Navigating Foundation Repairs and Real Estate Challenges with Bob Brown

March 26, 2024

128.  Navigating Foundation Repairs and Real Estate Challenges with Bob Brown

As anyone who's owned a home knows, foundation issues are a nightmare, marked by cracked walls, uneven floors, and malfunctioning doors and windows. In this episode of "Homeowners Be Aware," George Siegal sits down with Bob Brown, a leading figure in foundation repair diagnosis and author of "Foundation Repair Secrets: Learn How to Protect Yourself and Save Thousands." Brown emphasizes the foundational role (pun intended) the foundation plays in a home's integrity, making it crucial for homeowners to address any signs of distress immediately.

 Listeners are treated to a deep dive into the complexities of foundation repair, the varying approaches based on geographical location, and the surprising impact of factors like soil composition and nearby trees. This episode is a must-listen for homeowners seeking to understand the importance of their home's foundation, how to identify potential issues and navigate the often-confusing world of repairs. hmxkk8nz

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Transcript

George Siegal: 0:00

Anybody that's ever owned a home will tell you one problem you don't like to find is something wrong with your foundation. The signs can be cracked or deteriorating walls, uneven floors and sticking windows and doors. When these things start to reveal themselves, what should you do about it? My guest today is Bob Brown. He's a speaker, patented innovator, the foremost authority on foundation repair diagnosis and the author of the book Foundation Repair Secrets Learn how to Protect Yourself and Save Thousands. Before you start over-googling to figure out what's wrong, you need to hear what Bob has to say. I'm George Siegal and this is Homeowners Be Aware the podcast that teaches you everything you need to know about being a homeowner. Bob, thank you so much for joining me today, happy to be here Now. A foundation of a house is something that most people probably take for granted and I imagine it depends on what part of the country you live in and the foundation challenges. So, overall, tell us how important. I mean it sounds obvious just in the name it's the foundation. How important is that to a house?

Bob Brown: 1:08

Well, I mean, if your foundation is not right, the rest of your house won't function properly. Your doors and windows won't work, you'll get cracks in your walls, you can even get leaks in your roof.

George Siegal: 1:19

So it's important that your foundation operate optimally Now when I'm going around my neighborhood I live in Florida, I live in Tampa and you see them put the base there, they pound away on it for several days, put all the pipes in and then they pour the foundation. Is it done differently in different parts of the country? Tell us what like for each. I know you can't describe all 50 states, but is there a general way to do it versus an unusual way?

Bob Brown: 1:45

Yes, in the colder climates you're going to see more crawl spaces and more basements, and the reason you see more basements up north is because you have a frost depth and you need to dig down your footings for frost depths, and sometimes that can be quite deep. It could be three feet or so or more, and if you're digging down that far, it's not that much farther to keep digging for a basement, and so quite often you'll see up north basements and quite often kind of in the mid-range or even up north you'll see more crawl spaces than slabs on a grade.

George Siegal: 2:26

Now, here in Florida there's a lot of elevated houses. There's houses on stilts. So what would you consider? The foundation, the base where the ground is, where the pylons go into the ground, or the elevation where the first floor starts?

Bob Brown: 2:38

Down in the ground there's a deep foundation system and can be installed in a variety of ways. But piles and piers and all kinds of things to go in and install a deep basement system, or, sorry, a deep foundation system, and they'll extend up and then they'll have a floor structure. So a lot of people get mixed up between the floor and the basement and a lot of especially with slabs on grade they think that the slab is part of the basement when in fact it's not. It's the floor slab. Now, sometimes with a post-tension slab it's kind of the same thing, but not always.

George Siegal: 3:17

Usually not so just to dumb it down for me because I get so easily confused. So the foundation would be the very bottom level.

Bob Brown: 3:27

Right, that's where the foundation is support the structural loads.

George Siegal: 3:33

So then, what are we looking at in terms of? Most people aren't involved in that part of the process. You know, even if you're buying new construction, they don't really want you out there until they're pretty far along.

Bob Brown: 3:44

So how do you keep?

George Siegal: 3:45

an eye on that. How do you know if it's being done right, you know.

Bob Brown: 3:49

I will tell you that there's probably no way for a lay person to really know whether it's being done right, except maybe very obvious Like I've seen like them pouring concrete right after a real heavy rain and there's mud down in the footings or something you know. But most of the time it gets built properly. And the foundations. The reason for foundation problems is not necessarily the construction, it's rather the soil, and the soil is complicated and unpredictable and over time it changes and that's what the foundation sits on and it doesn't really matter that much. I mean, you could have a foundation made out of solid titanium and it's still floating on the soil, right, so it could still have problems.

George Siegal: 4:39

Now I had an arborist out to my house recently we have a big grand oak in front of the house and he was saying that a lot of houses, the trees around it cause problems for foundations. How conscious do you have to be of the trees around you?

Bob Brown: 4:51

That's right. Trees can cause a problem in a couple of different ways. So one of them is obviously if the trees are real close, the roots can interfere with the footing, and I've seen roots break up footings and cause like a peak in the floor slab and crack walls. I've seen that happen. But the other way that people don't quite think of a lot is the fact that in areas where you have clay soils, clay soils expand. They call them expansive soils. Right, Everybody's heard of expansive soils, but they don't really understand what they mean. What they mean is if you have clay soil that's expansive, then when it gets wet it swells and when it gets dry it shrinks up, and so those changes in equilibrium is what causes the problems, not necessarily the initial makeup. Well, if you've got soil around the house that's in equilibrium and you've got a giant tree sucking out moisture in one part of the house, those soils are going to shrink more than the others and you're going to cause settlement, and that happens quite often in areas with expansive clay soils.

George Siegal: 6:00

Now I follow a number of home inspectors on Instagram and they show me pictures of. I saw one recently where they were pouring the foundation and there was a big plastic cup that was on the ground. So when the cup was pulled away, there was now an opening in the foundation. Now he said, structurally that's probably not going to affect it, but is it just give you an indication of how sloppy they might have been when they were doing the project?

Bob Brown: 6:23

Oh, yeah, I mean, hey, we're dealing with construction workers that quite often make a lot of mistakes, are not educated properly and, let's face it, you know every industry has a shortage of properly trained people and construction is really, really having a struggle right now. You just can't find people. I mean, I sold by company last year but it was a super structure. I mean a super hard thing to just define guys to you know, basic guys just to work. You know we'll train them. Even then we couldn't find them and we quit. We quit recruiting from the construction industry because there was just nobody to recruit from. We just wanted to find guys that wanted to work hard, right and and trained them ourselves.

George Siegal: 7:15

Now, sometimes you see a foundation poured and it sits there for a couple of weeks and then sometimes they start building on it right away. Is there a certain cure period that's needed to properly let a foundation take hold?

Bob Brown: 7:29

Well, concrete cures on an asymptotic scale. It starts out curing very quickly but it doesn't happen right away. It takes 28 days to reach 90, whatever it is 95% of a strength. I think it takes seven days to reach two thirds of a strength and it's only half half strong after maybe a day or two or three. So it does take time for concrete to to cure up. However, you know, depending on the foundation type, they'll go in and if it's a post-tension slab, they'll go in and tighten up the cables and tension the cables.

Bob Brown: 8:12

After, I think, three days and generally speaking, you know you start framing a house. You know the wood doesn't really weigh that much, right, it doesn't. You don't get a lot of weight on the foundation until they start putting the roof tiles on top of the roof, and you'll see them do that. They'll get the house singles shingles and they'll just set them up there. They won't necessarily lay them out, they'll just set them up there and that's to weight the house and it's a lot of weight and they want it to kind of move and settle, because all homes settle during construction, right, and they settle the most when you put that weight up on the roof. And so most of the time they'll get that up there and they'll put the put the tiles on, and then they'll wait for it to have a little bit of settlement a couple of weeks or something like that and then they'll do the drywall, because if they don't, then the drywall starts cracking right away and then they have to fix it right. So that's not a that's not a good plan.

George Siegal: 9:11

Now, does it make a difference if it's a block house, cause a lot of the houses here are first floor block and then, and quite often, well, not enough, but a lot of them are second floor block also.

Bob Brown: 9:21

Block is quite a bit heavier than wood. So yeah, you might, you might have a little longer waiting period for block, that's, that's true. I didn't think about that. But and typically when you put the block in, the block's not that heavy. Well, it is heavy, but what's heavier is the grouting of the cells with concrete and rebar in there. That that contributes a lot of weight and it's not just a little bit. I mean it should be. You know every, you know it's not just a little bit of a grouting 32 to 40 inches on center vertically and then horizontally every four feet to have what they call a bond beam and all that concrete ways when you start putting it in the in the cells.

George Siegal: 10:00

So if I'm buying an existing house, do I want a foundation inspection, or should my home inspector be able to see the signs of a foundation that has problems?

Bob Brown: 10:13

I do the training for the American Society of Home Inspectors here in Phoenix Ashy, they call it right and I mean I'll train them to know what to look for, but they don't really have the skills. They don't really have the skills to like diagnose whether it's heave or settlement, or whether you need peers or how bad it is. That really should require an engineer and, by the way, should never be done by a foundation repair contractor, even though they do it more than anybody else. We'll talk about that when you get the chance but should be done by a licensed professional engineer.

Bob Brown: 10:56

Now the problem with real estate transactions is that you have a 10 day inspection window and the home inspector goes in and they might see a problem, right. Well, then they get the report and they turn it in like two days before the end of the window an inspection window and so then in a panic, the realtor reaches out to try to find somebody and the first thing they do is they Google and who comes up? The foundation repair companies. They call a foundation repair company and it's like, hey, can you give me a report in two days? You know well, I mean a foundation repair contractor will go out there and give an estimate, maybe in two days, but that's not really a foundation investigation and there's no way an engineer can get it done in two days. It's just physically impossible.

Bob Brown: 11:43

Might be able to get it done in 10 days if they're really have nothing on their backlog and they can really do it fast. But I encourage most realtors to put a clause in their contract that says hey, if a foundation problem is identified, then we need another 10 day window to get an expert in here to give us an assessment. And what usually happens, unfortunately, is the they call a foundation repair contractor who wants to sell a big job and he shows up and says, hey, you need $80,000 in peers. Well, guess what happens to the listing? The whole thing blows up and everybody goes their separate ways. Right, that's what usually happens.

George Siegal: 12:29

Now you know, there's so many things that when you're buying a house that you have to think about and I can honestly say that in all the houses that I've bought I've never had to or thought of bringing in a foundation person. I've usually just relied on the inspector calling something out as an alert. Now, the way you're explaining this it sounds like that's a missing link, much like I think a lot of people need to maybe bring an insurance agent with them to find out if the house is insurable. You know, there's things we just miss that we end up paying for later.

Bob Brown: 13:01

Right, yeah, and you might. You might not have to, like, bring the insurance guy out, but you can check it for claims, right, they can do that online. It's a little more difficult. For foundation inspection, you really need to have eyes on it, right, you need to, you know, do a full inspection, and it needs to be done really by a licensed professional engineer and not just any old engineer. By the way, it needs to be a forensic.

Bob Brown: 13:31

I prefer a geotechnical engineer, and the reason I prefer a geotechnical is because a structure everybody calls a structural engineer really the wrong guy to call, and the reason is is because they'll call him out and he'll say, oh okay, there's no structural deficiencies. Okay, well, could it become a structural deficiency? Oh yeah, if it keeps moving, it could be a structural deficiency. Well, is it going to quit? Is it going to keep moving? Well, you need to call a geotechnical engineer because it's a soil problem. So you just wasted all your time and effort calling a structural engineer when you should have just called a geotech in the first place, a forensic geotech, not a regular geotech. Most engineers work in new construction and they work in things like infrastructure, freeways, dams, sewer systems, water systems. You know all those kinds of things, maybe new buildings right, and very few work in residential. Even fewer do forensic work, and those are the guys you need to call out.

George Siegal: 14:33

So what are we looking at? Cost wise for that? Because you know, most people bitch if they're going to pay $400 or $500 for an inspection. Then they're told well, maybe you need to get a termite inspection now you got to get an AC guy out here. So where do you fit into the equation? Well, I don't. I'm not a. What you're talking about, though I'm not saying I'm not expecting you to show up in my house.

Bob Brown: 14:52

You sold your business, but yeah Well and I had a forensic engineering business and a foundation repair business, so I understand both parts of it. And you're right. I mean that is a problem for a buyer right, because a lot of engineers will charge $3,000. Now I'm trying to build a group of engineers and give them the tools to be able to produce it for less than a thousand. But that's a bit of work, I get it, but that's my mission in life. I'm trying to help the public by giving engineers tools to make them more efficient so that they can compete with free, which is what you get with the foundation repair company.

George Siegal: 15:33

Yeah, I just don't. I can't get my head around seeing how anybody buying a house especially if it's in that $500,000 to a million or whatever. Nobody's going to pay for that.

Bob Brown: 15:47

And I totally agree and it's a problem. It really should be on the listing, on the selling agent's end, to be proactive, to know good experts and to bring them in before they even list the house and say do an inspection, give us a clean bill of health, or else tell us what needs to be done and then supervise it and inspect it so that you can give us a clean bill of health when it's done. And that's the way it should be done. And a lot of times what happens instead is they call the foundation repair company who gives them a giant bill to repair the foundation. Everybody goes their separate ways the seller fires the listing agent, does cosmetic repairs, hides it, finds a new listing agent and puts it up for sale, and then, if it's a continuing problem, somebody finds out about it three years down the road. Right, that's what happens most of the time.

George Siegal: 16:52

Yeah, disclosure laws are so weak in so many jurisdictions around the country that it's like playing hot potatoes. So it almost seems like that should be something that, if you're looking at a house, maybe you insist that the homeowner stand behind the foundation, because that shouldn't be your problem If they're living on a decaying property, it shouldn't become your problem.

Bob Brown: 17:13

And it's like, as we talked about, it's very difficult for a. I mean, think about it A guy that's interested in the house, not even sure he's gonna buy it right, is gonna spend a grand checking it out when he might not even buy it. I mean it's not very tenable. My hope is that someday that a foundation inspection with Topolines and the history and the damage maps and all the things that are required in a proper report be done on every transaction or prior to, within a certain amount of time prior to, so that there's a record of the history, some of like a, like a Carfax, yeah, like Carfax, yeah, something like that, so that it's transparent and everybody knows what they're getting into.

George Siegal: 18:06

Absolutely. I think every house should be tagged by that and I know that's unfortunate for somebody who's got a problem house, but that's like a store selling something with a stain on it and they just hide it. It shouldn't become the buyer's problem and we just kick it down the road, and it just seems to happen way too often. I know here in Florida we also have sinkholes. I would imagine that there's no foundation that's gonna save you from that, is there?

Bob Brown: 18:32

Nope, you got a sinkhole the whole house will fall in, or a part of it, or whatever. Yeah, there's no stop.

George Siegal: 18:39

Yeah, you can't even get an insurance, isn't paying for it. They've now realized-.

Bob Brown: 18:43

They used to in Florida, but they quit doing it.

George Siegal: 18:46

Yeah, like a lot of things they've quit doing here but they've probably gone hey, that's a money loser, let's stop paying for that.

George Siegal: 18:51

It's exactly right, yep. So I just see it as a real challenge. I mean, I see the importance of it. It's just like getting a geological study of your property. I think it's easier when it's a brand new house, because the builder, at least for a certain period of time, has to stand behind that foundation. So once I have the house and it's in my possession, what should I be looking for? Or even if I'm looking at a house and haven't bought it yet, so make me my own little junior foundation expert here what are some things I can look for?

Bob Brown: 19:18

Well, observationally, you're gonna notice if you've got foundation problems, you're gonna notice cracks in your walls, typically interior walls, exterior walls maybe, but exterior is not climate control. That can crack for a lot of reason. Now, block stair step cracks, you'll see, and that's pretty obvious. But stucco over wood frame cracks for a lot of reasons. Interior drywall yeah, you'll notice it right away. Doors and windows that are out of square, kind of pinched, maybe a larger gap on one side of the door and pinched on the other side, it doesn't operate very good. Man Windows, same thing, right, sloped floors. Those are the things that you're gonna notice.

George Siegal: 20:00

Now do you see, in areas where gosh in Arizona, you have it probably with a long period where you go without rain, but what about areas where they have flooding and they have water problems? That probably causes a whole different set of issues for foundations.

Bob Brown: 20:16

It might, but the bigger problem is expansive soils, and some areas have them and some areas don't. And expansive soils are cyclical. They may go up and down and up and down, and all that moving eventually causes problems. Now, if you have an area with giant flooding, that's gonna be obvious. You could have scouring, you could have water that goes into down to layers where there are expansive soils that maybe typically don't get wet right, so you can have those kinds of problems as well. Moisture is always the catalyst, always is, and changes in moisture is what causes the problems, not necessarily moisture. So if you're under a constant flood all the time, if you're wet all the time, like Louisiana's, wet all the time, well it's gonna be what it's gonna be. But like Texas, on the other hand, texas you have dry seasons and you have wet seasons and you've got expansive soil. That's why there's so many foundation contractors and so many counties and problems in Texas because of that combination.

George Siegal: 21:20

Now I've had home inspectors tell me that you need to really watch the grading around your foundation. You wanna make sure that's sloping away from it, not towards it. How, on top of that, do people need to be Super on top?

Bob Brown: 21:34

of it. I mean most of the time when you get a report from an engineer. Almost every report says fix the grading and drainage and then nobody does it right and then they wonder why they have problems. So it really is important and quite often on modern houses there's no way to make surface grading work. I mean you're supposed to slope six inches over 10 feet. Well, you got a five foot side yard. How's that work? Well, then you have to provide theoretically, by code anyway.

Bob Brown: 22:09

Slope a certain slope, 2% slope out to the street. Well, there's no elevation difference between the house and the street to get enough water to go out there. So really, the only way to really make it work is to put gutters with hard pipe drainage to get the water 20 feet away from the house. And almost no builder does that right. Well, I don't know any builders that do it, unless it's a custom home. But those are the things you need to do. You'll get that recommendation almost all the time from engineers and I'll just say to the short work just do it now and wait for the engineer right, true, and I bet a lot of builders just put that into the ground, but it doesn't go anywhere, just to make it look like.

Bob Brown: 22:50

Well, I've seen some boneheaded things like they put gutters and the hard pipes are perforated so it just ejects all the water right out of the house. That's the worst thing you could do and I've seen that happen.

George Siegal: 23:04

Yeah, another thing. I bet a lot of people learn this the hard way. If you have a tile roof and you have gutters and it's raining, the gutters are really worthless at that point because the water just comes shooting off the roof and lands all over your yard anyway.

Bob Brown: 23:17

Well, we have a lot of tile roofs in Arizona and so the gutter companies have learned to put bigger gutters on. They catch us most of that, but it is a challenge, and especially at the corners and you can put up a little higher, like you know corner thing that catch extra water, where the water comes down in a hurry. Right, there's things you can do. You're never gonna catch it all, right, I mean, it's impossible. You can't catch all the water coming out of the sky right next to the house. So how does that work? You know the goal is, you know, get as much as you can, right.

George Siegal: 23:50

So when you're at a party, do people come up to you and say are you the dirt whisperer?

Bob Brown: 23:55

I've had a lot of people ask me, that's for sure.

George Siegal: 23:59

What's it like having a title like that? I think it's kind of cool to have a title.

Bob Brown: 24:03

I like it. You know it's interesting, it's fun and you know dirt is an interesting subject. I mean. A lot of people think that, you know, dirt is just one homogeneous, massive brown underneath the house. It's not that way at all. Dirt gets deposited in layers and every layer is a little bit different more different density, different mineral content, different affinities for water. You know lots of different things, and in each of those layers they're not exactly parallel. They all kind of, you know they were deposited by nature, organically, right, and so some may be high, some may be low, and the builder may have cut into a few while he was, you know, or piled on top. Dirt can be really, really complicated, which is why you have geotechnical engineers, right.

George Siegal: 24:55

Yeah, you know, years ago a buddy of mine, good friend of mine, kept me waiting in a bar two hours while he was late and when he showed up he goes. I was with the dirt man. He was a construction guy and at the time I rolled my eyes like the dirt man. I think it could be pretty fascinating hanging out with the dirt man now.

Bob Brown: 25:11

Yeah, lots of fun things with soil. I do a lot of hiking with the geotechnical engineer and you know we're always talking about this natural process and rocks and look at this one and all kinds of stuff you know.

George Siegal: 25:23

Yeah, no, no. I love that stuff now. I wish I wish I cared more about it when I was younger. Now tell me about the book.

Bob Brown: 25:29

So I wrote the book. Well, it's taken me about five years to write it, but it was essentially started with the genesis of a lot of just a lot of blogs that I blogged about, and then I eventually took all those and put them in order and created a book. But it's been a lot of fun. I'm considering another book at this point, a follow on book, but the book basically has two premises.

Bob Brown: 25:58

Number one, why you should never call a foundation repair company to get diagnosis. You can call them for repairs. They're good at that. And then the second part of it is people forget about expensive soils and particularly in heave. They don't understand what heave is, and so I wanted to show that there was a solution for heave. Now the reason that's important is because the traditional foundation repair industry sells these piling products and they ignore heave because they don't have a solution for it. So they don't train their sales guys. They don't do anything about heave because you know they don't want to go home hungry and it just confuses things. They don't have the training to really understand it very well. So I wanted to show that there are tools for it and it can be addressed.

George Siegal: 26:51

There's a couple of things I wanted to touch on in our remaining time, just because I think it's some things that could help people the most, and we might have covered a few of these already. Five red flags that mean foundation issues to look out for when buying a new home. The five red flags.

Bob Brown: 27:07

Well, we sort of discussed them already Cracks in walls, sloping floors, baby cracks in floors Although floors crack for a lot of reasons Doors and windows out of square, and being aware of the geology of where you're at, what the soils are like and you can go onto the NCRS website and kind of get an idea about what the soils are in your particular neighborhood. They usually print maps and those kinds of things for people to understand, and so those are the key things that you should be aware of at least when walking through the house. And I've had realtors say things like oh Jay, don't worry about that door, that won't open, or the crack right next to it. Those are just cosmetic and we're going to get that fixed. I can't believe a realtor would ever say that, but they have.

George Siegal: 28:01

And that's kind of why I asked you the question again, because I've heard that from them. I've heard them. They look at you and go oh, that's just normal settling.

Bob Brown: 28:08

Yeah, what should I think when I hear that you should think oh boy, you are opining and leaving yourself open for a giant lawsuit, because realtors should never opine on the characterization of anything foundation related.

George Siegal: 28:22

Yeah, and it wasn't the. It wasn't the realtor, it was actually a builder that said that to me. I go why is that doing that? That's just normal settling.

Bob Brown: 28:31

Well, builders are almost as bad as foundation repair companies. So you know they have a here in Arizona. They have a 10 year, or actually an eight year, statute of limitations and if you discover it the eighth year, you get a ninth year. So during that period of time, if you make enough noise, well, first, if you complain to the builder, he'll send out, you know, a rep. You know who will come out and tell you that it's nothing, that is normal, and then, if it keeps happening, they'll send out. You know, if it's bad enough, they'll send out a drywall guy to patch all the cracks. And then, if it keeps happening, he'll just keep doing that, keep sending out the drywall guy, and eventually you know you're either going to run out of gas or you're going to lose interest, or, if you complain hard enough, he'll send out his engineer.

Bob Brown: 29:24

Well, the problem is it's the same engineer that designed the house. So what's the? You know it's not like he's going to say, oh yeah, we screwed up. He's not going to do that. He's going to protect the builder because that's who his client is right, and so he's not really a, he's not really an independent engineer, he's biased, and so you shouldn't really trust anything they say. To be honest with you.

George Siegal: 29:54

That's true. So the places I've inevitably seen cracks are in like crown molding. Is that from foundation problems? It can be.

Bob Brown: 30:05

Sometimes you'll see a gap underneath the floor and that's, you know when the floor is dropping. Or if you see, like the crown molding, where it kind of wobbles back and forth, you know that's from the floor pushing on it. You know what we call cramming cramming the baseboard and that is from the floor pushing upward. And that can be either from the settling going the footing going down settling, or from the floor heating up from expansive soils could be either one.

George Siegal: 30:34

Now, when you have problems with a foundation, can anything be fixed? Or is it usually not covered by insurance, Right? So if I have them, you come out and you say it's going to be $40,000 to fix your foundation. That's on me.

Bob Brown: 30:48

It typically is. Now there might be some exceptions. So the rule is in the industry that they don't. They have what they call an earth movement exclusion, which means they don't cover problems that are caused by earth movement. But if you can prove that it's a sudden, catastrophic loss from like a pipe break or something like that, then you have a fighting chance and I say fighting chance because I've seen it about 50% of the time where you can get an engineering expert to testify that yeah, the pipe broke is what caused this and therefore insurance is liable. Blah, blah, blah. And then you'll have to fight with the insurance companies engineers, which again the insurance companies engineers are not independent either Because, guess what, they're protecting the insurance company. They were hired by the insurance company, they're going to protect the insurance company. It's just the way it goes.

George Siegal: 31:46

Yeah, now in Florida too, our wonderful state legislature just lowered the amount of time you can sue your builder. You had 10 years you could go after them, and they just reduced that to seven years. Do you think they were thinking about things like foundations and settling when they were doing something like that? Absolutely.

Bob Brown: 32:04

It's almost always the complaints that come from a builder. Almost always they're either water proofing problems or they're foundation problems, and a lot of the water proofing problems are related to foundation. So yeah, they were thinking about that and unfortunately, they were influenced by the home builder industry, which has a significant lobby. I mean, most of them are traded on Wall Street. They got pretty big bucks almost unlimited bucks and they're going to lobby hard and so that, but so normally taking those three years off.

George Siegal: 32:38

There was probably a thought in there like we'll save a lot of money doing this. I don't think they just randomly chose that. That's exactly right, well that's unfortunately fact of life, wow, okay. So then, and I think the other thing, it's hard to find good people, and I know you say, don't get out the yellow pages. So what are the dos and don'ts when hiring a foundation expert?

Bob Brown: 33:00

Well, We've alluded to one big one already never hire a foundation repair contractor to diagnose the problem. They're gonna send out who. They're gonna send out a foundation repair Salesman who gets a hundred percent commission. He doesn't. They're, they don't typically. They don't get paid any salary Not any. I've never seen it in any of them and I know a lot of them through a lot of different industries. They don't get paid salary at all. It's all hundred percent commission.

Bob Brown: 33:32

So if they don't find problems, guess what? They starve to death or they get fired. Find a new job. So they're, they're Extremely conflicted to begin with. And the second reason is they don't have the training.

Bob Brown: 33:49

I mean to be an engineer, to be a soil engineer or any other kind of engineer, you need to go to school for five years and had two years of Training under. You know, in the, in the industry from it, from an engineer, you have to take two very difficult exams. So what is a foundation repair salesman training get? He might get a couple of days training at a, at a, training put on by the single source supplier on how to sell their products and how to recognize problems, to sell their products right. That's, that's primarily what what you get and these guys are ultra confident. They puff up their chest and they say things like oh, I've been doing this for 30 years. I'm smarter than engineers, you know I'm way better than engineers. And my response to that is I've probably been doing it wrong for 30 years. You know, and sure they've.

Bob Brown: 34:42

They've seen a lot of houses, but they just don't understand. They just don't understand. You know soil, mechanics and structural load paths like an engineer would, and so they're just not qualified Much as they, much as they pretend to say that they are. They're not. I, I had lots of salesmen work for me and I can tell you and I've known a lot outside my company, that's just the MO that they have and that and it's just.

Bob Brown: 35:11

It's a problem. You should never, never call a foundation repair company. Now the problem is you Google it, guess who comes up? The foundation repair companies, why they have a lot of money in the marketing and they're helped by their suppliers who are who are Even more well-known than you know they're not just a company who are even more wealthy and, and I mean like basement systems, they're a good company. I like basement systems, I know the owner. They're, they're good guys, but they have a hundred people in their internet marketing division. A hundred people How's a little old engineering firm going to compete with that, right, it's very difficult, so you're gonna find foundation repair companies.

Bob Brown: 35:48

That's just. That's just all there is to. You have to dig and search. I'm in the process of putting a directory on my website I hope to have it finished here in a month or two Of all the forensic engineers throughout the country, because I get that question asked to me a lot on on social media. Hey, I live in Alabama, I live in Minnesota. You know, I can't find anybody. You know, and I try to help people as much as I can.

George Siegal: 36:10

So you don't really want to call the repair company in until you have a report for them to work off of right.

Bob Brown: 36:16

Right, I mean, think about it, you get. You get once a foundation repair salesman who says, oh, you need 13 peers, and another one says, no, you need 14. And on the other side of the house, and the other one says, no, you need 25. And so who does the homeowner believe? They believe the guy that is that they're most comfortable with, which is what. The guy that's the best salesman and Usually the guy that's the best salesman is probably not the best engineering type. You know, engineering types are detail-oriented, they're the opposite of sales. And so, uh, listening, you know, to the guy that's the best sales guy, on which product, which plan is the best plan, is ridiculous, it doesn't it? You know homeowners aren't trained to understand that. What? What you need to do is get an engineer to tell you, oh, you need 14 piles. Here's a plan. Go get three bids from three bidders, from three contractors, and get it done.

George Siegal: 37:11

Now the homeowner has confidence that, oh yeah, this is the right plan and it's, it's gonna be supervised and it's gonna be done right and would you tell the homeowner then to hold their ground when these guys try to Upsell them and say oh, they said you needed 14. We think you need 18. You say I have the report when you're doing the bid. I want you to do what's in this report. That's right. I want you to fix my house.

Bob Brown: 37:35

That's right. And, by the way, if you have qualms with what the report says, go call the engineer. Don't talk to me, I'm not the expert. Go call the engineer. If you can convince the engineer that you need 18 instead of 14 peers will more power to you then. But but don't talk to me about it because I'm not an expert.

George Siegal: 37:53

Okay, so in a perfect world, just to wrap this up, what would you want homeowners To be thinking about? Foundations? What should be in their mind? Not not necessarily what you're looking for in the house, but how important in the process should this the health of your foundation be? Well all.

Bob Brown: 38:12

I know is it's expensive and a lot of people have made the claim and I've never been able to verify it, but I've got. A lot of people have made the claim that more foundations get damaged from earth movement than they do from Hurricanes, tornadoes and fires combined. I've never been able to verify that statistic, but but it abounds a lot in the foundation industry. A lot of people say it. I have no idea whether it's true or not, but it could be. It's a, it's a big problem. It doesn't make the news because it happens one house at a time.

George Siegal: 38:42

Yeah, it kind of makes it makes your own news circle or among all your friends when all sudden you find out you need $50,000 worth of foundation work to sell your house, right.

Bob Brown: 38:52

And here's the problem that homeowners face. There they're faced with okay, well, I can get a free Report done by a foundation repair company, or I have to spend a thousand dollars with an engineer. I think I'm gonna save the thousand dollars. Well, that's a. That's a mistake, because you're gonna pay way more than a thousand in art, upsells charges and Other problems. And guess what, five years down and down the road you might have another problem like Okay, the foundation repair industry, we give a lifetime warranty for our peers, right, that ought to make you feel really good, right?

Bob Brown: 39:26

Yeah, yeah, it makes me feel really good. Well, and five years later you call up and you say, hey, my house has got all these cracks and you know they still got problems. So then they send out one of their really educated guys and he says, oh well, yeah, this is from heave. And it says right here in our contract that our peers can't fix heave and our contract Excludes it. So well, have a nice life, you know. And the homeowner says wait, wait, if it was heave, then you guys probably diagnosed it wrong. You know, you shouldn't have put in the peers in the first place. And then the contractor says, hey, what do we know we're just dumb contractors, we're not engineers. You know, and and this is the problem you face when you hire a contractor that To give you a plan that hasn't been engineered.

Bob Brown: 40:12

Now most Contractors will tell you oh, don't worry about it, when we get permits, we're gonna get, we're gonna get, you know, engineering done. Well, guess what? That is not engineering. That tells you, uh, that that this is what the problem is and this is the solution. You only, you only think engineering that the city's require is a spacing calculation. They don't want this pier space too far apart so that the house will sink between the piers.

Bob Brown: 40:41

That's the only thing the city requires, and most contractors are smart enough to know that that's gonna be six or eight feet, depending on whether you have snow loads or not, and that's kind of the standard in the industry for most foundations. So it's kind of a dumb thing that that's the only thing they require, because it's kind of intuitive. But the most important thing nobody asks for, and that is what was the problem and what's the solution? Nobody, nobody asked that up front to get permits. And so when you get a permit, they're not gonna discuss that problem, they're not going and they're not going to. They're not going to address it at all. So this, this promise of oh, we're gonna get engineering is a false promise to make you feel good but does nothing to help solve the problem.

George Siegal: 41:24

And should I be worried when a seller is fixing it because they're gonna take the lowest bid and try to save as much money?

Bob Brown: 41:30

They may not I mean, nobody's gonna care as much about as the person who's buying the house but they might be too late and and I see this a lot, I see this oh well, the seller went out and got his contractor and the buyer went and got their contractor. There's a huge difference. Oh, now what? Right again, it should go to an engineer. The engineer will decide. The engineer might just decide hey, all you need to do is fix your drainage. That's all you need. You know, and maybe the majority of time that might be the only thing that you have to do.

Bob Brown: 42:03

But at the end you get the engineer stamp and if you're a buyer and you're looking for the sellers, oh, we had work done. Well, guess what? I wanna see the engineering plan. I wanna see the sealed stamp by the engineer who investigated the problem, not the one who pulled the permits, the one who investigated the problem. Oh, and, by the way, he should be the special inspector that goes over and ensures the job was done per his requirements and that he puts his seal on the end of it that says yeah, this was done properly per my plan. Now the buyer has a total, total confidence that it's done right. And guess what? Engineers are regulated by their state boards, so if they screw up, you can hold them accountable. Guess what? The foundation repair contractor, sales guys. Who holds them accountable? Nobody. They could tell you the moon is made of green cheese and nobody cares.

George Siegal: 43:02

Engineers-.

Bob Brown: 43:03

And they might not be in business.

George Siegal: 43:04

They might not be in business by the time. You have to go out after them.

Bob Brown: 43:07

It might not, but the fact of the matter is it's difficult anyway. It's like going after a home builder. It's very difficult. I know I was on the other end of it. It's hard to win those suits.

George Siegal: 43:21

Do all foundation repairs have to be permitted? So you should ask if that you should. They should have a record of that it should be permitted.

Bob Brown: 43:28

Some states don't require it and it's a shame. But it's kind of interesting. Both coasts East and West coast permitting is always required. You know you would be in deep doo-doo if you did it without a permit. You get to the middle of the country North Dakota, omaha, iowa they don't require permits. You can just go do it In Texas. You don't even have to have a contractor's license to do contracting work or foundation repairs. You can. Anybody can just go do it Now.

George Siegal: 44:03

I will say Texas I know I love Texas, but that scares the hell out of me, Cause-.

Bob Brown: 44:06

Yeah, it's crazy, I mean it's, you know, it's the while, while West there in Texas they do. A lot of cities in Texas, to their credit, do require an engineering report and some of them require a full report that investigates the cause. Not very many, but some of them do Because it's such a problem there They've the cities have learned to kind of deal with it. But most places around the center of the country do not require permits. In Arizona even they didn't require it for a long time and now it's finally getting around to the point where it's required, and sometimes it still happens without permits. But I would say 90% of the work is now permitted.

George Siegal: 44:49

Why do you think that is? Do people just not care enough? I mean, if you're buying a house, that's your biggest investment I would think you would want to know everything, but most people don't.

Bob Brown: 45:00

Well, again, it comes to the sales guy. If the sales guy is really confident, you know he says oh, you don't need permits for this, we do it all the time without permits. It's a nonpermanable kind of thing and besides it's gonna delay your project, it's gonna cost you more money. We can get this done right away and be a lot cheaper and we're gonna do a good job anyway. That's what the sales guy says to the homeowner and a lot of them buy it.

George Siegal: 45:27

Yeah, I think we're all stupid Because we hear what we want to hear, we want the path of least resistance, but then when things go wrong and we got screwed, then we want to blame somebody and people really blame themselves.

Bob Brown: 45:39

That's right. Yeah, after the fact you got problems then you become very angry, but you kind of did it to yourself.

George Siegal: 45:49

Well, listen. Hey, bob, you're so passionate about this, I can tell it. It shows that you love what you do, and I wish you luck with the book and everything that you're doing. Thank you so much for coming on today. Hey, I'm happy to be here. It was a lot of fun. If you have a story about your house good or bad I'd like to hear from you. There's a contact form in the show notes. Fill it out and send it my way. You might be a guest on an upcoming episode. Thanks for taking the time to listen today. I'll see you next time.