Austin Gray: Inside Home Inspection and Pest Control in Florida

Speaker 1  0:59  
So welcome to Real Estate Excellence, making lasting connections to the best of the best in today's industry, elite. We'll help you expand your circle of influence by introducing you to the leaders in the real estate industry, whether it's top agents who execute at a high level every day, or the many support services working behind the scenes, we'll share their stories, ideologies and the inner workings of how they run a truly successful business, and show you how to add their tools to your belt now, please welcome the host with the most Tracy Hayes,

Tracy Hayes  1:33  
welcome back to The Real Estate excellence podcast today. I have one of the most vital services in the home buying process. My guest is one of the most respected home inspectors in Northeast Florida, originally on Episode A nine back in June of 2021 his business has continued to grow, adding another truck this month I saw on social media there. He's also added pest control, which we're going to dig in, and why that's so important here in Florida, these services are vital to buying a home, especially when buying in Florida. We are a little different for you. Anyone moving from out of state, or if you're a new real estate agent, you're not fully informed on why, how Home Inspections now in insurance is important, and obviously you got to have a pest control service coming on, termite bond, that kind of thing. We're going to talk about that. Today's show is going to be focused on these services. What is important? Hopefully my guest will have some great stories, which I know he does. Let's welcome the owner of great home inspections, great pest control. Austin gray to the show. Hey, thanks, Tracy, hey. Be here. Appreciate you coming on. It's been two and a half years has gone by quick. Didn't have video the last time, so we got some. Hopefully we'll get some good video clips for you here for the social media when clues out. But you've continued to grow. And I know when we if anyone goes back to the original episode we talked about, you know, we talked about your hiring practices and how important is to hire the right people. And I've known you've continued to surround yourself, because now you're growing. So it's probably a little more difficult in bringing some people on, but making sure they're doing it the gray way, right? If we want to say it that way, tell us a little bit. Just in the last two and a half years, tell us a little bit. You know, your expansion of the home inspection, I'm sure you got some more crews out there for that, and then adding the pest control. Why? Why did you see that as a need or an opportunity for you?

Austin Gray  3:19  
Yeah, absolutely. So I feel like I'm an OG man, I'm number nine. Is that what it was? I think

Tracy Hayes  3:22  
it was number nine. It was June. I counted, yeah, this morning on the block, yeah, yeah.

Austin Gray  3:27  
So this is 190 I love it. So since 2021 we've grown exponentially. We're about 100% larger than what we are, so about double the size since 2021 so far this year, we've done about 1500 inspections while the year so far, and that includes insurance inspections, WDO inspections and full home inspections. And then, actually, towards the end of 2021 we started the pest control company, got everything rolling, and in the beginning part of 2022 we were really starting to roll it out. The pest control company is interesting. And why we kind of started the pest control company is one of the most asked questions that we had from the inspection side. Was, who's your pest guy? Who's your AC guy? And you know, it was one of those two ways, which ways are we going to go? And at the time, we were already doing some pest control work inspections, and thought it would be a great opportunity to have another revenue stream, and that was pest control. Pest Control. Pest Control is vital in Florida, as you know. Like you were just saying, termites, bugs, roaches, squirrels, I know you just said you had a story in

Tracy Hayes  4:30  
your house, some rats. Yeah, some whatever they call those rats. My wife was just

Austin Gray  4:34  
telling me, I haven't sprayed for mosquitoes in my house in a couple months, and she's, hey, we're slapping each other all over the place. Go ahead and get this fixed. So yeah, there's always there's a pressing need for pest control, and it creates stability within our company and our organization. Also provides other opportunities. We just had one of our newest techs that joined the pest control side, who came from the inspection side. He expressed some interest in there, and we're like, hey, we have a perfect move. We can get you over here to do pest control work. And now he loves it. So. Know, just creates more more opportunities from within with our company, and more stability from a business perspective.

Tracy Hayes  5:05  
I'm gonna have you grab that mic and just pull it to you about a foot away, perfect. What is it? You know, obviously, you know, being in the real estate industry, home inspection, you're working with a real estate agent. You're working with that buyer for that one time. But now pest control is more of, you want to set up the more of a subscription thing, right? You're setting up, you know, come and do your regular inspections, you know, if they're getting a termite bond, whatever, that type of thing, it's a little bit different market. Or who you're, I guess, basically who you're marketing to, right?

Austin Gray  5:38  
Yeah, any to, we're marketing to any and any and any and everyone, right? If you're, if you're a human being, and you don't like bugs, where we're your people from, you know, this is more of a business podcast, and, you know, from a business perspective on home inspections, it's one and done. Just like real estate, you sell a house, that's it, yeah, and it's hard to budget as a business, it's hard to prep, it's hard to plan as a small business when you don't have any recurring revenue, and pest control fixes that, right? If you're on a subscription base, you know, it's the cheapest Bill you'll ever have, 30, $40 a month for a particular service. They always need it. It never goes away. Roaches don't care what the s and p5 100 are doing, so it just kind of stays there, right? The last thing the wife is going to tell you is, you know, cut the pest control when they see a roach on the ceiling, so it creates stability. And that's stability was one of the main reasons why we went towards pest control the way that it works. And every home inspection that we do, our customers will receive a free or, depending on the size of home, it's either free or $49 for initial startup pest control service, which is normally about $200 if you go pick up the phone and call anybody else to get that initial service, then they get a discounted termite bond on that starting at $99 so you typically will save about five or $600 on your startup. And from again, as a business, podcast, I'll kind of talk, you know, as a business, how are we able to do that, and why does it make sense? Pest Control is a very competitive market, and for us, we don't have to pay to get those leads right. So the big guys, Orkin Terminix, whatever they're paying, on average anywhere from three to $500 per customer. That's our acquisition cost. Wow, it's very high. And so we're able to come in as a person that they were a customer of ours, so it's already kind of a warm lead. Anyways, they're usually pretty happy with us, so we're able to save them that money on the upfront without having to pay that acquisition, wow, three to $500 acquisition.

Tracy Hayes  7:27  
That's, that's pretty high. It's heavy. That's that. That's high. I remember when the cell phone business me, my wife, were in in the late 90s, you know, I think at one time it was $260 all tell figured was their acquisition cost and, you know, and, well, we know where our cell phone bills are today, right? It's like you got to have one. Everyone in the family's got to have one. And now you're Joe, just to to get acquire a home. I mean, yeah, you're, you're in the hole for the first six months of the service, right? I mean, for, for most parts. Well, I'm, I always think pest control, and I always want to put the lawn, but we want to separate that, because you're not doing the lawn. We talked about that earlier. You're focused on the house of the different services on the under the pest control rodents, I know if I saw that on your website, obviously mosquitoes, you know, the other bugs, like roaches, type of thing. What else

Austin Gray  8:18  
are we doing? Yeah. So we cover every pest control need, except for lawns, right? So that's not that. That's not bug so if you have a bug issue or an animal issue, we can help with that. So rodent exclusion work. So sealing up any openings inside your house, crawl space areas, setting up bait boxes on the outside of the house, if you have an ongoing rat or squirrel issue that's going on mosquitoes. So if you're outside, stepping yourself, or you're worried about ticks, which we actually have some ticks in the area right now, one of my kids came in the house about a month ago and had a tick on their arm, and we actually set that off to quest agnostics to get it tested.

Tracy Hayes  8:51  
And yeah, what do they do for the ticks? Is it just a spray or what's the Yeah,

Austin Gray  8:56  
so we can do a spray mosquito fogging. And like I was telling earlier, before we got on that I hadn't sprayed my own lawn in a couple months for mosquitoes. And there are certain IGRs that are in, like a chemical that's in the product that we use for mosquitoes that will also kill off ticks as well. Interesting, yeah, we'll cover all those well.

Tracy Hayes  9:11  
They're definitely in our areas. I mean, St John's counties. I mean, they got to bring in Phil anytime they build a house or build anything. Here we're St Johns County is borderline swamp. Yo, mosquitoes are there. I know just from family. Palencia is an area where there's a mosquito issue, where I'm at the St John's golf generally, if the mosquitoes start to get bad, if you just go on the county website, there'll be the next morning, they'll be around spraying. Where are you finding some of these areas that that need your extra help from the sense of mosquitoes. Because imagine that everyone wants to be outside. They want to be by the pool, and if it's not caged in, you know, obviously mosquitoes are in need. What are some things that you're doing there, besides spraying? Is there other apparatuses that are available?

Austin Gray  9:58  
Yeah, if you're if you don't want to do. Do a fogging treatment. So we have these backpacks, and basically just the county will go by. The thing that the county doesn't do is they'll drive their trucks, and you are paying that. So if you look at your escrow account, you will see mosquito in there. St John's County. It's minimal, but you'll see it. So they'll take their trucks and they'll go drive down the streets, and they'll go spray, right? Well, where mosquitoes will lay their eggs is in the like any sort of so if you have a large plant like, are you familiar with viburnum? They have large leaves. So any sort of tropical plant where dew will collect and will sit, that's where mosquitoes will lay their eggs. So if you're just spraying on from the street, you're not going to be as effective as if you're walking around a yard with a backpack, because we're going to be targeting all of your shrubbery, spraying into the grass itself, anywhere where there could be dew or water collecting. That's where we're going to treat. And if you don't want to go with a fogging treatment, you can actually do they have baiting systems. They're not quite as effective, but they do work. And so what a lot of times, what we'll do is we'll do a fogging treatment around the perimeter of the home, and then we'll set these bait traps on the inside of a patio, like a rear screen Lanai, where you might have a pool areas like that, or if you have a fountain somewhere in your yard, we can set these baits, and you can actually hang them from fruit trees. You can set it up on the side of a column on a house. They're pretty effective, and it just basically has a water based solvent that's in there. And then every month, when we come out to treat, and it's a monthly treatment for mosquito, we'll come back out and then rebate those

Tracy Hayes  11:20  
not a bad idea if you're listing a home that might be in one of these areas, and you don't want the new possible homeowners to be walking out and getting bit by mosquitoes, because that might be the number one reason they might not buy the house, right? Never know. Yeah, never know. Might want, when you need call Austin, come by and maybe do a pre listing spray of mosquitoes,

Austin Gray  11:44  
mosquito and bug free, yeah?

Tracy Hayes  11:47  
Because they figure this lasts about 30 days, the fogging is that the

Austin Gray  11:51  
Yep, it's about 30 days, yeah, so you'll never be able to eradicate. It's called mosquito suppression for a reason, right? We can't eliminate mosquitoes from the world, but we can suppress them. And if there's anything that I can guarantee a customer is that we can never, like I said, completely eliminate your mosquito problem, but we can suppress them down to where you might not see maybe one or two or none, you know, for extended period of time, for those 30 days.

Tracy Hayes  12:12  
Health wise, with pets, how to the chemicals you're using? I imagine, obviously, they got to calculate that into the mix.

Austin Gray  12:18  
Yeah, you have to be very careful with what you're mixing the products that we only have a couple of restricted products that we use, and we reserve those products that are in the shop, and we don't keep those on the trucks for termite services, and only very particular termite services. The stuff that we use is safe for pets. There's actually a couple of the products that we use that on the label itself you can actually spray directly on your animals. So we're not going to do that. But if you ever go into a Petco store and you actually look at the active ingredients that are in some of the flea and tick sprays, it's some of the same exact products that we're using, just at a higher dosage, for mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, anything that's kind of flying around.

Tracy Hayes  12:55  
I'm always worried, especially the lawn fertilization the dog going out afterwards, yeah. Always worried about them getting on their paws and then they lick their paws and all that kind of stuff. Kind of stuff, type of thing. In our original episode, we really talked about culture. Now, you're, I mean, how many employees are we talking total between the two companies here?

Austin Gray  13:10  
Now we're over 35 employees

Tracy Hayes  13:13  
total both. What have you found? You know, you know. And I just, I just admire you as a young man. Your way, you do your business and your reputation is just out there. And we talked about culture and just, you know, some of the stuff that we were talking about two and a half years ago was so impressive, because if you listen to any of the personal development books or these leadership books, I'm listening to one right now, written by cita alumni, marine maxims, if you haven't listened to that one, it's on leadership. He's a Marine, but there's a lot of stuff can be brought over into the business world. He's just relating his 30 years of studying leaders from the beginning of time and to leaders that he had. It was, it's a very I'm in the middle of it, but anyway, but your leadership, your and how? Now you've grown. You doubled in size in the last two and a half years. You've added a company on how are you maintaining the culture? What? How now that your management team is larger and just your overall, you know, now you got 35 people that you're working with, yeah, yeah.

Austin Gray  14:17  
So there's a lot that goes in. And yeah, you got me on a on a good one here. So staying engaged with your people, having conversation quarterly meetings, just I think what's made me successful in business and with my employees and with others is just maintaining a good just a good working relationship, just being myself. I'm not trying to be someone that I'm not. I'm simply just trying to be a good person. I We could spend two hours on what I'm trying to do here is I'm trying to make this into 30 seconds for you.

Tracy Hayes  14:56  
So well, let's let me be more. Specific as you've grown, what are some challenges that you started, or maybe saw some things happening, and obviously, maybe you adjusted to cover them, but as to talk to someone who might have a growing company, or thinking about growing companies in the foreshadow some challenges as you got larger, you know, it's a little bit more difficult to have a conversation with everybody, or see everybody at the shop in the morning, or that type of thing. So what are some challenges you started to see and obviously kept them?

Austin Gray  15:29  
Yes, let's talk about this. Last year was challenging. Every year presents its own challenges. So last year presented its own challenges for the inspection world. And you know, we did have, we did have a rough few months, q4 last year, when rates started to hit close to 8% it was, it was hard on us, and it was more of a kind of

Tracy Hayes  15:48  
the Home Inspections just dropped. It was odd. Yeah, it went

Austin Gray  15:51  
from it went from balls to the wall to what happened. Did our phone number get turned off? What's happening? And during that time, when you know the saying, when Warren Buffett says, when the tide goes out, you know you kind of people you're exposed? Yeah, well, you know when money's coming in and everything's nice, people can just kind of blend in, within your within your company,

Tracy Hayes  16:13  
and you don't really you're busy. Everybody's Yeah,

Austin Gray  16:15  
everybody's busy. And when things get tough, do you kind of start to go deeper into your business and figure out, Where are the holes? Where do we need help? On, where, you know, where are we overstaffed? On, where are we understaffed on, what's happening? Where can you save some money? Yeah, so last year, during q4 was the hardest time in my life as business owner. I can legitimately say that I had sleepless nights. Was waking up three o'clock in the morning, you know, was talking my wife. Am I failing? Like, what's going on here? This is, this is not good. And those are the parts that people don't see. You know, as a business owner, and I wasn't alone, right? And there were other inspectors that were and other real estate professionals. And during that time, we had to make some hard cuts, you know, people that were with us for for quite some time, but we just started to dig deeper and find that they weren't the best fit for the company. There were things that were kind of leading

Tracy Hayes  17:01  
up to the end of last year, but you were busy and over

Austin Gray  17:05  
busy, and everyone was getting a paycheck. And it was never a time where no one was ever like, where we weren't able to pay anybody. It was never like that. But it was, it was quick, and it was fast, right? As soon as those rates jumped up, it was just like, Okay, what's going on? And so I spent a lot of time, and what happened and where I failed on a leadership perspective, is that when we were growing, we grew somewhat rapidly. If you look back at where we were and where we are now, it was somewhat of a rapid growth. And so I was in all these groups, and everything that people were telling you and that you were reading is just, you know, get out of the business. Let your people do what they got to do, right? And where I failed as a business owner, where I've learned is accountability. And I didn't have a lot of accountability in my business. I trusted everyone to a fault. And when I tried to implement some of those strategies from like, a cultural perspective, like, hey, like, we need to do this. This is what it is, because the world's chaotic, and if you don't have certain set boundaries of, okay, this is what you're this is what's expected of you, right? This is what you need to do. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It makes life just that much more difficult. And when I tried to implement some of those things, I was getting a lot of pushback, because I let it go for so long, I did my best as a business owner to just step out and let my people do their thing. I didn't want to micromanage. I didn't want to, you know, hover above them. That's not who I am as a person. And this is kind of leading to one of the questions that you said, What would you know? What did I learn from, from from that rapid growth that we had, is that I, as a business owner, did not have things in place to hold people accountable in the proper way. And looking back, had I have had, you know, weekly meetings with this person that were very structured and said, Hey, this is what we need to do, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and we just hit those four or five things. Had I would have been structured enough to do that. A lot of the issues that we had last year have been a problem. But I just let things go on for so long, and then by the time, you know, I'm like, Okay, why am I not getting a paycheck anymore? And I'm digging deeper in the business. I'm like, Okay, this isn't getting done. This isn't happening, you know,

Tracy Hayes  19:09  
give us some, you know, not to mention names, obviously, but just, just so any other business owner that's watching this right now, which all of our agent friends, are all business owners, too, and some of them are going to add people to their not to the scale that you're at. But what are some things for, you know, give us some that we can actually stick to the wall, like, what was it happening that you wanted to happen? You gave them the reins to make it happen, but it just wasn't happening.

Austin Gray  19:36  
Yeah, there's, there was a lot. And it wasn't just one person in our business. We it's a heavy relationship building business in in the home inspection world, right? Build relationships with realtors, and the same goes for them, with us and their vendors, right? Like they want to know us. They want to know the roofer. They want to know their pesky they want to be friends with them, because it's we're an extension of their business. Yep. So in, you know, with the home inspections, our number one focus is first. Customers. We want to make sure they're happy and they had a good home inspection after that, we want to make sure that we're in good graces with our Realtors and that we love them. They send us work. You know, we really do appreciate what they're doing out there, and not for us, not following up with our Realtors, our agents, right? We have inside of our system, we're able to see one of the biggest things that we look at are inactive agents. And what we would consider to be an active agent is anyone that used us from point A to point B, and then they haven't used us from point B to point C, which is 90 days. So if we don't like if they used us one time or 10 times here, but they haven't used us once within 90 days, we want to know, okay, what happened? What's going on, right? And so we want to follow up like, Hey, did you have a good experience? Are you still selling homes? You know, we asked a number of questions. How's it going? We'll send them gifts, you know, gift cards, whatever, just to kind of just re engage. Yeah, re engage. And that was one thing that just flat out wasn't getting done for most of our agents, and so we weren't getting any answers on why they're not using us anymore. It was always, you know, if we, if you know, a question was asked, Hey, what happened here? What happened here? Why haven't they used us? And now, six months, you know what happened? And they're like, oh, yeah, we'll follow up. Or, Oh, I'm not sure, you know, we're too busy doing this, too busy doing that. The follow up was not there, and that was unfortunate. That was one of the things for like,

Tracy Hayes  21:19  
I said, You're because you're because you're so busy, you're you don't really see these things. Now things start to slow down. So now you start looking at your processes, right, right? You're looking at these things. And are we doing it? When was last in this so you obviously one of those things is, yeah, when was last time we did business with EX real estate agent,

Austin Gray  21:34  
and as a business owner, I just want to know, simply, know, why? Right? Is it that you're not selling anymore? Okay, great. Enjoy your life. You sold whatever

Tracy Hayes  21:41  
vacation, just didn't have any listings. Did, you know?

Austin Gray  21:45  
Did a competitor come along and say, Hey, here's a steak dinner, you know? Like, what? Like, what happened? Can they be bought? You know? And so not knowing that is bad for me, because then I'm flying blind, and all of this squarely comes back on my shoulders, and because I failed as a business owner, not setting these things in place, I failed my company, and I failed those people right that ultimately are no longer with us. So having structure in place, I can't stress that enough. That is the one thing that I can say that

Tracy Hayes  22:16  
I was listening this very interesting podcast this morning. Patrick, McDavid bet David successful businessman. He was talking to Sean Connell, who's a YouTuber media company. Both of them have media companies now, but Patrick picked David came from the insurance side, and he talked about specifically his he hired some his business grew exponentially. Hires these high end CC executives, like five of them at the same time, he said. And one of them came to him and said, you know, whoever I think is, whoever was the president or whatever the company, came to him as the owner, and said, Hey, I want to hire these analysts. I want to hire an analyst. He's, oh, well, what do I need that for? You know, what? How much it could cost me, $60,000 salary. He was like, All right, that's what you want to do. No but I want to hire three of them so they go back. And the short story is they went in and found the analytics of what states, because he's in multiple states selling insurance, and where was it? Where was it easier to get licensed and and grow in easier than other states and that sort of thing. And so breaking down what you're saying right here resonated with me, like you breaking down like, why isn't now, this is one piece of this puzzle, but the Why isn't these agents calling me back and spend 90 days what's going on? You need to know that?

Austin Gray  23:37  
Yeah, yeah. And there's and the one thing that I've heard from your podcast with all of the agents that have been here, and you ask your agents what makes you successful? And I went back and listened to some of your podcasts before I came back on and the number one thing. So I'm almost gonna write down a sheet of paper and then just turn around, what's the number one thing that agents will tell you that makes them successful?

Tracy Hayes  24:01  
The number one thing

Austin Gray  24:04  
as a real estate agent, like, what today?

Tracy Hayes  24:06  
Oh, you really put me on the spot here. Now this is good. So what I want to do here, there's, well, there's multiple, multiple things I that I can think of right off the top communication is, I would have to say number one communication.

Austin Gray  24:21  
And what better, as far as communication goes, than numbers? And so what I want to communicate to is our numbers. As far as what we track, one of the numbers that we track is Agent retention. And do you know the amount of homes that an average real estate agent sells the United States?

Tracy Hayes  24:39  
The average, I think is like six, if I'm not mistaken, if you're looking across the grand scheme, you know every from zero to 12, like fragrances in Northeast Florida, there's like 12,000

Austin Gray  24:49  
agents licensed. So across the country, in fact, check me, if you're one of the brokers, listen on here. It's less than two houses a year that the average.

Tracy Hayes  24:55  
Okay, so we're saturating down every single one, zero to people's.

Austin Gray  25:00  
On 100 Yeah, right. It's one point something. Since 2021 our agent retention has gone from two point I looked at this morning, 2.2 to now we're almost at four so that means the average agent that's using us is using us almost four times a year, which is once right, almost four times the average of the of the national average. So that's really important to us. And what that says to me is that the agents that use us stay with us, and they trust us, I think, as a home inspector or as a real estate agent or someone who is a business owner, what's really important to know as a real estate agent, if you're just getting started, or if you're a seasoned agent at some point in time, in your 30 year career, the odds of you getting a knock on your door, of, you know, getting a lawsuit, or someone not being very happy with you is pretty high, right? If you're a business owner that's successful, someone's going to come and knock him. And the part that I think agents see in our company is that we are an asset to them with the quality of work that we perform, right? So what, what that also tells me is that the top performing agents who use us see that value and know that if they ever get into a bind, or if they ever have an issue, they can come back to us and know that they're in good hands with our company. What we have several agents that have reached out to us that we've either done an inspection for on the listing side, or they've just their customer found us on Google, and they kind of saw reports and how we put together and how informational they are, and like, Oh my gosh. And it was, it was like this. I didn't know these were things. And so I'm really, really proud of that number. And for me, that speaks volumes to know that the average agent uses us nearly four times a year. You go

Tracy Hayes  26:45  
to these conferences, or do they talk about this? That's one of the numbers. Yep, what are you hearing from the other companies? Obviously, you're proud about where you're at, so you must be above the average of what?

Austin Gray  26:57  
Yeah, the average is across these larger companies that were with are anywhere in between the two and threes, two and threes. So we're just getting up into close to the four number right around that right? We're a little bit higher, but you can't really get that much higher, right? Like, if you, if you stay a small company, and you only work with, you know, 100 of the number one top agents in Jacksonville, but you know, at some point they're just going to be all listing side, and you know, they're not going to have a lot of buyers, so you might not even get four out of a Top Producing agent, right? And so it's hard to get much higher than where we're at right now. But yeah, you just want to make sure that whoever's using you is using you.

Tracy Hayes  27:35  
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you, you? Well, my real estate friends that are listening, every loan officer is going to tell going to tell you this. I'm sure Austin, you would agree. Real estate agents don't have the greatest loyalty at all times some do. There are a unique group that understand the importance of having that go to team, that team that you can call at 7am because you need something done right away. You know, for some reason the other home inspector didn't show up in your situation. Or you know that we got a lot of extra puzzle pieces in the loan world right now. Everybody's got extra issues going on, and we got to put some extra things together. Who's going to find that person if I can't do it? Am I do? I know someone that can do that type of loan and have those resources, you've got to have those two or three people in every little service that you can rely on and go to, and they're there because, obviously they want to earn your business, but you got to give it back, right? You got to say, yeah, you gave us one, but we're loyal to you, and we're going to continue giving you great service, but we can't continue giving us great services. We're only getting one a year

Austin Gray  28:39  
from you. Exactly wants to sponsor $1,000 for a party as well.

Tracy Hayes  28:44  
Yeah, exactly. We love to give. There's no doubt. We love to be part of the part of the thing, and we definitely love on our people who are regularly using you. I hear Austin's got a short he's got his black book of who's using them both, but that is a vital statistic in your growth. Let's jump into the home inspections, because at home inspection now, with the insurance issues, and on the 18th, I actually have Cindy Hayes coming back on. I had her on before Ari bar camp. She's on the National Association of realtor. She's the chairperson of the insurance so we're going to talk, be talking about all things insurance in Florida on that podcast on the 18th but part of that is you in the home inspection side. Yeah. Now you know it's important that I assume you're doing wind mitigation on every single report.

Austin Gray  29:34  
Now, just about that's a number that I don't know what percentage that we're using, but it's high. It's probably at least seven. Every insurance company wants it now, yeah, and it used to be that insurance companies didn't care about a four point for up until 2020 ish, you know, four point wasn't required until the home was 30 years old. It was always 30 years. If it was 30 years, if it was 28 years, you didn't need it. Now they want a four point inspection on a three year old town home. You know, which? You know, as a home inspector, it's a little confusing for us why they want it, but they need it, so we got to do it right? But there's also a lot of agents who are newer, or have been in the business a few years that I have conversations with that simply don't know what a four point is. And for me, someone who's in it every day, I'm like, Oh, really. Okay, they're four points, right? It's a roof, it's electrical, it's HVAC, and it's plumbing. And what a four point basically is, is they just want to know what's the age and the condition of those major components, right? The crazy part to me is that they want nothing. They want no information on the structural integrity of the home, right? They don't want any information. Is the house falling over? Is like, is it getting up by termites? Foundation cracked cold, and is the roof gonna fall off, you know, and the other things, but, yeah, so that's that's interesting, the four points you know that they want to know about, but it's a very basic form. It's basically about six pages long, and it's not a lot of pictures, except for just the equipment itself, right,

Tracy Hayes  30:53  
which all those things you're already doing in your regular inspection, you're right. You just copy them over or whatever, onto that. Yeah?

Austin Gray  31:00  
Basically, yeah, you're using a citizen state form that we use, so it's accepted through all the insurance carriers here in Florida, right? But, yeah, essentially, you're copying over a lot of that information and then just doing a couple more permit searches, you know, for those particular items. But if you don't have to, you know, if the house is three years old and everything's original, right? Not really pulling permits, it's just

Tracy Hayes  31:18  
all original. But it's just all of us, you know, it seems like it's all of a sudden, but it's probably been probably been, you know, the last year. Obviously, the roofs are, you know, the big thing. Now, actually, when I had Cindy on originally, she said she was replacing the roof on her house, and she told no, just give me the cheap 1015, year shingles. I don't need the 25 because if my, if I go to sell this house and it's 15 year old roof, they're going to want it replaced. Because the insurance, the insurance companies that are willing to take a 15 year roof now in Florida are minimal, are only a handful, and obviously you pay more

Austin Gray  31:56  
at a so what insurance companies are really looking for when we do a four point inspection on a roof is giving it five years of life, right? And so if you have an architectural shingle, I would advise not doing a three tab shingle, by the way, because that to go from on a 2000 square foot house. And roofer can correct me here, it's not much more that. It's probably 1500 bucks more to go from a three tab, three tab to an architectural and the reason why you're not going to get there's, there's multiple, multiple multiple reasons why you're not gonna get as much life from a three tab shingle. They're a thinner shingle. The wind resistance isn't as much. It's got less than 100 miles an hour. 100 mile an hour wind resistance. So if you put it by the beach, you get one good storm. It could kind of blow those away. And then they're only going to last about 10 to 15 years. Realistically, with a three tab where architectural they say it's 25 years, you can get them up there, but it takes a little bit more work on the insurance side. So if we go to a house and it's 15 years old, are we telling the customers that they're not going to get insured? No, absolutely not. What we are looking for is just the the condition of that roof. Do you have a lot of granular loss? Is there hail damage? Is there anything there? And if we can give it five years on a four point, there's typically no problem. But if we put three years or less, then then red flags go up, and then the underwriters like, oh, we can't do anything with this, right? No. And then it takes a little bit more work to get a roof right here, because then they want a roofer to say it's got five years.

Tracy Hayes  33:15  
So yeah, you're gonna we need to have, we need to have a panel of you an insurance agent. And maybe because the what the other thing we've been talking about and talking with the insurance agents, because, from the financial side, or from the agents represent they they're expecting a certain payment right when they call us to go, Hey, what do you think a payment would be on this house? I have no idea what the insurance is. So we put a number in there. When it was the new bills, and I was doing a lot of the new construction, I put $100 in there for insurance, and a lot of times it was a little bit less than that, especially a townhouse would be less than that, maybe maybe just a little bit more. But it was closed. Now they go out to one of these existing homes, and, you know, it could be blown up. So we're from the loan officer side and talking to the real estate agents and the insurance agent is when, almost when they that person wants to look at that house, you need to call an insurance agent so they can start doing their due diligence in the back to find out the age of the roof. And then the other thing is, obviously the hot water heaters. I think the

Austin Gray  34:15  
important part to stress too is how much of a of a headache this can be on the realtor side, it's difficult for us, right? And as a home inspector, I think I said it on the beginning side. I've said all the time, but we don't wake up in the morning and go, ah, what deal can I kill today? Can I get up on this roof and put a year on it? That's not what we want to do, right? And it's stressful on us. It creates more work on our side. It really does, because it's a lot more phone calls that are going on. But when we go to a house, and home inspector will never kill a deal, per se, the house itself will kill its own deal because it wasn't maintained. We're just telling you, right? And so we're just telling the truth the story about the house, and we'll do our best to make everybody feel comfortable. But one of the things on the four points is, if we get to. A house and it has an 18 year old roof, and it truly doesn't have a lot of life left. It's brittle, it's got granular loss, it's got minimal ventilation. There's lots of things that are going on. And then the realtor will call and say, you know, they'll go around the office, and they'll call me and say, can you put five years of life on this roof? We just need it for this deal to close. We just need it for this deal to close. Well, do one that's not really what we should be doing or can do, or what we even do, but what the agents need to realize is that if they do that, and they put themselves in that position to where they're begging and pleading to have an inspector put a higher number of years of life left on this roof? Well, they're kind of putting their customer in a bad spot. They may not get that house, but if I say, Okay, this roof has only got one to two years of life left, and then they're like, Oh, well, we need to say five, because really need to steal their first time. You'll hear all the sad stories. And what happens is, sometimes insurance companies, now they're doing it more than ever. They'll do the drive bys, you know, in 90 days, will go driving by. And then, if they go and look at that roof, 90 days after they close, and they're like, well, the pictures look a little suspect. You now need a roofer to come over here and give you five years. Well, if the roofer comes by and they get two or three or four roofers, and none of them will give them five years, they have now put their customers into a situation where they got to come out of pocket $10,000 or more to go replace that roof. So yeah, the deal closed. And yeah, you got your check, but now your customers are footed with the bill. And do you think that customer is going to want to refer you to their friends and family after what just happened there? You know? Because even though it

Tracy Hayes  36:34  
was their choice to move forward with that situation, they're going to blame the agent, yeah, or

Austin Gray  36:39  
the inspector and all that looks bad, on onto that customer, all of that. And if you're in this for the long game, that's not something that top agents will want to do. I'll tell you that right now, top agents don't put your reputation out there, right? But it does happen all the time. And because we do so many inspections, we get these a lot, and

Tracy Hayes  36:58  
kind of putting you guys in a corner, yeah. And that's such a that is, you know, integrity we talk about, you know, communication being one of the things, but obviously, we know no trust, right? We know that was important. You were, you were kind of leading into a little bit of your credibility. As a company, they trusted you. But, you know, where was the like, right? Because the 90 days, that's what makes me think of those three things. But when you start asking a respected business owner to bend their, you know, and go outside what they professionally, you know, you're feeling uncomfortable doing it, but then you feel pressure, like, Well, I really want this guy's person's business. And then it just comes a snowball of that could just blow up right in your face. And the reality is, I think agents need to realize which I think the top ones do. Most of these, we have more equity in our homes right now than ever. The price of the value these homes go so to have a roof replace because it's aged, or negotiating that into whether you do an escrow hold back so it's done after closing. Or, you know, because maybe the seller doesn't actually have the physical cash, but they just do the escrow hold back and have it is putting everybody in the right spot, and you're going to look good because you negotiated that. And the selling agent should understand, if you go to pass on this buyer, the next buyer is going to be asking the same exact thing. So you might as well deal with what's in front of you, yep,

Austin Gray  38:26  
yep, yep, exactly. So it is uncomfortable, and you know, you are looking at that from a business perspective, but you're also looking at it from a human perspective. And there's so many ways that you're looking at it, but, yeah, you're right, and it's, you know, they, they kind of will force your hand a little bit, like, hey, you know, I've sent you this business, hey, like, what's going on here? Like this, we need this deal to close, make make it happen. And it makes you feel very uncomfortable, and we don't get it. Like I said, the top agents, they won't really mess with it, because they know, but from a lot of the other newer agents, or some of the others who are, you know, doing one or two deals a year, those are very uncomfortable situations. And the unfortunate part from that is, if we don't bend and we, you know, lose this deal, right? Fast. News, or good news spreads like molasses, you know, but bad news spreads like lightning, you know, the agents say, Oh yeah, they killed this deal for us. They wouldn't put X amount of years of life left. And then they'll tell their friends, oh yeah, don't use these guys. You hear all these stories, yeah? And you hear it from everybody, right from the top inspection companies. We'll hear these stories, and the bottom guys will hear these stories. And I'm sure I'm

Tracy Hayes  39:26  
not out Well, the thing is, it's every it's every inspector, so you guys are equally being seen either way, exactly.

Austin Gray  39:33  
Yeah, anyways, but I will tell you, and I'll be very upfront and open, we've been sued three times as a home inspection company. In every single time that we've been sued, we've got out of it with a 57 501, and basically, the agents after those three times were they because what happens when you get into these lawsuits and you do these type of things? I think it's important for us to talk about this, and I'm not afraid every inspector knows that they can call me, and I am an open book. I will tell them everything about it, and I'm in front of the world now on your podcast. Yes, we've been sued three times, and all three times, the agents have basically loved us at this point, because what has happened is our reports were so black and white, they were so detailed, they were so informative, that the things that we were trying to be sued on were actually in their reports. But communication wasn't there from their end. They didn't read the reports, didn't review the reports with the customers. And so basically what our attorneys do a 57 I think it's a 57 105, or 501, but basically what that does is that our attorney goes to the plaintiff's attorney and says, Hey, this is black and white. We're not going back and forth with this. We're going to sue that attorney or just get out of this deal, right? And so this, this goes back to the roofing thing, and I've said it before in the past, like where we're an asset to you. Our reports are so detailed, they're so informative. We have so much information on there that you can sleep at night knowing that if you ever get into a tough or a bad situation, you're covered. Your butt's covered, your broker's gonna love you that you have these reports. I actually had a call from, I can't say, the brokerage. We had a call from a brokerage at one of the large brokerages in the country two or three months ago. And I was, I was actually at an inspection, and this attorney called me, and he said, Hey, I'm attorney blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, calling from this brokerage is this awesome? I said that really depends on who's asking this question. Don't hang up. Don't hang up. Don't hang up. Like, okay. And he's like, your report is actually helping us in this situation. I need some questions. I need I need to answer some things for me. And so we never got involved in this particular thing, but they had one of our reports that they were going after the listing agent from some of this information. Long story short, we were able to our report. Was able to help get the listing agent out of this very particular search.

Tracy Hayes  41:43  
What are you? You've been sued three times. What are what is the main thing that they're including you in the lawsuit? Are they actually suing the agent, but including you in what's going on? What are the what happens here?

Austin Gray  41:56  
What's your all three of them, from the buyers and the buyers. What happens when you get into a lawsuit, and being in three of them, I can tell you what happens. Buyer gets unhappy because of something and something breaks, or they see something. And do you know what's really interesting about three things? And if you're a realtor, reading this, maybe it'll spark you like, oh my gosh, maybe I need to read this. Is, as a home inspector, we have all of the we can go into our system, and we can click on each report. We can read the IP address, and this is what the judges are asking for. This with the attorneys are asking for they want to the IP address. When did you open the report? When did your customer open the report? Did you read it? Because we can see how far you've scrolled in the reports, and so all three of them, guess what?

Tracy Hayes  42:37  
The software you use can spit that information out. Because, you know, in your industry, this stuff comes up, yep.

Austin Gray  42:43  
So do you know, the interesting part is, all three of those, the agents never opened up the inspection report until after certain amount of time, they opened up three months later. And so what the customer, what the agents aren't doing in these situations, and this is just three times, you know, being pulled into this mess. And I know that there's this is happening all the time, and what they're not doing is they're not doing their customers. They're not doing their job, basically is they're not going in there and educating their customers on exactly what's going on. You know, some of these customers aren't opening up for a few days, or they may only open up, like the insurance report. So it's like a lot of people will not even open up their reports. They won't read it, and so they'll

Tracy Hayes  43:21  
get into that. He paid you all these, all this money to do an inspection, not even actually looking at it, unless, obviously there's some major issue, which obviously you bring to the forefront and say, Hey, you got a problem here. You need to figure out what you want to do with that. Yeah, and not looking at all the other not so important stuff. So we will call that. This just blows my mind.

Austin Gray  43:40  
It's crazy. When we hang up call a couple inspectors, you know, hey, how many people you know that? People tell you it's a known thing. It's kind of crazy. But we will call our customers, right? And we'll call them, and if they don't answer, we leave voicemails where we say, hey, we just had your inspection. There's a couple things going on here. Give us a call if you have anything. Blah, blah, blah. Most of the conversations that we have are less than five to 10 minutes with our customers. If they're not there at the inspection, I'll say the number one thing that you can do as a realtor is just to be present. Come to the inspection, right? Just be there, that way at the very end, we can kind of talk about everything that's going on. If you can't hang out with us for 23456, hours, depending on the size of the house, don't do that, but try to come towards the end at least, so we can have that conversation. So you can be there. But if you're a realtor and you're not reading your reports thoroughly with your customers. You need to be doing that our reports, and most of the reports now that larger companies are using, they're all the same software that we're using. They're very interactive. They're very easy to read and understand. You can shorten your reports to just see the deficiencies and not just the informational stuff in there. And so you can scroll through some of these things, and you know, hit the highlightment, highlight points, the highlight reels. But, yeah, I'll say that that's the number one thing for the agents. This has been such a big conversation about the roofing thing and how it kind of spun off to this. But it's important to know that,

Tracy Hayes  44:51  
well, in the lawsuit, you go in, you find out they didn't even look at the report Exactly.

Austin Gray  44:56  
And so we're saying to the customer. So this has been now, this is. This is the very first one, and this particular customer had sent us an email about a month after we did the inspection. So they've closed on the home. They've closed on the home. This was a multi million dollar home, and the customer had stated, hey, Mr. Gray, we have a problem in our house. We have bats. And I said, Yeah, that looks like a problem. I said, here's a screenshot, 5.3 dash four states that you clearly had a critter issue in your attic with lots of droppings and lots of things. And you also had five openings on the outside of your house. Did you get that address before you went to closing?

Tracy Hayes  45:33  
And you have a service I could fix this time, I think this

Austin Gray  45:37  
was 2018, Okay, this one was Yeah, and not at the time. I wish, I wish, though. So anyways, that's what was going on. And, you know, we didn't hear anything else until I got a knock on the door, you know, from getting my summons served or whatever, you know, two months later, and we were getting sir, we were getting sued. We so the buyer's brokerage and us were getting sued, and the sellers broker. There's three people in the suit, everyone, and they get so that's what happens when you get into a lawsuit, is people will take, get an attorney on here that people will take spaghetti, throw it on a wall, and they'll see what sticks. Yeah, because they want to go after your insurance. They want to go after the brokers, insurance, everybody. They want to go after everybody and just see what happens, right? And they just hope that you kind of bend over and say, Okay, here you go. Just go away, right? And they were coming after us for 125,000 US for 125,000 the sellers were getting the sellers brokerage was getting the worst of it at quarter million, because they have the insurance. And then the buyer's brokerage was up 125 so it's 125 125 I think it was 250 All in all, was like a half a million dollar lawsuit. And because bats are very expensive to go in there and remediate it can cost 10s, 20, $30,000 depending on the severity of the issue. To the eight bats, because they're protected species, they're very dirty.

Tracy Hayes  46:48  
You have to have wear that suits. It's not fun, protected inside the house.

Austin Gray  46:51  
As far as inside the house, sure, we actually don't touch bats as a special company. We don't want anything to do with them. They're nasty and dirty, lots of diseases. Yeah, so they, there were three people that were involved, and essentially what happened was they, they were coming after us because we didn't disclose that there were bats in the attic. Well, a home inspector is not supposed to tell you what kind of animal or critters. No, there's something. There's a critter. And a critter is everything. A critter is a raccoon, it's a squirrel, it's a roach. It's everything. And long story short, with that one, like I said, you know, we're just like, Okay, here's the report. You have four different things in this thing that said, Here is in the summary. It said this. It said that, however, you didn't open up this report until 63 days after we did the inspection, or 36 days, whatever it was, right? You now read this thing and go, Oh, whoa. I didn't see this in the inspection report. You know, get a little upset. Who knows, right? And the agent didn't open it until after we got served, because we could see all of you know, whenever they had opened it back up. So I don't want to get too carried away on this.

Tracy Hayes  47:53  
Well, you know, you make me think, because you know one thing in the loan world every time, well, when the appraisal is done, right? We have, we have to, the buyer has to get that appraisal. There's a time period that they have to get it now, obviously, most as soon as it goes through our quality control to make sure the appraisal is all good, it's done. As to a lending standards, we send a copy to the buyers. It's there. They paid for it. They have to, they have to E sign a document saying they have, they have received the report. Yep, it sounds like your world may come to that, not that you guys have the regulation that we have as lending side, but it almost would be advantageous as a service thing to say, hey, yeah, I sent someone out, and they have to E sign that they received it and they e signed it on this date. Yeah, they said they received the report, whether they read it or not. But it is great that you get that this technology is there, and it is there when they actually open and did they actually, you know, just see the cover page and say enclose, or did they actually scroll through

Austin Gray  48:56  
it, right? Yeah, yeah, that's actually, I don't know if we could do that, but making, you know, it's just an E sign, you know, if we could do an initial, you know, go to the software company and say, Hey, because they're, they're always like, Hey, how can we help you guys? What do you guys need? And so there they take a community of

Tracy Hayes  49:11  
people, and, well, what I think would be the easiest thing right away is the the agents are, all are using their whatever the E sign, DocuSign, DocuSign, yeah. So they could just, if you actually just sent them the document, a PDF that says, you know, gray home inspections, you know you've received your report. Any questions, blah, blah, blah, blah, please sign here that you have, you know you have received it, they can send it out there for them to E sign. And I think, I think it would actually be that quality control and give the agents say, yeah, they got the report. Because I know your story right there. I've never heard a story like that before. I never you know, could anyone can be sued? But what silliness are they being sued for? And that's silliness. The guy never looked at the report. Yeah?

Austin Gray  49:56  
So you know when you get those reports there. They're very scary. They're very they're very mean, you know, and they'll say, See attachment here. They had only attached the signed agreement to for the inspection agreement, but they never said any sort of mention about the inspection report at all. And so when we said, hey, what about this inspection report here? Can you, you know, submit this as part of your evidence? Because here's ours. Then, then the tone quickly changed, right? But it sucks, because guess what? You know how much it costs to get out of a lawsuit,

Tracy Hayes  50:24  
depending so we might have gone and had the bats removed. It might have

Austin Gray  50:27  
been cheaper. Out of those three, we've spent a collective over $25,000 out of three just to get out of it. Yeah, and guess what that comes out of the agents brokerages pocket two. They're spending the same thing just to go get an attorney to say, to defend yourself when you're completely innocent, and it's frustrating as a business owner to know that you are completely in the right. You've done nothing wrong. You've done everything to the book, to the T but yet you've got to come out of pocket 1000s, 10s of 1000s of dollars

Tracy Hayes  50:51  
just to get well, we're seeing that. I mean, obviously in our industry, all over, I mean, every day, you know who wasn't included in the NAR settlement back in the fall. And you know these other, you know these other brokerages now, I think real just wrote a nine, $10 million check or something. I don't know. I just saw that in a flash. I'm not sure, saying that that's what happened, but yeah, it's, I don't know what the lawyers are, slow or there's just now too many of them. Well, there's been too many of them. You know, yeah, they're looking for this, this, this type of stuff. But he's like, I said, they're just trying to tap into the insurance companies, yeah, which is, which is ending up costing us that much more from the home inspection side, in the last two and a half years? Has anything changed? Are you guys, you know, you know, I don't know what comes down from, from the state or federal government, as far as what you guys are required to do, are you doing things a little differently than than you were two and a half years ago?

Austin Gray  51:47  
So we're doing more, and when? So we have, we have so many data points, and you'll get lost in the sauce. Everybody in every business, if they've got their software's, they've got a million data points that you can look at. One of the interesting ones is that when a customer books a home inspection, as compared to when an agent books an inspection, it's about 35% higher of a ticket price than when an agent books an inspection. So what's happening is that the customers are going through and they're picking what services that they want, because the agents Nope, just a home inspection and a WDO, right, like that. Just we just need this. And then what will happen is the customer will get on here because they'll assign things, and we say, here's a list of our other services. Would you like any of these? We have videos, we have all this information. We're not trying to scare people. We still buy houses. They want to know what they're buying, right? And you know one of the first and so we do sewer scopes. And we've actually given our templates for sewer scopes to other inspection companies in Jacksonville, because we started doing them so heavily to where agents be like, Why are you doing these sewer scope inspections when nobody else is doing them? And it was, it was a little frustrating on our part, because we see it a lot, and we're getting these bills for 510, 30, $50,000 for sewer lines. Get a plumber on here, and they'll tell you why it's sewer lines are so expensive. And so finally, we got some of our other inspection companies, and Jacksonville kind of wake up to it. Hey guys, this is what we're seeing here. You know, you could be set up for something if you get into a bad situation with a seller who's just not very or a buyer who's not very happy. You know, you guys could get tossed into this. So now it's becoming almost commonplace to do these sewer scope inspections. One of the very first ones that we did this was probably right after our podcast that we had. It was one of the top agents our brokerage, one of the top brokers in Jacksonville, and she actually helps to run bar camp. She this was, like, the first week that we got our sewer camera, and I was really anxious to use it. I drove out to Fleming Island that, like, came in that day, and one of my buddies, one of the guys, was there doing the inspection, and I stuck this camera down this line, and they had added a circular drive, you know, 20 years ago, come to find out that this pipe was actually crushed underneath the driveway. There was, like a low spot where it was kind of settling whatever, anyways, was gonna be like a $20,000 bill. And her friend was moving from California to come here, this broker. And had we not have done this, that customer, you know, a year later, six months, a week later, could have found out that that West spot in that yard was the lower, yeah, part of the yard in like that, right? There was enough for me to go, Okay, we're all getting these cameras. We're all doing this. We had a house in bowls, and this is actually one of our YouTube videos that we share to our customers. It was over $40,000 to do a re pipe on this house. And the reason why it's so expensive is, if you get into a property where they have cast iron pipes, and you're on a slab, you got to bust up your slab to replace this pipe, like the pipe itself cost, you know, 500 bucks, right? But to bust up the tile and the wood floors and the walls if the problem is under the slab, if the problem is under the slab, and the odds of you having an issue with a cast iron pipe underneath the slab today is pretty high. The last time they were put in was in the 1970s so these pipes are corroding. They're starting to basically collapse on each other. I know years ago you probably saw you have cast iron pipes under your house. Yeah, maybe in total compensation. No, no longer longer those days. But anyways, so we're finding a lot of issues, and it's important that. Customers know and understand what they're getting, and with a sewer line inspection, that's what we're doing a lot of now, we're doing that on more than 50% of our home inspections. It's a very cheap add on. It's about 199 to $250

Tracy Hayes  55:10  
depending on the length, and you definitely recommend it for houses that are older than brand new, brand new even because, yeah, I've had heard some stories the builders gone back over and crushed their own pipe.

Austin Gray  55:20  
So I had one push me for this, because I'll get it to you. This was we've had set we've had more than, gosh, probably at least 20 or more on new construction that they were digging up yards. So had this lady. It was in, it's in Naka T the if you go to the very back, Nope, it's still there. Still houses being built in there. These are the nicer ones. And so I went in there, and the last thing that did they were actually leaving, because I did everything in the house. My Hey, last thing I had to do is your sewer line. I am we go to dinner, right? It's a one o'clock inspection. Big House, five o'clock, okay? And so they're getting in the van, and I'm putting the camera down. It's in the front door. And I was like, Hey, come here. Didn't need to get very far. Was about a foot into it. Anyways, the whole bottom of the pipe was missing, and there was dirt that was just coming in there. There was roots that were already starting to grow through. So that pipe had actually been this was a brand. They hadn't actually moved in yet. No, this was an 11 month this is a warranty inspection. Oh, wow, good. And so Paver driveway, whatever, instead of, like, how do you, how do you fix it? And I'm like, see this driveway? It's not gonna be here pretty soon, because they're gonna have to bust it up, dig, dig your ground and then make this nice. And had they have not spent that extra $199 $250

Tracy Hayes  56:29  
you know, in that range, it could have gone a couple years before it started to back up. And $1,000 bill, your

Austin Gray  56:34  
average sewer line repair bill United States, is nearly $12,000 yeah, the roof is not the most expensive item in your house that you ever place. It's your sewer line, you know, for less than $200 for dollars for the most part, to understand what you're getting into. It's great. And so, yeah, you are you were on to something. If we get to the house and we see if there's a large tree within that service, lateral, somewhere near there, we want to do it. If there's been an added driveway in the front, anything where they've had weight, or whatever, we want to look into those areas. Or if it's cast iron, simply, if it's cast iron, we want to take a look at it and it. And so another frustrating part for realtors is that if we get into a situation with an older house built in the 30s, 40s, whatever, when they say, hey, the sewer line has been replaced most the time, the sewer line that's been replaced is it might only just be underneath the house itself. And because that part, when you're off grade, can be much cheaper, right? Four or five, $6,000 but most of the time they're not replacing the part that's in the ground from the connection point in front of the house to the street. That's the other, you know, 810, $1,000 or whatever it is there. So when we come in and we say, okay, yeah, you've got PVC here, but you're turned into cast iron at your clean out, things start to happen. And then people get upset. Sometimes, you know,

Tracy Hayes  57:41  
I want to go back, because the way you said that, you know, the real the real estate agents ordering the inspection, they're not, obviously, they're they're not really giving their customer the customer service, because they look at these other things. And obviously the agents not gonna sit there they, you know, and they probably don't have your brochure or something. Go look at all the services. Which ones do you want check off? And I'll order these for you. They're just you. They're just ordering that basic home. And you may have somebody somewhere. I know insurance wise, my wife is there. Oh, you know, we need to, you know, make sure we have the extra insurance, you know, especially on the cars or, you know, we have an umbrella policy, you know, and all those types of things. If you never at the insurance agent doesn't ever ask for that, and the people don't even know that service is even available. Yeah, they're not going to order it. But these people will check off these additional services, which also protects the agent. You know, the agent orders that thing and doesn't get the pipe inspection. There's opportunity for someone to come and sue you. Why didn't you order the pipe inspection? You knew this could have cast iron pipes. Or in your case, you're saying the new home builders are probably just as guilty as the cast iron pipe.

Austin Gray  58:47  
We had rebar going through a three this is on one of our Instagram pages too. We post most of our stuff there, but we had a piece of rebar going through a pipe in Del Webb river town a couple weeks ago. So we put our camera that's not supposed to be there. Come back up, dig it up, redo it.

Tracy Hayes  59:02  
Wow. Putting it under the driveway. Is that something just, just turning on how the house is positioned, or is that we're putting it under the driveway? Common for the

Austin Gray  59:11  
smaller lines, depending on how the house is built, depending on just where the plumbing is designed to go, right? So when the the draftsman will draw your house, because I was draftsman for years, and so where the draftsmen will draw, then they basically will give these house plans to a plumber, you know, to this other guy, and he'll go, Okay, your toilets here. This is here. Then they'll take all your lines. They'll say, Okay, it's most suspicious to go right here. And then if you've got a 40 foot wide lot and clean outs at the front center of the house, the driveway has got to go here because you have a side entry garage, yeah? But there are some, or a lot that are not underneath the driveway, but sometimes just, it's just the way Canada,

Tracy Hayes  59:48  
this is cost you that much more because you're basically redoing an entire driveway, yeah?

Austin Gray  59:52  
And what will happen on that, you know, going back is, there's this old adage that that realtors will say some. Um, not all. Some realtors will say, hey, when they're talking about the customer, how much does this cost? How much does this cost? How much does this cost? A lot of them are still stuck back in the the 90s or the early 2000s or, you know, they've just heard from who they were taught, yeah, it should cost you about 400 bucks. You know, could should cost you about 500 bucks, right? Well, when they're buying a 3000 square foot house number there for, you know, four or five, six hours, and they need all these other services now, because insurance is involved, they need a termite letter, and they need all these things. It's sticker shock for a lot of people, right? And so what we have found is that when a customer goes on there and they book the inspection themselves, and then they go, Oh, wow, you know what? I think I actually want this, this, this, this sounds like a good

Tracy Hayes  1:00:36  
idea because they know a friend that had a problem with it. That's the thing. So we

Austin Gray  1:00:39  
started doing sewer scope inspections about God, maybe right around the time that we did that first podcast, about two and a half years ago, two years ago. And then the other thing that we do, and this is one that will frustrate a lot of agents, but it'll frustrate them if it's not communicated in the proper way, mold is a thing, right? We also own environments. Environ X is environmental services solution companies. We'll use environments to do mold assessments for mediation, and then we do lead bait, lead paint testing, asbestos, all that stuff. So what we will do now that we're also licensed mold assessors, is we'll go in and we'll educate people. Hey, every house this building in here, I promise you, I'll swab one of these walls and we'll come back with mold right? But it's educating the customer in such a way that they understand Florida, it's Florida, whatever, right? And so a lot of our customers are now doing our indoor air quality on most of the homes that we inspect. We're doing those on about 40% I said most. So we're doing that on a lot of homes that we inspect.

Tracy Hayes  1:01:34  
My wife would probably order that one. She's got the filters in the house and all that kind of she's concerned about the air quality. Now you just don't know who your what your customer, you know, sees as important. And if you just go in and click, just give me the basic home inspection, you could be cheating them out of a lot of different stuff that they would have ordered from you. Yeah.

Austin Gray  1:01:53  
And there was, whenever I was getting started in pest control several years ago, my business coach that I had had, I was like, Hey, I got to quote this. This house. It's 7000 square feet. They went past. They went termite went termite, they went rodent, they went mosquito. They want all this stuff. And I'm like, they're not gonna pay this. This is if we did it, like, at a good, like, fair price. I'm like, this is almost $300 a month for all this stuff. And he's, you have no idea what value is to this person or that person. You could tell them $5,000 and they would be like, Oh my gosh, yep, we need it. We hate we don't want to ever see anything, right? You can go, this person, tell them, 20 bucks. I can't believe you charge me $20 to kill roaches, exactly. And so that's same thing with your customer. Yeah, you don't know where they don't know, yeah. And sometimes those customers want to spend a million dollars, and they want to know everything that could possibly be on with this, because they've seen the internet. They've seen the home inspector videos on social media. Now, they've seen all of these things that have happened. And if you're only going and saying, Hey, we need an inspection, don't worry about any other stuff, because this could just cause more work for me. Because essentially, that's what it does for a realtor, right? If I'm going in there and I'm doing all these other services, it will basically cause you more work, right? More negotiating, yeah, but at the same time, isn't that kind of what you want, you know the best for your customer, right? You're all about your reputation. And that goes back to almost four inspections a year from our average customer, from our average agent, right? And so they're seeing that value that we're providing. And if you're just where, and it's an inspection company fails, is if we go in and we just do these reports, throw it all at them, and we don't community communicate any of this to them. And where I've done a good job as a business owner is being in the construction industry is I've educated our people on how these things are done, how they're built. I've connected all of our people with all of our contractors. So we have contractors that we can call. They're all in our reports. If we have an issue, I can be on the phone. I can FaceTime somebody. I was at an inspection on the river in Margaret's walk last week, and I called my stucco guy. I was seeing a lot of stucco issues on this house, 6000 square foot, and luckily, he was in the areas. Like, Hey, man, I'll come over. I'll be there in 20 minutes. Like, thank goodness. So like, we have, you know, we have those wonderful connections. And if you're able to communicate things in a way that's not so scary. Hey, you have this, this is how you fix it, you know what I mean. And if you don't do that, if you don't communicate, if you don't have those resources, yeah, all the other stuff that we do is crap. What good is it if we're not explaining those things? And I think that's where a lot of frustration will come from with agents, where they may have gotten burned with a previous inspector. They may have gotten something that just went sideways because they weren't educated properly, right? And so that's what we're doing. We're going in there, and we're basically just saying, okay, you've got mold. If it's stacky broaches, which is black mold, or if it's clay sporum, which is one of the most common molds, is in the world, you'll find that on almost every single inspection that we do, we will tell you how to get rid of it. We'll tell you what needs to be done to get this problem under control. Most, most issues with mold is humidity, and so that's one thing that a lot of people don't think about here in Florida, is if your humidity is high because you have a very cheap air conditioning unit, or it's older or whatever, and you're not keeping that under check, this is going to continue to be a problem, so you need to get a newer more. Efficient AC or, like a whole house dehumidifier, or more efficient doors or windows. And so just educating them on that, hey, get this, get this, do this. And this should be under check, under control, but in the meantime, this is how you clean it. This is how you fix it. That's the mold thing, right? Knowing that you have a sewer line that's going underneath your driveway, or if they have plans to do some work here, they want to plant a tree here, telling your customer, hey, don't put it here. Don't do this here, because it can cause problems with this pipe later. Just, we're not trying to be fortune tellers and saying that it's going to break in six months if you do this. But it's just educating them on like best practices.

Tracy Hayes  1:05:37  
Well, I think you know, you talked about the dollar, and they get the sticker shock because they've been told, you know, three to $500 and get a home inspection. But it's not, it's not. There's so many issues that have come up. And that person you were telling the story about that first, you know, sewer inspection under the driveway. There was already some sort of sign, but no one knew what it was. And you found out that would have been like you said, like $20,000 picking up the driveway, putting it in. Now you look like you're the biggest hero, and now the agent looks so great because you were the one they recommended, and they they are looking up to you, but they're looking up to you through the agent, as the agent referred me to, this outstanding home inspector, they just saved me either a $20,000 negotiation or $20,000 issue I'm going to deal with later. Who, you know, whatever, it's always going to be at the wrong time. You're gonna have company over the house, and all sudden, the toilets start backing up, right? Yeah, yeah. It's gonna be the wrong time. But now you just, it's, it's doing the right thing all the time. I think it's another Marine Maxim's book I gotta get. They're talking about this morning, and one of my he graduated the year before me, but he's now a general. But this colonel was referring to David Odom and saying, basically, he's doing the right thing all the time, and you're doing the right thing all the time. The agents need to understand, yeah, there are now people do have budgets, so maybe you need to negotiate. But that home inspection, you know, the appraisals needed, you're no there's no negotiation on that price. They're gonna charge you whatever that going rate is in the area. But the home inspection you could choose is strategically, choose the things based on the age. Maybe talking to you said, Hey, their budget's not quite this much, but we need to get the most out of this home inspection, because these, most these people, from what I'm understanding, a lot of the agents are saying they don't. They want turnkey houses. So if you're if there's issues with that house, and you're not locating these things, that's not a turnkey house anymore. When they find out a year later that they need to spend $10,000 on replacing the sewer line, yeah, yeah. And I'm

Austin Gray  1:07:37  
very aware of people's budgets, it's tight out there houses. Homes are more expensive than ever right now, and interest rates are a little higher. But, you know, across the the and I know some I'm gonna get hammered for this, but over the course of 100 years, we're probably about average. We're right right now. Six is right. You know that, yeah, and I do, but it's expensive by a house right now, and people are stretching their dollars to get into the house that they want. And I understand that, and I do know that people can't afford to do this, but for an additional $150 here, or $200 to get this thing done to protect that half a million dollar house. That's about your starting price now, yes, in house now, yeah, half a million bucks. And are you going to want to fork out, you know, $800 with us total, or 400 and potentially miss out on $50,000 in damages over time? What you know? Just wait,

Tracy Hayes  1:08:19  
we know we're our fellow citizens, are tapped credit wise, I want to say tapped. The credit is the highest it's ever been. So that means they don't have cash. So when they get hit with a 10 or $20,000 sewer line, which there's you can't when it starts to back up and cause problems, and then they're calling you out, going, Hey, what's wrong with the sewer line? Oh, it's blocked. It's not well, we'll wait till next year. You got to do something right then and there. How are you going to do it? You're tapped out because your credit, you know, these are things that people need to think about, like I said, and it's a reputation now, sometimes people will never know, because you did that, sir, that you know that? Oh, well, they did the inspection. There was nothing there. Okay, great. But what if there was, and it could be catastrophic, right? And really set someone back? Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%

Austin Gray  1:09:04  
so yeah, there's, there's lots of things there, and then obviously, whenever you're using us, you know, there's, you're saving other dollars down the road. So if you go with our company, we're not the cheapest and we're not the most expensive. We are in line. We were higher. We've adjusted our prices in 2022 and we are now right on par with some of the other bigger guys in town, because we were a little higher, and I think that was a well known thing, but you're going to save anywhere from five to $600 minimum with us, because eventually somebody is going to call pest control company have them come over, right? And then we also have a deal with all of our preferred contractors that use us, is that they if you were a part of our system, because they're built into our report. So every time there's like a roofing issue, electrical, HVAC, plumbing, whatever. They are all attached to the bottom of our reports. And so they will individually go to each so if there's eight deficiencies on a roof, there will be the roofers that will be attached to those individual deficiencies, electrical, whatever. And if somebody wants to get a quote, they can go, click, hey, get a quote here from our report, go to the contractors. Well, in order to be a part of our system, all. Of our contractors have to have a coupon code, kind of like teal deal for the Jaguars. So when they call it's like, hey, use code GHI 20. So not only are they saving with us, with our pest control company, Five 600 bucks, but there's 10s of 1000s of dollars in savings. If, like you just it's kind of like an affiliate link, right? Exactly. Yeah. So there's 1000s of dollars in savings, and after the fact, money with our customers that not every other actually, I don't know if any other inspection company is using what we are using. Is using, what we are using and how we're using it. We're kind of interesting on that. I've been on a podcast on the actual software company talking about it, and they're kind of like, Oh, that's interesting. You know, we're doing things that are a little bit cutting edge, but it's working, and our customers are seeing it, the agents are seeing it, and we're having a lot of success.

Tracy Hayes  1:10:40  
Well, like you say, you talked about value. You don't know what people see value and in the reality is, like you said, you're making their connection, saying, even here are other people, and because you used us, you use them, you're going to, if you need them, there's going to be a discount there, and then you're already giving them a discount from the pest control should they come over, which offsets the cost that they just spent on your home inspection to gain that business. Yes, it's one thing. When I, when I first started Quicken Loans, eat your own dog food was Dan Gilbert's thing, as he has multiple different companies besides Quicken Loans, which is now rocket. I mean, there's this whole you know thing is he wanted all those employees to use the services within well, for you, you want all your clients from the home inspection, and use your pest control and and then use the other people you network with and eat your own dog food. Was his ism, is what they call it. I want to finish with the termite bond, because you're I know, when we bought our house, we had one or the previous there was one active, and then obviously, I guess we assumed it tell us a little bit how and how and why. It's important in Florida for the termite bond and have one on your house. Yeah.

Austin Gray  1:11:46  
So in Kansas, the average amount of termites per acre is less than one termite colony per acre. Do you have any idea of how many termite colonies per acre on average are here in Northeast Florida, 616, to 18. That's a fact. So there's more than 16 to 18 termite colonies per acre in our area, and so we have a heavy presence of subterranean termites. It's just a well known fact that we have in our area. If you've ever sold a piece of real estate in Jacksonville, in the in the South Side market or wherever, if you sold a decent amount number of homes, I'm sure you've come across a termite issue. So there's also another interesting thing that we do with the termites. Is if you have an inspection with us and we're finding termite issues, we're able to come in and do spot treatments, which not every pest control company will do, but at a very discounted rate. For the realtors, we kind of cater to realtors on these spot treatment areas. So getting underneath the house to spray boracare treatments or any sort of Termidor or centricon spot treatments to get that to closing. We can help out with that, with the termite bond. What we will do, this is not something that we've talked about. I think you might know about it, but any any Realtors listening this, if you have a listing that does not have an active termite bond, we will install that system for free. And the way that we're able to do this is, what we do is essentially, we put a hold on the payment for 180 days, the seller will never see a bill. The realtor will never see a bill from us. So we'll go into the property and we'll install a legitimate termite bond. We'll do it exactly how we would do it for a normal paying customer, and at the end of the 120 or 180 days, if the House has not sold, basically, we will go to the listing agent, if they still have the listing, or we'll go to the seller and say, Do you want to continue on this termite bond? If they say, No, we don't want it anymore. We're not going to sell. Or for whatever reason, we go back. We go pick those stations back up. If they say, yes, we want to continue with it at that point after the 100 and I think it's 180 days that we have on it. Now, they used to be 120 it's 180 days. We will make the customer pay for it. So if the house doesn't sell in six months, you got to pay for it. But nine out of 10 homes are selling within you know, 60 days or so. So then what we do in the reason why we do it is we will have the potential to gain that customer who's purchasing the home that we may not have ever had that potential to get. And remember, I was talking it's about three to $500 yeah, that customer. So then we'll say, hey, it's just $9 to roll over that termite bond. And then after that, you're paying. We do monthly premiums on termite bonds, about $30 a month, and they can cancel at any time. So we're doing that to add more value, you know, to the listing, like, hey, it has an active termite bond with centricon. And then after that, a potential buyer can just roll that over for 99 bucks. You know, it's not free, right? So it's we have to have something, you know, to put in the ground for that. And then our hopes is that we'll also get them for pest control as well. And it's just another way to add value, right? If you're going to a listing agreement or a listing presentation, and you're just kind of trying to do everything that you can to get that, because they're interviewing three, four or five different people, one of the questions you can ask is, it's more work, right? Because you have to ask the question, to ask it. But hey, does the House have an extra my bond? It's, you know, page, and I think it's item number 16, right? You can check that box. Do you have a termite bond? No. Okay, great. Well, now you do, and it's free, and here you go, and here's how we're going to do it, right? So that's an

Tracy Hayes  1:14:50  
interesting so for our customers coming from out of state, you know, up north, who don't need termite termites are not an issue, or they're coming from Kansas, and they tell. Termites are not an issue. They are an issue here. And how does a termite bond work for those coming in and have no idea what? Why should I? Why do I need a termite bond?

Austin Gray  1:15:10  
Yep, so I'm gonna go into that as soon as I talk about Yes. So even agents. I had a conversation with an agent last week, oh, we don't need a termite bond here. The house is Hardy. I was I was like, okay, so it's a wood frame home. So even a brick house, so nine out of 10 houses that you have brick around it are brick veneer. It's a wood frame home. You have brick that's on the outside a stucco house, it's stucco. I don't need this stucco. It's not wood siding. No, they go after the framing, how the house was built. We have they find the wood and even block homes, because guess what, they come through the block voids. They start eating furred strips, and they get inside the house. Watch my Instagram video on the block house in St Augustine, from last summer gone. 25,000 hours of damage on this house, on a 100 block home. They got in the inside. They were swarming. She didn't see it until she vacuumed into her baseboard and exposed it, and they all came out. It was because she was taking a pool. Never had a termite bond, left the pool hole there, and they disturbed a colony somewhere, and blah, blah, blah.

Tracy Hayes  1:16:01  
So colony started to move, and found the house, block house, 100% but

Austin Gray  1:16:05  
they got in through a block void, found the furred strips and started going into all the trim work on the inside of the house, and just did some severe damage. So why do you need a termite bond so you will never, ever, ever, ever, ever be covered for termite damage under your insurance policy. So if you go purchase a home and that home falls to the ground after you have termite damage, it's considered to be a part of home maintenance. So it's extremely important to know that you will never be covered for it. And that's a shock for a lot of people, because we get calls in the Pest Control Office, we're like, hey, we caught our insurance to see if we get this covered, but they don't cover termite damage. We need to start with termite bond. Well, it's an education time. You don't you're not ever covered for it, because it's home maintenance. So it's extremely important. Extremely important to know that you can get a termite bond startup with our company after you have a home inspection depending on because it's all based off of the linear footage. Right? A person who has a one story home that's 2500 square feet is probably going to pay more than someone who has a three story home that's 3000 square feet because it's all based off of the footprint. That's why we're charged as a business. But from 100 to $300 on the startup for a termite bond to protect that million dollar property is worth every last penny. And termites are just an active thing here, and you'll never be covered for that damage under your insurance policy. So we are your insurance policy as a pest control company and startup for that, and then approximately three to $400 a year to maintain that it's worth every penny. And the way that these things work is termites are nothing but random foragers. All they're doing is, and they're heavy down here, because we have a frost. It never, it never freezes. So they're active year round. So termites, they're crawling around. They're looking for food sources. You there's nothing in the world. If you ever have a technician or a person that tells you that, hey, you're going to attract termites to your house by putting baits on the side of your house. They don't know what they're talking about. Termites are looking around, and what they'll do is they'll look for decaying wood any sort of water source, because they need water to survive. So if you've ever seen a subterranean termite, you've seen the mud tubes that are going inside of a house, or that it looks very dirty. They need these mud tubes to survive. It has moisture content in there, and without moisture, they can't survive. If there's no dead trees, if there's no wet areas, you're probably pretty good for the most part. But what these stations do is, as they're randomly foraging, they'll go into these stations and they'll find them. Statistically speaking, they're the most effective product on the market for termites, and it's the only product on a truck that does not carry an SDS label. You can actually eat the product yourself. It wouldn't do anything. It's not anything. It's 99.5% cellulose, so just wood shavings, and then point 5% of this product called Nova flumeron. And what Nova flume around is, is like birth control. It's an IGR of sorts. The termites will find it. And just like rats and every other critter in the world, once they find a food source to send off pheromones, and they're like, hey, termites found food. And so these everybody else comes, everybody else comes, and they take this bait, and they take this bait, and I'm using this so people can see it on the video. They'll come up here to the station, they'll eat it, and they take it back to the colony. And then what they do is these workers, they will regurgitate it, they'll throw it up, and then the Queen eats the food. Well, when she's eating this bait, she can no longer reproduce. And then it takes about 30 days for that particular colony to die off. And the way that a old school traditional termite treatment is they used to drill into your concrete. You would have patched holes everywhere. Is basically you just have a liquid barrier. And depending on what you used, is either to turn or non deterrence. They knew it's there or it's not there, and they would walk over the liquid and they would just die citric on what we use is called the colony Elimination System. It's because it actually gets rid of the colony itself, and takes approximately, depending on the size of the colony or the type of termite, 30 days, and then they're gone. But the what will keep them around is gutters, but no down spouts going away from the house. Right? You have a wet area on the side of a house, condensate drain lines from your air conditioning, if you're just dripping there constantly on the side of the house, and you're right next to some plants, and it's kind of plants, and it's kind of making mulch very soft and easy to eat that'll keep them around, right? But there's nothing that you can go on the ground like you're fishing for, you know? You know you can't put a live shrimp and then in the ground and expect them to come. They're just randomly finding these things, right? And if you can eliminate those water sources from around your house, you can help. Protect Yourself From termites a little easier. Did I answer

Tracy Hayes  1:20:03  
that enough? Yeah. Well, and then why? I want to go back and just kind of tail back to that one where you the lady didn't have the termite bond and had the, you know, doubt 10s of 1000s of dollars in damage from the from the insurance itself is, obviously, you're not the insurance company. There's an insurance company that's, you know, you're taking your expertise and you're putting those things in, are they limited in how much they cover? Obviously, the assume the claim has to be approved, there's gonna be an adjuster come out and look at the what, what's the typical bond? So are you must be some from, from Dollar, something I'm talking about from $1 standpoint, like, what's covered? They could if that, if, you guys, if that had all been bonded, and then they went in there. And they had actually gotten into the house after you did your pre inspection. So the house is clear. Termites were good. Go and put the centricon system in. Were great. And all of a sudden, two years later, she's had the bond, kept it up. And then we found 20 this $25,000 worth of damage inside the house from termites. Is are they restricted from, you know, $1 amount, what's, what's the, what's the background of the policy, I guess so,

Austin Gray  1:21:05  
state of Florida requires that there's two options on your termite contract. And I'm sure you've heard of this or know about it, but it's either retreat or a repair and retreat contract. Not only does it have to be on page one on a termite contract, it also has to be in bold, and it also has to be a certain size. So you can't hide it. You can't put it here. It has to be a certain part of the paragraph. It's very important that it's there, and it was put there by attorneys. So our contracts were written by attorneys, and there's a particular reason why. So most people will go with a retreat only service. If you go call, I'm just going to pick on them, just because they're the big guys. If you go call Turner pest control right now, and you have a 2000 square foot house, and you tell them that you want to repair and retreat bond or bond or repair and retreat policy for a 2000 square foot home, right now, you're going to pay it's typically about $9 per linear foot, plus, call it 250 the startup on that's going to be about three to $4,000 and then your monthly service on a repair and retreat contract is going to be about 100 to $150 just for the termite, whereas if You went with a retreat only meaning that if you get termite, if you get termites into your house, they'll retreat, and they'll kill those termites, and that's it. Now, if you have a repair and retreat contract, no, there's, there's not a policy limit on there. It's a million bucks. That's what we all carry. Well, you're paying quite a bit, but you're paying quite a bit. So, you know, there's this, this is another podcast, but there are certain ways that bigger companies will do things that we as a smaller company, we just won't do. So we're paying attention to them a little bit more. As a smaller company, we have a better way to control what we're putting out and what we're doing, just because it's the size of our company. But yeah, there's a repair and retreat or retreat only contract. And just choose wisely, right? You're either going to pay a couple $100 up here, and then, you know, 3040, $50 here, or you're going to pay 1000s of dollars here, and then hundreds of dollars here. Weigh your options, right? And if we are truly doing our job as a pest control company, and we're servicing your home, and we're checking those stations and we're doing our due diligence, the odds of termites getting so out of control, like a situation like that, with having an active pest control company is fairly slim, right? If you have a large Formosan termite colony that just goes unchecked for several months, yeah, it can eat up a whole back broom of your of your home. But if we're going there actively, you know, every few months for pest control we're looking at, well,

Tracy Hayes  1:23:14  
imagine they have a centricon probably has the statistics, you know, on that situation, that if a good pre inspections done. No termites. They put the system in. I mean, what's the national statistics of them penetrating past that system?

Austin Gray  1:23:28  
It's over 90% protection that they have. This is also their interesting Jeopardy. Fact, the White House, the Statue of Liberty and the Alamo and all government buildings are protected purely by centricon only. I actually took a picture of it. I went, I saw the Alamo last year, place in San Antonio, and I walked by and I forgot that that was there. I was like, oh shit, there's citric on here, and we're lying. It's here. So if the government can trust them, I can't really trust them, but trust it on their buildings. Yeah. And so we trusted on our customer homes, in my own personal home as well, and we had active termites, not in the house, but we had them on our baits last summer. Last summer, it was kind of funny was we'll get a lot of calls, because Termites will swarm. And they swarm. Subterranean termites will swarm depends on the year. We were having early swarmers in the beginning part of February, all the way until late October, sometimes early November. So they'll swarm almost 12 months out of the year here, because it's such a temperate climate. Well, I was redoing all the landscaping my front yard last summer, and I guess I hit a colony. And when I dug up part of the it was like an old August room tree that was there, and I was in the it was like a Mini Backhoe that I was like, whatever. And I was like, Oh my gosh, there's termites. Are sore, but I took a video. I'm like, taking pictures, and I'm like, This is so cool. There's here. And so I just know, as a as an operator, that you know what it takes to get rid of them, and just because you have turbite source forming doesn't necessarily, doesn't necessarily means you have an infestation, but it means that they're there, and you need to look into it. You know further what happens is basically, you know, you're 16 to 18 colonies per acre, and they're just there, right? And they're just trying to find stuff. Off and you'll disturb one. They could be 10 feet down. They could be 100 feet down. I mean, we don't know where they're at. You just kind of hit one. But if you're doing your inspections, if you have your coverage on your house, and you know what to look for, and you're listening to your pest control company and your inspector saying, hey, you've got a low spot here that's holding water, your air conditioning units dripping too close to side of the house, your gutters going right here. Everything in the inspection world, in the pest control world, starts and ends with water. Think about as like an inspection report. All the things that like kind of go bad, that cause red flags, roof leaks, mold, water, water, foundation issues, typically water is causing that heavy water, not having gutters like drainage issues.

Tracy Hayes  1:25:40  
Well, from the lending world is in the real estate agents have the sphere of the VA loan, they are looking just for that, and your home inspectors are already looking for that for you, yeah? And we always have this, you know, miscommunication, oh, the VA, they're going to come out with a different appraiser. No, they're looking for water damage because just of the reasons you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, which what you're doing already anyway, as a home inspector, are pointing out areas of work because those are the mold, obviously, the termites, all those things that we just talked about,

Austin Gray  1:26:07  
Yeah, sort of conducive condition is what we're looking for as an inspector and as a pest control company. And that's something that's interesting. So we actually have other home inspectors who work for us in the area, and they actually do their termite inspections as an employee of our company. So we have other competitors out there who are working for us as

Tracy Hayes  1:26:27  
other to be endorsed on the

Austin Gray  1:26:29  
to do, yeah, so as a whole director, you cannot, it's just based off the volume of stuff that we do do a lot. But we were actually investigated by the state three years ago, and you know why? And a lot of inspectors don't know this. If you are doing a home inspection and you put the word termite in a home inspection report, if someone out there is angry enough because you killed the deal and they didn't go by the house, or you did a repair request because the home inspector said that you had termites in your house. Guess what? You pick up the phone and you call the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and you tell them that this home inspector is practicing pest control without a license. Guess what? License. Guess what? F DAX is coming to your door. Ask me how I know we had a guy who put in that there was active termites swarming in this house, and you could see it. They were eating up the house. It was a piece of junk and green Cove. Well, we always knew not to put termites in there, we would always say, hey, there's damage. And then this is why we do wdos on every single one of our home inspection reports. There's a reason why we include wdos. It's because, in the event that you can that we come across termites or any sort of issue, we don't have that problem. We're like, we can't say it, you know, but we can now we can, because we just always have a WTO. So what happened here was termite said, appears to be subterranean termites. What happens is said, hey, there appears to be active termites in the property. Further evaluation by a pest control company is advised. Well, the listing agent, I guess, was smart enough, and said, Send me over the WDO report that shows that you had termites from the pest control company. And they said, well, we just have the inspection report. So she had a friend who, because all of this is public record, and her friend was working for another larger company, and this other larger company took our home inspection report, sent it to the state and said, Hey, this company, this home inspection company, is practicing pest control without a license. And this was, like, a month after we started our pest control company, like right after. And so I'm picking up the phone, calling all the inspectors I know, and I'm like, it's not just because we started this company that you got to do this, but here do this, but here's, here's what's going on. And so yeah, you can get in trouble if you're going through an inspection report and you're talking about termites without a pest control license, because as a home inspector, you're not trained for pest, for pest, you have no idea what you're talking about because you don't have the proper training. So you have to have a WTO report. So just another one of those things then.

Tracy Hayes  1:28:41  
But every house should have a WD. I mean, you guys just said you're part of your just, just part of your thing, just part

Austin Gray  1:28:46  
of our thing. Now, yeah, we did that. It was, I don't even think it was two weeks after that where I said, Okay, now that we have pest control company, every single inspection is going to include it, yeah, report it

Tracy Hayes  1:28:54  
makes part of it. Now makes it makes total sense. Yeah? Anything you want to add? You had some good. You had some good. We have some good stuff here, for sure. I hope people are listening, because you whether they sit at a lunch and learn that you're doing and getting educated, or they could sit here and listen to this hour and a half right here and get a lot a lot of good stuff, for sure.

Austin Gray  1:29:11  
If you're out there and you want to get more educated on what it is that a home inspector is doing, or if you want to just learn about inspections, more about our company, we would love to do lunch and learns. We provide good food. I promise we bring the good stuff, and we don't keep it boring. We'll typically make a little fun and have fun with the agents. But yeah, if you're looking to learn more about us as a company and who we are and what we can provide, we'd love

Tracy Hayes  1:29:34  
to speak with you 10 four and to go back to the real estate agent ordering it or the customer. Have you tried to sway the real estate agent from making the making the order, or, or try to, you know, try to get the customer more involved, because they might order the extra services. Because I to me, I'd be like, Yeah, you know, kind of like a loan, hey, yeah, real estate agent, here's my application link. Okay, seven. It to your customer. You want me to call them? I'll take it manually. They can just click the link, whatever they feel. Probably to do. How are you figuring out how to get more customers ordering? Because obviously, they're the phone, yep.

Austin Gray  1:30:12  
So they order the inspection, we call the customer. Hey, are you understanding what, what services that you have and what are the services that that we provide that you don't have? And if they say, yep, we just want this, it's all good to go. No problem. We also have two automations that go out, so two, just two emails, and it'll go out to the customer and say, Hey, here's your final chance. Here's a coupon code if you want to try this out. And it's $25 off for this. Let us know if you want to add this on to your inspection. And then, yeah, we're just here you go. So we'll call them just to make sure they understand what they're getting.

Tracy Hayes  1:30:39  
And then if they put that in video, the what I think you ought to put that in video? Oh, it is, we

Austin Gray  1:30:43  
said there is embedded links. Oh, okay,

Tracy Hayes  1:30:45  
all right, the email goes out with an embedded link for the video. Yes, yes, yes, because they'll watch the video more than they'll read anyway.

Austin Gray  1:30:51  
Yeah, it's super short. It's, it's honestly, like, one and a half two sentences, yeah, long. It's very short read, because I know, because of your attention span, mine is too if I get something like, that's how I am. So it's very short, and the links are like, click here to see what this is. Yeah, everything has a link in it. It's fucking so

Tracy Hayes  1:31:05  
well, another great podcast, great tons of information in there. We're gonna get get a lot of short stuff out of there too. We'll break that down for those who like the short little bites. But appreciate you coming on.

Austin Gray  1:31:18  
Yeah, absolutely, man. Thanks. Austin. Awesome.

Speaker 1  1:31:22  
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