Standing Out in Ohio Podcast
Listen and learn how some stand out from competition and gain market share. Information helpful to agents and buyers. Conversations with professionals and entrepreneurs regarding their stories and what makes their companies and themselves stand out and gain competitive advantages. Listen to stories from Ohio real estate agents and related businesses to help you know how to improve and who to consider using for yourself or friends. Created by the owners of a highly rated home inspection company in Ohio and the Winners of Best Home Inspection Company in the Midwest https://homeinspectionsinohio.com/
Standing Out in Ohio Podcast
New Houses Aren't Perfect
Can you trust that your brand-new home is truly flawless? Think again. Join us on the Standing Out in Ohio podcast as Laura and I, Jim Troth, unravel the myth of the perfect new construction home. This episode promises to challenge your assumptions, revealing the hidden pitfalls often overlooked in new builds. From unreliable subcontractors to shocking inspection findings, we share our firsthand experiences that underscore the necessity of thorough home inspections, regardless of a home's age.
We recount a recent pre-drywall inspection where our inspector discovered standing water in the basement and dangerous electrical setups, highlighting the unpredictable nature of subcontractor work. Imagine finding beer cans hidden in the attic by workers or a hazardous extension cord in a waterlogged basement. These stories serve as cautionary tales and a wake-up call: never skip a home inspection, even on new properties. Tune in for a compelling discussion on ensuring the safety and quality of your new home, and learn why even new houses can harbor significant issues.
To learn more about Habitation Investigation, the Two-time Winner of the Best Home Inspection Company in the Midwest Plus the Winner of Consumer Choice Award for Columbus Ohio visit Home Inspection Columbus Ohio - Habitation Investigation (homeinspectionsinohio.com)
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Welcome to the Standing Out in Ohio podcast, where we discuss topics, upcoming events, news and predictions with real estate professionals and entrepreneurs. Listen and learn what makes their companies and themselves stand out and gain advantages over the competition and gain market share. Subscribe for the latest news and discussion on what it takes to stand out from the crowd. Now here's your host, jim.
Speaker 2:Hey everybody, Welcome to the Standing Out Hot Podcast. This is Jim and Laura Troth and New Construction.
Speaker 3:Oh, we have stories for you All right.
Speaker 2:I think one of the previous podcasts, maybe the one before, we talked about how things just wear out right. They're not always done to perfection. People are not perfect, people make mistakes and and the the assumption is that if it's a brand new house, just like a brand new car, it should be perfect, it's gonna be awesome, I don't need to do any work to it, this is gonna be good for decades. But we all know you hear it in the news at least once a month hey, there's a recall on such and such model car first year out. It's being recalled. You're out out several years out. Well, I got that one. I got that van. It's a 2015. There's some recall. Came on it about a year ago. Yep, I don't remember what it was. I didn't do anything about it, but I had a recall and I figured next time I take it in they can double check it for me. I thought we did take it in. We took it in for another recall, oh, okay.
Speaker 2:So there's all these little issues, so just something new. You should not assume it's going to be perfect at all. But first let's listen to this.
Speaker 4:Habitation investigation is the way to go for a home inspection in Ohio. For a home inspection in Ohio, trusted, licensed home inspectors for your needs, from radon to mold to warranties, for a great home inspection, you really can't go wrong.
Speaker 2:Visit homeinspectionsinohiocom All right, laura, new construction. I actually do feel a little bad for builders, the big builders, right they have trouble getting all these subcontractors, because they see you building 10 houses. They need a lot of people to work on 10 houses. How are you find all these? First? Of all subcontractors subcontract and they don't always show up is the story I'm hearing. They don't all show up, so you gotta go, I gotta find another guy.
Speaker 3:You're sometimes you're scraping the bottom of the barrel and how many times have we gone up into attics and found beer cans strewn about or hidden behind the two by four framing? I? I mean, you're at the mercy of your subcontractors, and there's no denying that. That's why home inspections are so important, as is evidenced by what we found yesterday.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so so tell I was. I was. I was teaching a class. You were on the class as well. Teacher class get a phone call. I can't answer it it's one of our inspectors. I said, hey, I automated it. I got this program, that automatic response. I go nope, Can't talk right now in a class and you give the inspector a call. What was? This is a pre-drywall.
Speaker 3:So this was a pre-drywall inspection and she went to go down into the basement where there was, in spots, two inches of standing water, and she took a video and you could hear the water pouring in to the basement. Some pump wasn't working and on top of it there was an extension cord that was coming from outside somewhere and was plugged in and it was in the water.
Speaker 2:Not safe.
Speaker 3:Not safe. So she actually decided that she was going to go out and unplug it so that she could take a better look at the basement. So she went outside the house, she went outside the house, unplugged it and went back down. Good thinking, unplugged it and went back down. Really good that she did, because she looked up and in between a couple of joists she found an hvac system that had gotten piped in it was like it was a flexible pipe.
Speaker 3:It was the flexible pipe from the duct okay guess what the hvac contractor did to put in his pipes. Something was there my assumption is that it was him, because he cut the pipes, the drain pipes for the water.
Speaker 2:For plumbing.
Speaker 3:For plumbing, like a two foot section out in between the joists so that he could put his pipe in for his hvac system. So the second they turn on their water, it's just dumping down into the basement. See that, see, that's such that's just dickish behavior.
Speaker 2:That's the only way I can describe it. Hvac, guys go. You know what I'm gonna put my stuff here?
Speaker 3:I don them. I don't care what they're going to do Cut them.
Speaker 2:They'll have to go around it and I saw that picture and the ductwork they used was a flexible ductwork.
Speaker 3:Right, so you could have moved it around.
Speaker 2:Moved it around, versus the hard pipe that you can't bend that stuff.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you could have just brought it down below the pipes and kept on going, but no, he decided that yeah, and that's why you need a home inspection on new builds. I mean, we've heard that only like 3% of new builds are getting inspected.
Speaker 2:Which is way too low.
Speaker 3:There's so many issues with these shitty subcontractors and we're seeing so many more issues on the inspections that we're doing for new builds. Like it's crazy, every pre-dry wall now that we're doing, the inspectors are texting and going hey, look what I found. Look what I found. Oh, look at this there's. There's some crazy stuff, but hey, builders are getting as bad as flippers now right.
Speaker 2:I hate that, but yeah, it's, and it's subcontractors, right, and they don't. If you don't have a third party to take a look at it, the county guy probably would not notice that well, no, because they're, so they have to come in and out so fast.
Speaker 3:With the number of homes that are going up, with the number of places across the county that have new home developments going up, they're crazy busy. I'm sure that it's just a cursory look oh, I have no choice.
Speaker 2:I'm sure it is.
Speaker 3:I'm sure it is so moral of the story. Don't assume that that your new house does not need an inspection. Assume that it does, and just know that we are an impartial third party. We're not there to screw anyone over. We're not there to get any jobs or to fix anything. It is what it is and you will have that information to take to the builder to get it.
Speaker 2:We are there, unbiased opinion, to protect everybody, yes, mainly the home buyer.
Speaker 3:But in the long run it will protect the builder too, if it gets fixed.
Speaker 2:The builder because, say, they finish that basement wall, if it ceilings up, then they run water and it damages everything. The builder's going to have to pay for that.
Speaker 3:Right and they're going to have to tear all that down. It's going to be that much more money because everything was finished.
Speaker 2:We protect the builder the agent, we protect the home buyer. We protect the agent Because I have a couple of people like, hey, I'm so glad my agent talked me into getting the sewer scope Right. I have a couple of people like, hey, I'm so glad my agent talked me into getting the sewer scope Right, and the agent looks like a hero, right. And it's just unfortunate that not many houses, new builds, get inspected. But we have always found an issue Every single new house Yep, Pre-drywall. Usually it's little things.
Speaker 2:That wasn't, but normally it is no no, yeah, usually it's like hey, I'm missing some nail plates which easy to fix, can be catastrophic if it's not taken care of and caught earlier and something happens because it's easy. We've done clearance tests and I was like, oh, mold, because they didn't have a nail plate. So a nail touched that pipe, but a small hole and it just dripped out for, like, I think it was like two years yeah, I think it was.
Speaker 3:I remember that that was in a condo, wasn't it?
Speaker 2:it was a condo, yeah, yep. And I've seen missing nail plates next to a sewage line. Oh, my Lord, going vertical. So anybody using the bathroom above you're going to have this gunk dripping out between the walls.
Speaker 3:And that's not only going to be mold, that's going to be bacteria.
Speaker 2:That's bacteria which can cause all kinds of different types of infections and lung issues which we need to talk about, the person that we know of that passed away due to fungal growth in the lungs right, which we think we know why why that?
Speaker 2:happened, why that had happened, what condition promoted that to occur? But always get an inspector. I remember inspecting a new house no, it was a final walkthrough and the HVAC, the main trunk, the supply, air coming off the furnace, gaping at like eight inches wide, about no, like six inches wide, about eight inches wide by about no, no, like six, six inches wide, about eight inches tall, big old gap, because they reduced it from one size to a small one but then never closed it up. So air, so it's like not even close to being efficient wow, totally screwed it up, or there's some.
Speaker 2:There have been some other weird thing. We've seen support beams missing that can hold up the second floor of the house.
Speaker 3:We've seen HVAC people coming in and cutting out sections of support beams for their plumbing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh, we had a picture the other day. Somebody put the well, it hasn't been an HVAC guy put the furnace in the attic, so it's probably a bigger house. Okay, Bigger Needed two systems.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:So you think bigger, more expensive, higher quality. They totally cut away a lot of the trusses for the roof structure.
Speaker 3:Oh, I remember this. Put the furnace in there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally compromised the structural integrity of the roof which, with the truss system as part of the ceilings below as well, totally ruin that. So they gotta get.
Speaker 3:So so they're gonna have to have an engineer come in and figure out how to fix that for them.
Speaker 2:They yeah, I mean, as long as it doesn't move too much, it's a pretty straightforward fix. But they should have an engineer. Go listen. You got weight up here that you weren't supposed to have up here with the structure so, and then when you cut these things, you made it worse, you screwed it over and now you got to do things up even more now, because that's the way you put up here and you compromise the trusses. One issue can lead to a lot more shit, that's for sure.
Speaker 3:I'm noticing a lot of commonalities with the HVAC stuff.
Speaker 2:I don't think the trades play necessarily well with each other. Maryland won picture it was not a house we saw, necessarily a wall of each other. Remember that one picture. It was not a house we saw. It was somewhere else where there was a two-by-four chunk of wood down inside the plumbing Right, and it was a new house. It was a brand new house. Yep Well, remember that one house Not that long ago, a bunch of gravel was put into the waistline Right.
Speaker 2:Now I don't know if that was just incompetence or if that was done on purpose you don't know, but when you see a pipe, a clean out, sticking up out of the house and there's no cap on it, why are you gonna throw gravel onto it?
Speaker 3:like I said, incompetence or ignorance.
Speaker 2:You just or you just don't care or you just don't care.
Speaker 3:I'm here to do this.
Speaker 2:And my fault. They didn't put that cap on. No, it's not your fault. They didn't put that cap on. No, it's not your fault. They didn't put the cap on, but it is your fault. You put the gravel down it.
Speaker 3:And it is your fault that they had to take a metal spinny thing to go and break up all of the rock after everything backed up into this house.
Speaker 2:So they pushed the rock down into the main sewer line. Yep, I into this house, so they pushed the rock down into the main sewer line. Yep, I'm sure the city's happy about that. Oh, I'm sure they're delighted. Yeah, so I think that's it for this, but our next one, we should talk about mold.
Speaker 2:Okay, we can do that Just in situations that you really need to be careful for. Let your clients know. Maybe it's not really a rural thing, but it's where we see these type of heaters. So, anyway, I think that's about it for this one. Everybody, take care, and thank you very much. Bye, bye-bye.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to the Standing Out in Ohio podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Spotify or Google Podcasts to get new, fresh episodes. For more, please follow us on Instagram, twitter and Facebook, or visit the website of the best Ohio home inspection company at homeinspectionsinohiocom or jimtroffcom. That's J-I-M-T-R-O-T-H and click on podcast. Until next time. Learn and go do stuff.