen, then I would say, yeah, bring a friend, run some recon over there and distract while you're doing that.

All right, so let's transition then to, let's say they're in a rental already because this is where we get the most people reaching out for help. And I know you've probably seen this stuff too. So I'm living in a rental. What are the first step, Steps, excuse me, I should take if I suspect there's mold in the rental and kind of a follow up. What are your steps if you actually see it or smell it? Because sometimes you suspect it. Maybe some health symptoms are getting worse, but you don't see anything. What do you do then? And then what do you do if you're like, oh no, there's water and coming in the back door the landlord just hasn't fixed and now there's mold. So take us through that. What do we do first?

Yeah, so documentation is going to be key, right? If you see something, you've seen water, you always want to document it immediately if it's visible, that's important. Take a video, take screenshots and actually tell your landlord right away. Right. If you, the, the, the problems get worse if you don't let people know, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to let them do remediation right away because sometimes that can be iffy. But if it's an active moisture issue, water's coming into the building, there's a pipe leak, whatever you need to stop the water immediately and then you can set the plan moving forward. I don't know how you're going to handle it and be very upfront with your, with your landlord or your management company and just let them know, hey, look like water damage is now present. I am very concerned about this and unfortunately it's going to require some typically management by you on how this process is going to, to go through. I'll give a great example. I, I, you know, I'VE had issues in, in, in the past in rentals that I've lived in, and I had a leak occur, and I did the same thing, called the landlord right away, told them to stop the water, told them they, they knew what I did, but they were sending people in to just start work immediately. And I said, hey, guys, listen, you don't have permission to come in here until I see everybody's certifications and licenses. And I know that they're, they know what they're doing. I see a project plan on how this is going to move forward, and we're going to address this. I live here. I know you want to address the problems, but I live here and I want to make sure that we're doing this in the right manner and you have the right to do that. Now, where your rights, where they can try and push you a little bit and you just need to be protective, is you can't stop them from physically fixing the problem that could cause additional damage, I. E. There is water squirting out of your sink, and you're like, nope, I'm not letting you in until you show me this, this, and this. They actually can, can let themselves in. And usually they can, you know, they'll have to give you a certain amount of hours heads up for other entry points. But if you begin to really insert your authority and tell them you want to be part of the process, that's good. And then just make sure you're documenting as things are happening through, through that to make sure that you're, you're, you're seeing it right, and you, you know, it's being done properly.

So I want to, we're going to get to certifications, what you're asking for from the people doing the work in just a moment. But what about if I just suspect there's a problem? I'm not sure, because sometimes people are like, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do. Do it yourself test, and we can talk about that if you want to. Or they're like, do I pay for an IEP to inspect my rental? Do I ask the landlord to pay for it? And then what does that mean? Let's unpack that a little bit.

Oh, that's a. This is a great question. And, you know, it can kind of go both ways depending on the relationship with the landlord. But I always say to, to start with the, let's start with the suspicion, right? If there's nothing overtly obvious calling your landlord and saying, hey, I'm not feeling well, I think it's my home. They're just going to send somebody in, if they even do this and they'll take an air sample in the center of the room. And if you've listened to Kendra talk about anything at any point in your entire life, you know how bad that is and that doesn't work. Right. So we need to typically take it upon ourselves to show improve the problem before bringing the landlord in. So that can be done in a variety of different ways. Going back to we were talking about before. Perform an inspection of your own home. Five signs of water damage. Start looking in the areas that it commonly is. Do you have access to your ventilation systems? Can you open up your vents? Can you look inside your AC units? Can you look around for areas that look suspect and to be a problem? Right. So gaining essentially visual evidence, we actually created this app called We Inspect together specifically for this problem where you can just do single room investigations to try and figure out where the problems may be within the home. And it's perfect for these type of situations. And then you can turn it into doing self testing. Once you kind of have this idea on whether or not there could be a problem within your home and you know you're going down the right path. I always say when we're going to speak to a landlord, more evidence visually and scientifically that you have will make the, the conversation more one sided on your behalf. Right. The end of the day you have a contract. There's legal terms here, right? But if you allow them to have the upper hand in the process to begin with, they send in their person before you did your own visual assessment or own testing and that person runs an air test. The landlord's not an expert on any of this stuff. They're going to listen to their expert and that expert is going to say to them, hey look, I ran an air test and everything was fine at the time I did. So this person's crazy. And so now your, your job of trying to prove that there's a problem there has just increased tenfold. So I will always lean on, go down the path of getting one visual evidence. You've done the inspection, you can, you know, hire an IEP on your own. If you feel that you found a good IEP that could come in and do a very thorough assessment and do the testing for you. We'll unpack how you may be able to get paid back on that later. Two, you do this on your own, right? There's different tests you can do, there's dust testing that you can do. Where you actually go through and screen the home to see if there's certain molds or toxins or pathogens within the settlement of the dust. You can do something like we talked about before, where you're doing like a guided inspection with somebody or a company like ours where you do it through an app and you're gaining the information and evidence to go back to them with. Now, if funds are an issue, which, look, sometimes that happens and that's okay. There are ways to try and work with your landlord to bring in an IEP or do some self testing. And I always say, let's first know there really is a problem before we go down this path. Because if the approach that I have seen work is when the tenant goes to the landlord and says, hey, listen, I am really not feeling well, I. I'm seeing things throughout the home, I know that you may not think that there's a problem here. Here's what I like to do. I would like to pay for an IEP to come into my house and do an inspection. We can agree on that IEP together if you like, and I will pay for it out of pocket. If he finds a problem, I'd like to be reimbursed for his services. And so this allows the landlord to feel, well, look, if they bring in, if there's nothing there, then it's their problem. If there's something there, I'm actually kind of responsible anyway, so I will go down the path of doing that, right? So I found that to be really helpful and it brings the landlord into the process more and they feel like they're part of the process. But by you paying for it, it sets you up in two ways. The first, you're controlling who you're bringing in or helping control, because the landlord will go to Yelp and they'll look up inspector and they'll find the cheapest person, they'll send them directly to your home, right? And look, I'm all up for a deal. Love, love a deal. And a discounts, right? That's all great and I want value in what I'm doing, but sometimes that doesn't equal what you get, right? And so there are individuals in the industry that are more high volume, kind of on the side of the landlord where they're looking to get in and out of these places as quickly as possible. Really inexpensive and do just a lot of them per day. So you really want to vet a person who's coming out, make sure they have the right certifications, have everything that they need. So you can help control that. Number two, by paying for yourself, you become the client. What's so crazy, guys, in all of these states is if the landlord hires them and then they pay them, they are the client, even though you live in the home. So they can get this report and they can have it and it can say there's mold. They have to do something about it, but they don't need to tell you what they found. They don't have to share it with you. They don't need to give you it. So it is, you know, it's very difficult because then you're going in trust and you have no idea what the project plan is, what the scope is, if it's being handled right, what you're exposed to, all of these things. So it again, puts you in the driver's seat to be in the process, but then working with it. So then you can send it to the landlord, you can make sure that it's being done appropriately and handled properly. So I've seen it, I've seen it work really well. I've also seen it where tenants have just gone out and paid for it themselves. They've done their own dust testing. They've done a guided inspection and have taken that back to the landlord and said, hey, look, here's what was found. I would like a more thorough assessment of the whole building or not. They use that to get out of their lease, whatever it may be. There's different talk tracks depending on what your goal is. But at the end of the day, having you kind of initiate it always seems to be the better path.

I love that. And we're going to end, we're going to talk about breaking the lease. So if you're thinking you're in that situation, hang on with us. And I want to mention to you, I wrote a article for anyone listening, how to find a good iup, because they're not all good. So a little bit like the wild, wild West. And it's 19 questions, which I know I, I should have come up with one more to make it a nice run. But it's 19 and it's going to talk about the certifications and what you're looking for. But that, you're right, Corey, that is so important. You want to own the results and you want to be in control. But I love that, that idea to bring the landlord in that, you know, I, I will, you know, bear the cost up front initially. Let's. And my next question, and I know you're not a lawyer, so, So I don't you know, we're not giving legal advice, but generally, and we know this varies by state, this is something that Change the Air foundation is really working on. But what are some of their rights, generally speaking, as a tenant? If I discover mold in my property and can I withhold rent, can I break the lease for the, you know, because there's mold there and they're not addressing it.

Yeah. And you know, again, state by state varies, and I'm not an attorney, but you know what I have seen, since we are nationwide, I've seen it really depends on the state. Some states, like California, New York, they tend to be a lot more cited on the renter than they are on the landlord. Then there are other states where it's the exact opposite. So you really want to dig in on it to find out more information about your local laws. But in the end of it, if you boil it all down, a landlord needs to provide you with a safe place to inhabit. Right. So you need to be able to live there safely. Safely is a very general term. Right. Safe for certain people is one thing, and it's completely different for somebody else. Right. So, you know, again, back to this error test that we talked about before. An error test could pick up one sport of stachybotrys for some people, could be detrimental for other people. And certain IEPs will say that's not a problem. So it's, it's a, it's a gray area going back to, to the other part of it about paying rent. And if you really feel there's a problem and you're at, at, you know, you know, battling your management or landlord not paying rent is the worst thing you can do. It is hands down. Anytime I have seen that go down with a tenant, it has ended very badly for them. You are in a legal contract. You are better off continuing to pay rent if you can and, and trying to get that money back. If it goes legal, then you are stopping to pay rent and saying, I'm not paying rent till you fix these problems. Because nine times out of ten, it kicks a different clause in in the lease that allows an eviction process to begin and you may end up getting evicted. This goes on your record. There's like a whole process of things that can happen happen. The landlord can now come after you. So you need to be really careful. I have seen people get creative around this. They, you know, notify an attorney or sorry, they, they open up a, an escrow account in both the landlord's name and the their name, and they start funding that account showing that they have the faith of paying, but the landlord's not doing the same. I wouldn't recommend doing this unless you're consulting with an attorney to understand how to properly structure allow the landlord to know what you're doing. But making sure that you're paying rent in some form of capacity is important in this process. Otherwise it could really flip the script on you here.

Yeah, no, that is a super helpful advice because that's probably the question, can I stop paying rent? And then you're right, it can create a whole host of other problems. One of the things for anyone listening and I learned this from Christina Bayer, she's a lawyer, we've had her on. You can look on our website for interview with her, but you need to look into the warranty of habit habitability for your state. So type that in with your state name and it'll bring up the rules specific to your state. Or if you go to our website also changethe airfoundation.org on our policy page we link to a document that lists all the laws. There aren't many surprise, surprise by state. And so you can start to see what your, what your rights are. But it's smart to do your homework here. So let's kind of shift into something you had brought up before. Let's say we have to remediate and we want to ensure that the person coming into our home is actually trained, is certified, they know what they're doing, that they can keep our home safe, they can protect our health. Because it's tempting for a landlord just to have hire a handyman or their Uncle Bob. How do we know that the right people are coming in to do the work?

Yeah, absolutely. We all love Uncle Bob, but he belongs at the Thanksgiving dinner table. So let's leave them there and let's make sure that they're certified and or licensed, depending on the state that you live in. So head again to the website. You'll be able to take a look at the policy page that Kendra just mentioned. They'll have the local listings for which states require licenses. And this is on the IEP side as well. So even if you're hiring an inspector, make sure if you are paying for that inspector, they are licensed within your state. If they require licenses, because you could shell out all this money, go to the landlord. Landlord says where's the license? And they don't have one. Right. So that's number one. We need to make sure that they're licensed in the state. Now here's the thing. About a lot of these licenses. Okay. That doesn't mean that they're any good at what they're doing. You can literally go and get a license in certain states in one week, and then you are a licensed mold inspector with zero background. That's crazy, right? So they have to be licensed so that the state can get their money. But if they're, if you're not in that state and, or you're in the state, you want to follow up with additional certifications because that is showing that they actually are taking the care to continue their education. There's great organizations like acac, the American Academy and their accreditation of certifications, and they're one of the oldest they've been around. They're very well vetted in our industry. They hold a variety of different indoor environmental certifications from the IEP side all the way to the remediation side. So you want to verify that they have their, their certification there. Normie is another really good one. There are iic, there's the IICRC that has a variety of different restoration courses as well. And for some of them, it's not just a matter of a business certification. And this is part of what I think people get a little bit confused with. There's the business that can many times be certified, but then depending again on your state, you're not certifying the people doing the work. And a lot of times that we see with remediation contractors is you'll have a business certified. The salesperson who shows up to book the job, and even the foreman are certified. But the people doing the work, the ones that are in the containment, they're not certified at all. And so it is okay to ask for everybody's certification that walks in that door. And you should, you should see if they're certified to be doing the work, because they, they need to be in order to be performing mold remediation. And, you know, obviously different indoor air quality contaminants require different licenses or certifications. And you should make sure of that when you're going through this process.

Yeah, that's important. Never assume that when they say they're going to remediate something that that means something specific. Because if you call five different companies in the state of Virginia, where, by the way, it is not licensed, I could go to bed tomorrow and wake up and call myself a mold remediator. You're going to get five different solutions. So you want to make sure that, you know, you have a clear understanding, ask for the scope of the work before they Begin. I want to see what your procedures are, what your steps are. And we have a great document again changetheirfoundation.org on how to find a good. That's only 10 questions. A remediation company and I even gave a summit talk. You can listen to me talk about hiring the right team on, on our summit episode. But let's, let's do some specifics here because what if the person, they send the handyman to inspect and they say something like it's just dirt or mildew, it doesn't need to be remediated. What should you do?

Well, first off, Kendra, I need to say something. If you woke up tomorrow and decided to be a remediation contractor, the state of Virginia would be very lucky because you like way better than anybody else. So maybe one of these days you wake up and you do that. Back to your question. Look, this is where testing comes into play and it's so important. The reason why a company like the one that I own, we inspect even exists is because of this. And actually again back to the state regulations. In some states it is required that you do an inspection before remediation even happens. So if you think about the flow of all of this, it really begins with problem. Either is visibly there or you suspect to be a problem. You bring in an IEP to perform an inspection, not just a visual inspection. They should be performing tests. And then that information from the lab is used by the IEP to develop what's called a remediation scope. That remediation scope is what's given to a third party remediation contracting company. That means two separate companies. They should not be the same. And again in states it is a legal to do in certain states both the inspection and the remediation. So they should get a document, a scope of work of exactly what they need to do as a remediator from their I, from the IEP that the client hired and then that is executed. That process is getting us to blank slate. And then after that you would want to do another round of validation testing to make sure that it was done right. But what happens with what you're saying is when we either visually say we see a problem and Uncle Bob shows up and he is there to say now that's that's dirt. That's, that's nothing. You don't have much to stand on unless you have laboratory evidence showing that there is a problem there. So getting that up front and which allows for the project scope to be created, which again buttons this whole process up to make sure it's being done properly. If we skip steps in the process, that's how these things, number one, don't get executed. Right. But also just take a lot longer. Like it may take a few weeks to have somebody come in, do an inspection, run tests and get a report. But now you have a scope of work that you can lean on to make sure that this process is going to go well. Because I can't tell you how many times people skip those processes and then they go through a remediation contractor who has no idea how to create these on their own. They end up creating more problems or not doing the job. Right. And it elongates the process to months and months and months and creates more of a problem for the. For the occupant.

Yeah. I mean, sometimes the only thing worse than no remediation is bad remediation. And I think that's sometimes hard for people to wrap their head around. All right, here's another one that I might say. Okay, it's a. It's just a little bit of mold. I'm going to paint over it or I'm going to bleach it. That'll take care of it. It's only a little bit. What do you say?

It will get rid of the visual aspect of mold that is there. So it will accomplish a very small portion of what is going on. But what you will do in turn is piss this stuff off. It is not that mold just allows it to us to still, you know, discard it. It's. It's a living organism that actually has, depending on the species, defense mechanisms. So let's start with bleach, because it's the tail as old as time. I think Clorox really did a great job of creating a new word called mildew in their marketing. And now everyone thinks that if they don't want it to mold, we'll just call it mildew and it's a lot easier to get rid of. Right. But that's not the case. Now, if you bleach something with mold, depending on the substrate or the material that it's growing on, the molecules of bleach can't penetrate deep enough to get rid of the mold that it's growing on. So you. Let's take kills on the other side of the fence, too. If you paint something, we're again, maybe killing the top layer, but we're not getting deep enough. Right. So let's think about trimming a tree. If you trim a tree's branches down, the tree doesn't just automatically die. Many times it will grow its branches back. Right. You have to get rid of the building material that it's growing on, because that's where the problem is. Furthermore, we don't know what's behind or within these interstitial spaces, walls, floor, ceiling, cavities, where the mold is originating from. And there could be a bigger problem back there that will allow these spores, these toxins to be continuously produced and impacting us within the environment. So I'm not a fan of utilizing bleach at all. I'm not a fan of this whole. Well, if I use a product that says it will kill the mold or encapsulate the mold, you have to go again through the project list of ways to get rid of the problem. This is why, again, you're able to lean back on what standard industry protocols are on how to remove mold. And unfortunately, for many times, it's about source removal. So when we talk about a landlord's perspective on this, they're going to be very concerned about removing a bathtub in a. In a bathroom. But if there's mold behind there, it needs to be done. Right. Because just going in and throwing a bunch of bleach on something and recaulking isn't necessarily, Necessarily going to solve the problem.

Yeah, I mean, that dead and dormant mold we don't have time to get to this day is just as much of a health hazard and poses, you know, all sorts of challenges, too. So one more piece to this then. You know, sometimes the landlord will say, well, it's in the attic, it's in the crawl space, it's in the basement. Doesn't matter.

Yeah.

What can you tell us?

Ask them to move into the crawl space. Is that allowed? He'd be like, you know what, you're right. Why don't you go live down there? Yeah, I wish that was a thing that we could force people.

Yeah. There's this thing called stack effect. You know that air down there in your. Makes its way up to the. That's how our co founder, Brandon Chapel, got sick. There was water in the basement of an apartment.

Yeah. Yeah.

You know, so same thing, basically, like, you need you. That's something you want to investigate. Right.

You have to investigate it 100%. You can't just ignore that. And even in. Within walls, the other thing is like, well, it's behind the wall wall, so I don't see any visual mold on the outside. It can't be getting through that. That's not how these buildings work. Right. First off, we're talking about microscopic particles that get out through a variety of different ways, through cracks, crevices, electrical outlets, ceiling lights. They can move into the environment. And then Kendra just threw out like this building science term again. Open up your remediation company here. Kendra, she threw out the Stackhouse effect. Right. And the Stackhouse effect is the movement of air within the building. And think of it, the easiest way to, to visualize this is if we've ever been in a building and you open up a window in one one area of the house and you hear a door slam all the way on the other end. Everybody has experienced that. You have not been living with a ghost. I can promise you that. It's not a ghost. It actually is building air pressure. Right. Because air is entering into the building, it's moving air throughout the building and causing that door to slam all the way on the other side of the house. And air is constantly moving throughout a building. It typically moves upward through the air, through what we know as hot air rising, where things move up within a building. And so each time that you have an air exchange occur within a house, you're going to have contaminants move from inside wall cavities, from down in basement areas, and leave secondary effects. That's why we can't ignore, oh, well, if I sleep in this room, but my problem is in my kitchen or in my basement, I just shut this door, I'll be fine. That's not going to work. We see issues all the time where there's a problem in one room and we're picking up in the dust, the spores that we're finding in the species we're finding in the kitchen in the master bedroom. And so, you know, you have to kind of take into consideration that a building is a living system and these things are going to be constantly moving around.

So we're out of time. But we have to bring it home with the question. Let's say something needs to break a lease. What do they need to consider? What's the best way to do that so that they're not incurring six months of rent? Right. You have to pay out the rest of the lease. What, what are some tips you have for them?

Yeah, I mean, this is a really difficult one. Right. You know, we kind of touched on it throughout the conversation. But if you have the means, engaging with an attorney will help. But utilizing the resources on the foundation website will also help. There's different clauses that you can look at to really understand what's going on but you know, again, to kind of what I said at the top of the call, this is a business for a lot of management companies and landlords and they're in the business to make money. So if we are in a situation where we are causing them more money, a lot of times if you have the evidence and you want to get out of your lease, just asking the question can get you out. I'd say probably 40% of the time when people say, hey, I did this test, I, I'm not feeling well, I've got three months out left on my lease. I don't want to make this into a thing. I want out now. People get out. You just got to ask. And you have to have someone to back that up with. Otherwise the documentation. Right, exactly. Because otherwise what are you doing? You're going to go to a landlord, you don't have anything to prove or stand up on, is going to create, create tension. The other way you can do this is there's a podcast episode that we have on Mold Finders Radio, hosted by my business partner, Brian Carr, and he talks about how to utilize tools like the dust test and irmi to talk to your landlord about what that means and for lack of a better term, kind of scare them into what the cost of this is going to turn into. Right. The cost of remediating this properly is a lot. And if you really want out of your lease, I'm trying to save you money here, I'm trying to save me money here. I'm trying to get out now before I have to turn this into a, a much bigger thing and want to move on from it. Unfortunately, with a lot of these things, sometimes you're going to get the landlords who are going to put their foot down and say no. It usually will be the ones that are very, very large, big management companies. Big, big landlords that own multiple, multiple properties because they have, they have attorneys on staff and they're just going to fight you. And if they let you out, they have to let everybody out. So when going through this process, you know, there's, there's a benefit for working to living in places that have big landlords. If they're maintaining a property and the building looks good, like they're usually going to be on top of their maintenance, they've got good schedules, they're running it properly. But on the other side of it too, they have typically a lot of vendor agreements that are at a very discounted price price because they have so many buildings, vendors will give them services at much cheaper rates so that they get a higher volume of business. And back to that analogy before. You don't always get what you pay for. Right. In, in a good way. So, you know, you, you'll, you'll also see that they'll, you know, have a bit more resources and, and know that they can kind of run you dry if you really try and fight them. So I always say.

Ask.

Just ask. And then at a last resort, you bring in an attorney to, to help you out if you have a very long lease left.

Yeah, yeah. It's never easy, folks. Our hearts go out to you, but our goal is to empower you with this information. Corey, thank you so much. If people wanted to get in touch with you, how can they do that?

They can't just call you and say, hey, how do I get a hold of Corey? No, they can find more about me on. On our website. Yes, weinspect.com or they could. They could see more about us on the dust test or the dust test dot com. Either way, I'm, I'm available. Just reach out to the team and they'll get. Get a hold of me.

Great. Well, thank you so much for being here. This is awesome. And everyone who's listening, if you found this helpful, do me a favor like share, share, share, share, so that renters everywhere can have this as a resource in the off chance that they, you know, encounter a problem or if they're looking for a new home. So thank you, everyone, for joining us. My name is Kendra Seymour. We'll see you next time.