Austin Gray with Gray Home Inspections

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Podcast Intro  0:31  

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  1:06  

welcome back to the show real estate excellence podcast. This is your host. Tracy Hayes, my goal, as you all know, is to bring the best of the best of everyone who is involved in the real estate industry. And today, my guest is one of the highly respected in his craft in Northeast Florida in home inspections. His home inspection company is highly endorsed by the top Realtors in Northeast Florida. I welcome the owner of Gray's home inspection Austin gray to the show.

Austin Gray  1:30  

Hey, Tracy, thanks for having me today, man. I'm really excited to talk about home inspections

Tracy Hayes  1:34  

with you, excellent Austin, as I mentioned prior to the show, and we're going to learn a little bit about you, and I know the audience wants to know a little about you and and then we're gonna, we'll dig into some some good stories here, as I always tell facts, tell stories sell. And the important of home inspections to me, in the real estate in the in the process, are you buying a home or even selling a home? Because obviously you and I have a good friend, and we like to do pre listing inspections and how important those are, but how important the inspection is. Make sure you know what you're buying is not going to be a nightmare, not gonna be a money pit. Some of you, I'm sure, have seen the movie. So Austin, tell me, let's go back. I went and looked at your LinkedIn. You're a very young guy, so we don't have to go back too far, but let's go back to the 2000s go back about about 15 years ago. Where did you grow up? Where'd you go to high school? And I see you're according to LinkedIn, you went on the UNF. Tell us a little bit about that.

Austin Gray  2:28  

Yeah, absolutely so, born and raised here in Jacksonville, was raised in Fleming Island prior to Fleming Island was green Cove. But anyways, Fleming Island went to green Cove junior high, and then graduated at Plymouth Island High School back in 2007 kind of getting on from growing up and getting into the home inspection career. I don't think as a kid, no one really sits down at night and says, I want to be a home

Tracy Hayes  2:50  

inspector. That's actually one of my questions.

Austin Gray  2:54  

So, you know, I was never one to really want to get down and, you know, into the books and read and, you know, go off to college. It kind of really wasn't my thing growing up, starting in junior high, elementary school, I was really infatuated with what my dad did. He's an architect, owns one of the most respected firms in the southeast United States, and so starting at elementary junior high, I just wanted to go and learn what he did, right? And the goal eventually was to one day, you know, work for him, and possibly take over that. And I would go sit in in the summers, on the weekends and the weekdays, I'd go sit in meetings with him, and I would just go learn about the process. Starting in junior high, my dad actually taught me how to do AutoCAD, and then he would actually give me small projects when I was 1415, years old, in the summertime. And what I would do is I would take as built plans, so if they got in renovations. People bought a 1950s home, and they wanted to basically add on to it, or do whatever. He would give me the as built plans that were done on blueprints, and I would transfer those to AutoCAD, so I would just copy, so that was. How old were you? Like? 1450 Wow. I was, you know, I really got into it, dove in deep, loved it, and then it kind of carried on into after high school, right? So I remember sitting on the back porch with my dad. It was about a week after high school, and I, you know, I graduated. I went off on a vacation for a week go see a friend. I came back. It was, he was like, Hey, what are you going to do? You know, because most of my friends went to school with were either a going off to the military or B, they were going to college, right? So it was kind of, you know, like, Hey, you got to figure it out. And it was kind of like a like, Oh my gosh. Like, it hit you, you know, like, what am I going to do? And so I said, Well, I don't want to go to college, right? And I'll go to St John's country, St John's Junior College. And I said, I'll do that. But in the meantime, my dad mentioned me. Said, Hey, there's a program called Northeast Florida builder Association, NEPA, and is still around. And he's like, maybe you ought to call your uncle. And he's Eric, touching, touching Plumbing Contractors. Like, call Eric. See if you know, see if you can get into the plumbing program. I'm gonna be a plumber. You know? I was like, but I was like, what else do they have in NEPA? And he's like, Well, they've got HVAC, they've got electrical, they've, I don't. All these things. I said, HVAC wouldn't be bad, you know, you don't have to get dirty and touch crap, right? So I said, Let's go do that. And at the time, the economy was really starting to kind of top off, starting to topple down at that point. So I went out to a place called Donovan heating an air. And they're great guys. I work with them. Now, I know some guys personally, but at the time, I said, Hey, here's my nephew, sheet. You know, I'm looking to get on with the guys for your appreciative ship program. Oh, sorry, we're not taking anybody. I was like, Oh, crap.

Tracy Hayes  5:26  

So then I was no new construction going on at the time.

Austin Gray  5:30  

Yeah, everything was already kind of built up. So they really didn't have a lot of new stuff going on. However, Eric, what was unique about his company is that they did a bunch of commercial work. So a couple of the last high rises that they did down downtown, the condominiums on the south bank, like They topped those out and did a few things they did Creekside high school. So they were busy during the downturn. So I knocked on the door, you know, walked in his office. Said, Hey, man, I said I'd like to get into the program with you. Oh, awesome, you know. So as I did that, I started working for him for about a year and a half, and that was Monday through Friday, 7am to 3pm then two nights a week you go to school or class downtown. And during that time, I've always been busy days that I wasn't in class. After I got out with the plumbing, I was working with my dad at night, and he was giving me side projects, doing this, doing that, because eventually I sat in the back of my mind that was still kind of the way I wanted to go. After the year and a half passed with the plumbing, you know, I can plumb my house now, right? I learned a bunch. So it was a good experience. Then I started working for my dad full time. And then, as I was working for him, he's heavy residential, all high end, you know, public Creek reserve, that's his baby now, Queens Harbor, marshaling, those are kind of his sweethearts, right? So when the economy really started to go down, it started to slow down. After 35 years of being busy as hell, everything just kind of started to dwindle. And so I was like, All right, so I know I was getting less hours working for him. I said, let me just go ahead and bartend at night, right? So I went over and as I was doing that, and then plumbing and then bartending at night, I was like, All right, I gotta figure out

Tracy Hayes  6:59  

what the heck I was. A young guy. That's cool.

Austin Gray  7:03  

It was good, right? And then one day, my dad, we all kind of knew it was coming. He brought me into his office, and I was still living at home, and I basically got laid off, right? And looking back on it, we all laugh about it, you know, it is what it is. But you got to think at the young guy, you know, 20 years old, and you got 30 other people who have to feed their families in there, who's the first to go, it's going to be the right, it's good. So that's my background. I kind of learned a lot. But then fast forward a few years after the economy was just in the gutter, I was doing this, I was doing that, went up to North Dakota for a couple years, just kind of bypassing while my wife Jessica was in law school. And it was a perfect time for us to

Tracy Hayes  7:42  

kind of just you, just because from here too.

Austin Gray  7:46  

So she moved back here in high school. Her dad worked for the railroad. He retired now, but she was born in Georgia, mainly grew up in West Virginia, and then came down here in the early 2000s so she went to Florida coastal School of Law there, graduated, and it was during that time where I was like, hey, buddy mine, I saw posted something on Facebook. I'm in North Dakota. Whatever I said, I've heard about that oil boom. That's I said, DJ, what's up? Man. So went up there and actually lived in the back of my truck for a little over a week. I had a 97 f1 50 step side. I put a topper on the back of it. That's a whole nother story.

Tracy Hayes  8:23  

Hopefully it was more towards the summertime. It was, it was June or July. I was gonna say it was still cold December, North Dakota in the back of your truck. Oh, my

Austin Gray  8:33  

God, would have been terrible. It was still terrible. Either way, after that, Jessica's dad, I was trying to get her to move up there, you know, take advantage of the market that was there. Market that was there. You know, there was a lot of money to be had up in North Dakota. Said, Hey, let's do this for a few years, and save up some money. Come back, right? And then, why don't we live there? I love Florida, right? And so I took her up there, I bought a truck, and we drove up there the first week of January in 2013 and she that was one of the coldest years on records in North Korea. They had, they had 40 below Wind chill at least once a week. And, I mean, it was just nuts. So she saw 45 or 50 below zero that trip up there. She said, Hell no, when she left, and she's like, you're coming back. And so her

Tracy Hayes  9:13  

dad or she's, she's, she, she's going back with her, without you, right?

Austin Gray  9:18  

It was six months after that, before I finally had a job lined up that, you know, could support, you know, could support us. And that was her dad with the railroad. He's like, hey, I can get you on, you know, as a mechanic working on a locomotive. And I'm like, I've never stepped forward locomotive, you know, don't worry about it. You'll, you'll figure it out. And I was like, Okay, so what's the railroad? And as I was doing that, I was like, I'm not gonna do this. It was just kind of a stepping stone to get back home, right? Something that was good, pay, had benefits, and we could kind of focus on what we needed to do. And we bought a house, and right next door to the right, there was a guy who walked up, and when we bought our house, I was like, I could easily do this. Like, I know everything I like, I was kind of he was talking, and I kind of heard him stumbling a couple things, and I'm like, It's okay. Okay, you know, I kind of understood what was going on. I'm like, this could be kind of cool. You know, walk in people's houses, telling people, what's this, what's that? You know, expect this, expect that whatever I was, like, interesting. And then a guy, a few months later, my next door neighbors, the guy walked up and had his belt on everything. I said, Hey, man. I said, Are you a home inspector? He said, Yeah, what's up? I said, I've always kind of thought about being a home inspector, and always, always. And I was like, I was like, You guys hiring? And he's like, yeah, actually, we are. I said, Would you mind if I follow you or, you know, come with you one day and kind of see it is what she's like, absolutely. And he's like, he's like, Here's my card. Call me on Monday if you're serious about it. Give us some thought. I called him Monday morning. Said, Hey, man. I said, Can I come meet up with you this afternoon? Right? And he's like, Absolutely. He's like, I'll be at his house at one o'clock. So I met up with him and had a crawl space. And it's the very first house I ever did with him. He's like, he's like, this house got cross space. You want to get underneath it? I said, you got a suit. Threw it to me. I said, Let's go from from from that point on, it was, it was go time, right? So I kind of hyper focused on that. But what was interesting? Was, when I was at the railroad, I had a really good gig there. I had a night shift, and I had Sundays and Mondays off. And during that time, what I was able to do is, I was able to work six days a week, right? I was able to do 9am appointments with this guy, and on Mondays, I could do two, nine and 12, and then Saturdays, I was going. So I was doing, you know, 789, houses a week, on top of

Tracy Hayes  11:23  

working full time, just working as an assistant or an unpaid apprentice, yeah. And I wasn't making any money

Austin Gray  11:27  

working for him. He was just teaching me. And then it got to the point, after a few months, where I started, you know, just kind of helping him, right? I'd go around, I'd go one way on the house, he'd go the other way, or I'd go inside, outside, vice versa. And then we got to a point where he's like, all right, you know, I had my license, but I just, I wanted to just really get as much information and knowledge from this guy as I could. And after about a year of working with him, you know, they turned me loose, like, Hey, man, let's go. And so he started sending you on your own assignments, right? So he no longer works. He retired. Fast Forward, a few months later, I ended up just starting my own company, and then things just took off from there, right?

Tracy Hayes  12:06  

So let's hold that right there, because I guess I want to clarify a couple of things, and one that is a awesome story, and if there were some young people listening today, how you you had a job, but you really weren't happy with it, but you held on to it, because that was the cash flow. And then you took this time and effort to say, Hey, can I just ride along with you and find out about your business? And that is just amazing, right there. Now, when you started to see what was going on, or actually, before you even volunteered to do that, did you have a vision of an entrepreneurship, of having your own business? Was that or just, you just, were just looking for a job you enjoyed to do?

Austin Gray  12:50  

No, that was really, it truly, and it was to have that entrepreneurship. And, you know, at the end of the day, what I really, truly wanted was just, and it's still today, I just wanted to be a respected member in the community, you know, if you ever mentioned the name, you know, Kevin gray and the real estate community, everyone's like, Oh yeah, he's, you know, he's awesome. He's great. He does this, he helps out, doing blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I said, that's really kind of the route that I want to go. I just want to be that respected member in the community. And, yeah, I had that vision, you know, not the vision to be this conglomerate of this huge, massive whatever, but I had this vision of, you know, starting this company and just doing just that, what we were talking about. And one thing just kind of led to the other. But the crazy part when I kind of tell people, because I tell this story every now and then, but before I get to that, let's talk about the let's talk about the young kids, right? So it was almost, it was about a year, year and a half, where I didn't see my friends, I didn't go out on the weekends, I didn't do things. It was just a hyper focus, and it was a grind, right? And I saw the end game. I saw the picture at the end. I said, I don't want to be here, you know, with the railroad and the benefits, you know, it was almost six figures of what you were making there. It's, you know, it's a union job. It's pretty good getting around, yeah. But I was like, this just isn't what I want to do. I'm not happy, you know. And it was, it was that, that time, freedom that I craved, right? That was kind of one of the big drivers. And also, you know, just being in the community and being able to do more with my family, but,

Tracy Hayes  14:17  

well, you know, and you mentioned that, and then we were talking prior to the show, we were talking about boating, and you've got, you're on your second boat, nice 30 foot boat in the marina. You're 32 years old. And I know there's some guys who might be listening, or maybe some people listening might share this with some other youngsters. How you took that time that you say, a year and a half, you didn't go out with your friends, but now you can really have fun with your friends. You're probably entertaining friends that probably didn't take the route you do. You're probably a little more ahead in your business and financially than they are at 32 but you're being able to share your fruits. Yes, and it just feels

Austin Gray  15:02  

good it does. It really does. And I think it's kind of that, it just goes back to, really, what do you want, right? I mean, entrepreneurship isn't for everyone. My phone doesn't shut off, you know. But really, what? There's lots of things to do, you know, to kind of get you ahead, and to kind of do what I did. But I'll tell you, I'm, you know, responsive, right? If someone ever calls me, they have a problem, an issue, or just they need to communicate something, I'm there, right? So it's, it just kind of just doesn't shut off. I think one of the things that really helped me and prepped me was just being around, you know, an entrepreneur my whole life, my dad, right? So seeing how he was responsive, how he was always there. You know, sometimes it's just hard to turn it off, right? But just having that net customer service that, you know, capability of going, reaching out to people and saying, okay, yep, yep, yep, okay, hang up, yep, you know, just kind of, what is

Tracy Hayes  15:52  

the, you know, preparation, meeting opportunity is, what is, what they call luck or something. I think, you know, I'm saying, and I'm listening to you tell this story, and you're telling me insights that obviously I did not know before, and it just you, you had you were focused, you took the time, you sacrifice, and it was only you said a year and a half. It's really not even that long a time when you're in and where you look at it, I'm gonna be 51 here in a month. And a year and a half is a blip, and when the reality you took that time to sacrifice and your expertise now with, you know, the housing market here in Northeast Florida, which I think you know, we could talk about what we predict the future to be, but your your business is going to continue to roll, and you your preparation met The opportunity the housing market now in Northeast Florida, and you're, one of my questions is, how do you stay on top of that? You know, I'm saying you're, you're on top of your game right now, right? How do you maintain, you know, to keep yourself, to keep your company, and make sure you're on the cutting edge.

Austin Gray  16:56  

So one of those things is, really, I've had a My guys are the best inspectors in the in the state of Florida. I mean, I am so confident when I say that I'm really, what I did is I made sure that the guys that I hired wasn't just the first person who called saying, Hey, I'm looking for a job. You know, I've really just sat down with these guys, and I want to know their backgrounds, kind of like what we're doing, right? Just talking to them, saying, hey, you know, as a home inspector, this is a customer service oriented business, right? It's home inspections, one A, and it's customer service. 1b You know, there could be the greatest inspector in the world, but if he doesn't know how to talk to a customer or how to explain what's going on, you won't do much, right? I actually spoke in a conference about a year ago, a year and a half, right? Before covid had started, right? One of the questions and asked is, you know, this step, is, you know, this similar questions, hey, you're 32 you know, you've been in the best few years, you know, what have you done? And that's kind of what I just kind of tip toed on. You know, we dove in a little bit more, but we're gonna have enough time to do that. But it was just, hey, you know, I surrounded myself with people who wanted to build what I'm building. You know, they wanted to do more, but I surrounded myself with people that were smarter than me. I'm gonna be honest with you and these guys. You know they all know, they all come with these good ideas of, hey, let's do this. Hey, let's try that. Hey, if we do this, we can streamline this process. Hey, we can help out customers this way. So I actually, in the last year, I hired two other guys who are absolutely phenomenal, and they had their own inspection companies prior to coming over. But I just said, Hey, I've got this opportunity. You know, we're growing. We've got this huge market share in Jacksonville, and, long story short, got these two guys to stop their businesses, to come join us, and just bringing over those, these brilliant minds in the inspection world, has just helped us kind of give a snowball effect, if you will. And we're just, we're steamrolling competition left and right, we're picking

Tracy Hayes  18:41  

up market. So you've created the gray ideology or culture in the company. So you mentioned you hired people that were smarter than you, and I think people are intimidated by that. There's some people who are, you know, some entrepreneurs that can't grow because they're intimidated by hiring someone who or, you know that, because they think of the corporate world like a manager is threatened by someone below them, because they're doing well, you know, they're threatened by that. Instead of using that as their growth, to grow, they're afraid, and so they don't grow. How do you prepare yourself to, you know, keep that team, keep this culture of very experienced guys that could go off, you know, they've had their own business. How do you keep them together?

Austin Gray  19:25  

I think it's that vision of, you know, what do you want, right? And everyone's different. Because there's some people you know, when you sit down and you talk to them and you say, hey, what makes you happy? What makes you sleep at night? What you know, what do you want, right? And every single guy is different. You know, I've got one guy who wants to do three inspections a day, six days a week. Doesn't, you know, doesn't take lunch, right? He wants to make money, that's his thing. And the other guy, he just wants to spend time with his family, you know, he wants to do six or seven or eight inspections a week tops, you know, and he'll help out when he needs to, but he doesn't want to pick up the phone. He doesn't want to have to answer a call. All, he doesn't want to have to do those things.

Tracy Hayes  20:01  

He just wants to come in and pick up his assignment Exactly. That's it.

Austin Gray  20:05  

And there's you're going to have people like that in every single industry. So really, what you got to figure out is you got to have one just sit down and talk with people, and you got to say, what do you what do you want? What makes you happy, you know? What can I do to help you? Right? And I think giving them that vision also of, hey, this is where we're headed, you know. And just keep and keep putting that in their mind and say, Hey, this is where we're going. This is where we want the business to go. Keep growing with us, right? And there's going to be more opportunity. We've branched out, and we're starting to do, you know, like Super Scope inspections. We do debo inspections. We're currently in the process of finalize pest control companies, so we'll be able to have that, you know, other facets off of the home inspection business that creates more opportunity and growth for these guys to go manage, you know, like the Daytona area. I've got a guy who handles everything down from Ormond Beach to St Augustine, right? So at one point we're growing that area. Now he's, you know, in a year or two, he's gonna be able to have guys underneath him that he manages and does things. So we're creating opportunity here, and we're creating and we're and we're giving these guys a vision, saying, Hey, this is where we're going. And if you want to be a part of it, let's do it. Let's rock and roll. So I think having a vision is really important.

Tracy Hayes  21:09  

Who are you reading? You're you're reading or listening to podcast or or listening to audiobook, unless your dad just taught you all this stuff. Because this is high level stuff that you're BS. It is, I mean, because if this is just coming off the top of your head, this is, I mean, the thought process you've put into what you just told me and how you're running your company. I mean, this is stuff people are paying money for reading books. Wow, yeah, man, you realize that

Commercial  21:34  

you need to read some books. Write a book. Write a book.

Austin Gray  21:38  

You know, I've I've read a couple books here and there. I can't lie, I'm not a huge reader. I like podcasts. And there's, I just kind of dabble in all sorts of business podcasts and other things. Recently, in the past month, I joined this kind of like an elite group in the past 30 days. And there's, they have different levels of hey, you're either like a one man in a van kind of deal of an inspector, or hey, you're a guy who's got two or three employees. You're not quite doing 1000 inspections yet. Or they've got this level that I'm in is the entrepreneur level. You've got 10 plus employees, you know, you know, million dollars plus in revenue annually. And then you've got, which is their other elite group, which is, you know, these guys who have, you know, 100 plus guys, right? So in that past 30 days, within that individual organization, which is just home inspectors, they're, they've, they've taught some really good stuff, had some really good ideas, but no, I think a lot of it has just kind of developed over time. Just listening to my dad, right? Kind of what made him successful is he paid his guys well and he listened to him, right? And treating people well is everything, yeah, and that's, that's kind of what I wanted to do initially, too, is I wanted to have those, those core group of guys with me that were just taken care of, right? I want to know, I wanted these guys to know that, I care about them. You know, I appreciate them. Just building off of those core group of guys is just has created this business.

Tracy Hayes  23:08  

And would you say that is your, your, your key to success,

Austin Gray  23:14  

the people who surround you is a huge part of that. You know, doing it alone is just, it is possible to an extent, right? But you can only grow to a certain point before you have to have those other pieces around you to get to that next level. And you know, one of the things it's kind of crazy, when I brought Dana over in the office, I struggled with wanting to hire an Office admin at first, because, you know, I wanted to be the answer that. I wanted to answer the phone, I wanted to book it. I want to do this. I want to do that, right? And I was like, Why do I need to pay somebody when I can do this myself, right? I'm on a roof, I'm in an attic, I'm gonna crawl space. I was answering phone calls.

Tracy Hayes  23:49  

Sweating is dripping down on the phone,

Austin Gray  23:52  

you know? And I was answering phone calls. I was like, whatever. But it got to a point, right? And so I said, Okay, this is just crazy. I can't keep doing this. And but what I what I said to myself is, I said, Okay, whatever. You know, lady I want to hire in the office. I said, I want her or him to ride with me for a month, minimal in my truck every single day. And I want them to see what I do, see what I don't do, see what we offer, see what we don't offer. You know, really kind of, you know, I just didn't a lady to pick up the phone and say, Yeah, all right, we're available tomorrow. Okay, this is the this how much it is, right? And so Dana has been the greatest hire. She is awesome, and she wrote with me for almost a month. And she knows everything. When you call her on the phone, she can tell you what an evaporator coil does and what it does. People like, what's an evapor coil? And we have that in our house. Oh, yes, ma'am, you do all sorts of these things about a house, you know, yeah, you know. And that has just been awesome. And every single person who calls the book an inspection, all of our Realtors, they love Dana like you know.

Tracy Hayes  24:51  

That lets you focus on your business, focus on your guys who are out there producing what they need, and so forth in the you. Obviously, for a homeowner, that's, you know, we would like to say a trivial question in the industry is, any guy in the industry could answer that question, but Dana is trained to answer that question and relieve you from answering that same question numerous times over and over and over again. That's a, you know, that anyone in your industry should answer, right, I'm sure she gets questions that are probably above and beyond, at least. Maybe she refers to you, right, and gets advice on how to answer and gets back to that client. But that day to day minutia of getting caught up, you can't grow right? Yeah, yeah.

Austin Gray  25:32  

And you've really got to be able to step back at that point, right? You got to figure out, okay, what am I doing? You've really got to prioritize, you know, go, 123, right? ABC, and you got to say, Okay, this is taking up this much of my time. This is taking up this much my time. This is taking up this much of my time. Or this is the task, or this is the obstacle that I have to get over to get to that next step or that next level, right? And, you know, having, having these people in place, like Dana and, you know, like Jeff and Jim and all these guys we've got in place, you know, they all have their role, aside from just doing home inspections, right? I've got one guy who reviews all of our reports, kind of like a QC thing, right? So he'll go back and he'll read

Tracy Hayes  26:10  

through grammatical make it look professional, yeah.

Austin Gray  26:14  

And then so every, you know, once a month, the team gets together and we bring in professionals, kind of like what you're doing, and really what we want to be is, you know, when we go to a house, we always want to stay up on top of everything, right? We're not code inspectors, but we kind of want to stay up on on, on what's happening in the in the real estate world, in the housing market, right? So we this Thursday, we've got a roofer coming in, and some big code changes have taken place on January 1 of this year, and we kind of want him to touch on some things. But what we also do is we want to bring to these guys are questions that we have unusual things that we see right because we want to be able to, you know, hey, if we're seeing this over and over and over again, we want to talk to the industry professional in this trade to say, hey, is this accepted now, or hey, is this the new norm? Or hey, is this still not right to where, when we get into a situation in a house, we're not, you know, throwing red flags to customers or realtors. You know, we're not spitting out incorrect information, right? We want to just try to be as accurate as possible. And so

Tracy Hayes  27:17  

that's brilliant from this, because it was a standpoint, because I believe in the same way, because you're actually building an advocate there. When you reach out to someone like that builder and say, Hey, we can you tell us, I do this. You do that. Can you give us some advice? You're, you're now, you now have influence on them, and because now you're, you know, you're, I mean, you're sort of stroking their ego from the standpoint that you see them as someone who is a top person in that field as well. And I guarantee you, we're all in the real estate industry in general. And people come to you who can do this, who can do this, who do you know can do this? And obviously you're the first person that comes off the top of my mind when it says Home Inspections. But that roofer same way, oh, well, you know what? You need a new roof. You're going to refer him, I guarantee you, he gets questions about, we need a home inspection, and now you're in his Rolodex, right? By simply building that network of relationships by bringing him in that

Austin Gray  28:13  

way, yeah. And that was kind of the thought process too, was, hey, you know, we're doing close to 3000 Home Inspections a year, and, you know, kind of having that right? So we can bring in a lot of professionals that will kind of bend over a little bit, if you will, to help out our customer base, because we're sending them referrals and work, right? So it really just helps, just with the entire home buying process, right? Like, we have these good contacts who are, you know, talking with us once a month, or, you know, on a regular basis, and we're sending them, you know, referrals. And we're really helping, not only the realtors and our customers, but ourselves, just kind of helping to move along this home buying process. And, yeah, they've got our backs, right? So, but it's just, we're students of the trade. We're always trying to learn something, because it's always it's never ending. It's it's always evolving and adapting and so not really

Tracy Hayes  29:03  

changing off, just kind of making a slight turn here. You've built a great reputation with the agents. If there's an agent listening that doesn't know anything about you today, I guess, share to them. Why are? Why are? Why are the agents that you have created relationships. You're, you're, you're the go to guy. What can a new agent knowing and when they call your grace inspections, what are they going to get?

Austin Gray  29:29  

They're going to get a true professional. We are truly a one stop shop, so you got to pick up the phone one time, and we're going to be able to get everything done that you need to have done, inspection wise. We're going to be able to help you out with your WDO inspections. We don't farm those out. We're all licensed to the state of Florida through F DAX, so we all hold our je cards to perform WDO inspections. We do pools, docks, bulkheads, you know, we inspect everything within the house, and we can provide that to you guys within a timely manner. The professionalism. You know, we're always on time. We're always going. Answer the phone. We're there for any questions. And one of the things, too, you know, it always gets thrown around in the real estate world, is being a deal killer, right? We are able to talk to a customer way, right, like we talked about earlier, one A, 1b home inspector and customer service oriented. And what one of the things that you'll find is sometimes when we come to a house, right? I'm 32 years old. I got a little bit of gray on the beat. Sometimes people will kind of stress. I agree with that, you know. But sometimes people will say, you know, you're a little young to be doing this, right? And they kind of expect to see a guy with gray hair and old right? And you know, a lot of those guys, if you really start to sit down and talk to them, like, Hey, what'd you do before? Your own factor, oh, I was pilot, you know, or, Oh, I was doing this, I'm in retirement now, is kind of what I'm doing. I grew up around this, right? So if I ever get to a situation or a house that's got, you know, ICF build or, you know, on pilings on the ocean, or whatever it may be, my whole background was drafting design and plumbing and just working in the construction industry my entire adult life, right? So I'm really able to, I'm able to paint a picture to people I understand what's going on in certain situations to where it might not freak somebody out, right? I can't tell you how many times now that we're doing just the amount of inspections that we're doing, and how have gotten I get probably at least one inspection a month from either a realtor or like a roofer, saying, Hey, we got this copy this inspection report. Hey, can you take a look at it and tell me what you think? And tell me what you think, right? And I'll see some of the things that are being said. And I'm like, oh my goodness, like that. This is not a problem at all. But on here, it's like, it's the end of the world. I'm like, Oh my gosh. I'm like, and I, you know, I just had a good roofer, friend of mine, Cooper roofing down in St Augustine. He's awesome. I don't mean give him a shout on your show, but he had called me with this report last month, and he's like, Hey, this this seller, she's freaking out on me. She's trying to get a new roof out of me. This roof's only a year old, but this inspector wrote up this. And I was like, send me the reporter. I'll go take a look at it. And so I looked at it. I'm like, Oh my gosh. Like, I don't I was like, let me go take a look at like, there's nothing wrong with anything I'm seeing on the report. Like he had 100 pictures on here. So anyways, I said to the seller said, Hey, I don't have any skin in this game whatsoever. You know what? You know. But if you want me to give you a roofing letter that's basically with my letterhead and, you know, signature says, Hey, this roof is good to go, I'll do it. And so she had me do that then. So anyways, they gave that to the next buyer. I didn't do the inspection on it, but it just rolled on along right. And so I kind of that that's the big thing. So for the realtors who are out there listening, you're not going to get a guy who's going to scare off your buyer in this market where you've got 50 offers going on to a house, and you hire the inspector, and then they see, you know, a leaking host spigot, and they go, Oh my gosh, it could be this where you have to take this wall out to do this and make this repair here and do that, and the roof's five years old, yeah, but you got one that's bent over, you know, you got to rip this off to do this, like, that's not us. You know, we're able to paint a picture to someone that really just kind of makes you look good.

Tracy Hayes  32:51  

So let me so what? What you just said to me, someone buying a home, they're they're getting that report, and what you're telling me is you're taking that little extra time, how you're wording it on there to really, what the bottom line really is, is how, how dangerous a dangerous but how you know this minor discrepancy, the leaky spigot, you know? What is that really, in the grand scheme of things, in this home, because I think you're right. There's a there's emotions involved. The buyer is really excited about the house. They don't make an offer on a house unless they're emotionally bought in the seller. Obviously, they're trying to, you know, they hopefully their house is good and they can just, you know, get whatever they're getting out of not they're trying to be greedy, but, you know, they don't want to make any major repairs, but I'm sure you're going to point it out if it's there, right? Yeah, you know, and I asked you to, yeah, we'll tell some stories where, you know, say, I know you, I know you really want to buy this house, but this one's, you know, this is something that really could cost you a lot of money later, but to get out there is that your professionalism, you're you mentioned you had a quality control guy that goes through those reports that make sure, almost, I don't want to use the word softened, but just properly worded. And I think that that right there rings to me is probably a lot of these reports are not being second eyed. They're being written by someone who got in the industry. But you wouldn't want me writing your reports. I'm not. My wife would hit the roof. I mean, I'm not grammatically correct, right? And just how you use your words and you're reading in that report. Because you're not sitting there. Most guys are not reading the report to somebody. They're not calling the buy, the buyer, and saying, Hey, I just want to go over your report. Blah, blah, blah. And this is not really, they're actually just giving them a hand. Them a handwritten report, and that's what they read, and if they interpret it one way, you could be called the deal killer,

Austin Gray  34:48  

absolutely, yeah, that's, that's one thing that we never want to be associated with, is dear killer, you know, deal killer. But sometimes there are those houses out there that, hey, you know, they, they might not be for everybody, you know, just you. We'll put it that way. And, yeah, that's huge. And one of the things that we do in our reports, too, is, you know, if you, if you really, once you get in the home inspection business, and you start seeing all these reports and these guys, and you know what they're writing, it's kind of, it's not really painting a picture for someone, right? Because there's so many times where I'll go in there and I'll see a report where it's, you know, a leaking roof. And in the report, it'll simply state, roof is leaking repair, okay, why is it leaking? You know, yeah, how is it leaking? What do I need to do? And that's what our reports go into, right? So when you read our reports, you know, we don't give you 1000 pages, but we say, okay, the roof is eight years old. Everything appears to be in, you know, good working order and condition. It could either be this or this, and this is the remedy. This is how you're going to fix it. Now, that's kind of how we approach it, right? There's, there's like, a three step process to kind of, really most items in a house, and we try to kind of comfort people like, Hey, this is typical for the age of the house. This is usual how this has happened. This is going on. But this is truly the fix. You know, if there's a loose shingle or something has been bonded on a roof, right? Like the true fix to that is not to have a roofer out. I mean, sure, when you're under contract of the house, you need to have a licensed professional performance, but at the end of the day for them to go up there to make a lot of these fixes might only take them five minutes. And if we can put that into report instead of just saying loose shingle repair or loose shingle replace or whatever. Then all sudden, everyone is calling you the next day, and they're going, What do you mean?

Tracy Hayes  36:25  

It's me, it's negative. It's the first thing I think is, oh, my God, they their first thing is, there's a six foot hole in the roof. I mean, you know, even though we're talking something that, like I said, could be, you know, a couple $100 fix or something, boom, guys up there and done and the house is perfect, and it does all how those words go. And then having the solution, right? Aren't we all taught? You know, if you're going to complain about something, have the solution right, right? That's the way I always go. I complain about a lot of things, but I tell people, This is what I would suggest we do. Doesn't get me out of the out of that. I'm always considered negative A lot of times. But hey, I see things and I call it like it is, and that's your job. You call it like it is, but you're giving the solution of, hey, you know, for a couple $100 this is fixed, and you're out of here in a day, absolutely.

Austin Gray  37:11  

And one of the things that we really try to do is, you know, after every inspection, I pick up the phone next day, 24 hours later, and I'm gonna pick up and I'm gonna call that realtor, I'm gonna call the home buyer, and I'm gonna say, you read the report? Do you have any questions? Most the time is Nope, we're good to go. But sometimes people go, yeah, actually, you know what? Let me open up real quick, 8.3 dash one said this. What do you mean by that? And just picking up that phone to call them and just kind of follow up with them, takes us to above and beyond of what just about anybody else is doing, right? It's showing that we care, and we really do. You know what I mean? At the end of the day, I want everyone to have a great experience, but I don't ever want a phone call six months down the road, hey, this happened or hey, this is going on, right? So reaching out to the customer and to the agent, it just it truly shows how much we care. Yeah, and that's what I want people to know out there, is that we really care about your about your transaction, about your customer. We care about you, about yourself, too. Because it's not only customer comes first. They are our customer right at the end of the day, but kind of comes into the referral partner business as well. The aspect is, you know, because the agents refer 234, you know, home inspectors, and we want to make them look good as well, yeah, because if we make them look good. Guess what? They're going to keep getting more referrals from, you know, from those customers, but they had a bad experience with us. Might not really happen as you know, as frequently

Tracy Hayes  38:30  

do you feel in that relationship and just listening to you speak, they felt because you called them, you went over the report. So you're standing behind the report as a as the best of your knowledge, the best of your experience, this is the truth. You gave them a solution. Because I know not every report is, oh, no problems here. Drive on. You know, you've got problems. Got to go back to the seller and hey, I need this repaired, that repaired. But you're giving them the solutions that they feel, that conversation that you just had started off maybe, oh, man, we have this little issue. But you know what? Now I understand what Austin's team is telling me, and now I know the solution. And all within an hour or two, they're, they're back to their positive, emotional we're buying this home, right? And, of course, it makes the realtor feel good, absolutely.

Austin Gray  39:18  

And I actually, and you know, I leave this podcast here today. Later this afternoon, I'm going to go by and stop back by in Rivertown. We're in there just about every day, but I had a customer texting last night. I'll show you the text. You know, hey, our anxiety is at an all time high. They're not addressing this on the report. They're not doing this. They're not fixing that. But apparently, everything is going in this morning. Would you mind taking a look at it this afternoon? So later today, we're gonna go back by and we're gonna meet the customer when they get off work, and just kind of go over the process, whether I'm the kind of go over the process, whether I'm the house, and just kind of make sure that they're back at ease, right? So, yeah, I

Tracy Hayes  39:47  

deal with it on from the loan side, you know, the numbers. We see them every day. And again, it's those calls. This is sitting, you know, saying questions all the time. I try to, I try to prep clients and answer and cover a lot of the. Daily questions we get a lot of the times up front, hey, you expect this to happen, expect that to happen. Expect that to happen. But sometimes they're calling you and you're asking, you just got to take that few moments and and again, the anxiety of that 3045, days that they're, they're buying this new home, especially, you know, obviously we do a lot with the new construction. They got a warranty, right? So you can always throw it off on their well, they're, you know, they're, they're going to cover that. But let's dip in a little bit, and why someone the importance of home inspection. But since I brought up new construction, why is even a new construction, having a home inspector, important?

Austin Gray  40:35  

That's one of the things, and I'll tell you, to be honest, is is growing exponentially. It actually, it started to become to a point where Dana had called me last year and she said, Hey, we've got so much new construction that's coming in on these inspection side that I need to have a separate email outside of this that's just new construction related. And so we ended up doing that just to have everything separated because there's so much that's coming in, and one of the reasons is we're educating the customers, right? So many people just have no clue what's going on in the in Northeast Florida and across the country. Right now, with these new homes, there's a viral video that's going around, at least on the real estate world side, the guy who just had a new roof put on down in South Florida, Tampa, somewhere area, and it was a hidden video, quote, unquote, as a house, camera aiming towards this guy's garage. And it was the county that was coming out to do a code inspection to pass the roof that was just installed. The video lasted less than a minute and a half. He just drove in. Did he even get out of the car? He got out of the car, walked up to the garage. On the right hand side of the garage, looked at it like this, walked right back to his truck, got in the truck, and left, passed it. I sent it, I sent the video, you know, and I just post it. And I got to be honest with you, I see it on a weekly basis. Every time you go into a new construction neighborhood, there's just so much going on. Myself personally, I see these, these code inspectors driving around. I see these trucks are in there. I was at a house just last week where two of the code inspectors came at this final, you know, pre closing inspection. And I promise you, they were there for less than 15 minutes. They had their sheets. They were marking off their net. What are you really looking at, right? So the importance of that is, you know, it's talking about one of the things is really starting to pick up. That was kind of hard to sell at first, but there's three inspections that we do on new construction. You have a pre slab, pre drywall and a pre closing, right? So we have three phases of these inspections. These builders have made the inspection side so difficult to get in to do an inspection on their properties. They've done it in such a way that not all home inspectors can do it. They can't afford the insurance to even get on their property, right? Like we have to carry a million dollars in auto liability policy on our personal vehicles just to drive on the street, to go, I'm serious, just to get on to their property, on this on the public road, to go inspect their house. They want to see copies of our personal health insurance.

Tracy Hayes  42:55  

They got construction trucks moving around in you being a the drive in the neighborhood where this stuff is going on, but the new homeowner can drive in there with their car with and the real Florida insurance, right?

Austin Gray  43:06  

They don't ask those. And so, you know, they do these things. And then some of them want you to have workers comp insurance. Some of them don't, right? So, and then, you know, our general liability policy at our no insurance is not enough for these builders, so they want you to have, you know, there's a million dollar policy on your auto. So the one of the things that's kind of scary, if you will, is the pre slab stuff. And I post videos on our Instagram and Facebook page about a lot of the things that we see. Not everything gets posted because we just don't have the time. And I don't have time. But when I, when I am out in the field, field, still, I'll post videos. But the pre slab stuff is kind of concerning. These houses just get thrown up three and a half, four and a half months in a

Tracy Hayes  43:45  

general situation, what are you looking for in that pre slab?

Austin Gray  43:48  

So we're taking measurements, and we are making sure that proper footers are in place. Plumbing is where it's supposed to be before slab is poured. Electrical stub outs are where they're supposed to be. And then footers right? You want to make sure that according the engineered plans. And we're not engineers, but we're just following what the engineer plans say. Are they to spec Right? So there's a neighborhood down in St John's County, I'm not gonna say the builder neighborhood, but we were down there about three weeks ago and it was like pulling teeth trying to get this thing done. They're like, okay, the house is ready. The customer lives a mile down the street. It took a picture of the lot, saying, hey, it's not ready tomorrow. Like, look, it's just dirt still, right? So they were trying to do whatever they could. And so, long story, she didn't want to tell you when it was going to happen, yeah? So she lived a mile down the road, so she drove by one day, and she's like, Hey, it looks like it's about ready. Does this look like like it's about ready? I looked at in the photo, I said, Yeah, that looks like it's time for us to come. So I dipped over there at like, four o'clock in the afternoon. And so the superintendent came by, he was younger, probably about my age, and just was very standoffish, right? And I'm like, man, we're just here to just, it's basically, like a quality control thing, right? Like, we're here, we got your back. I don't hate you. I don't dislike you. I'm just here to do a job, right? I'm looking out for your best interest and the customer's best interest. So I get there and. And these houses, it's kind of a middle of the line to me, you know, houses start in the 250s to five hundreds, right? And I get there to the property, and I find three pretty big issues, you know. And one of the things is the one story houses look just like the two story houses, but the two stories, they just have a block on top, right? So, the same layout, same layout, same design. And so I'm looking at the plans, and I'm like, Oh my gosh. You know, the footers on this are completely undersized. It was for the one story house, but this was for a two story the whole thing it's that they're monolithic footers, you know? So it's basically like a big trench room mode around your property, right? So, long story short, for one story, they're supposed to be 16 inches wide, and for two stories, busy, 20 inches wide, blah, blah, blah, deeper, wider, everything. And so I was like, man, let me just double check my tape everywhere. So I started taking tape measurements. I'm like, Okay, this is for a one story house. They need to widen this entire footer for this house, right? So that was one two.

Tracy Hayes  45:52  

Why would they just not? I mean, I noticed there's a cost difference, but it's like, why would you just not just make all that is your way you build your homes. Why would you not just make the whole thing just using the one size footer, the larger footer, and just go that way and not worry about someone making a mistake putting the one story footer when it's supposed to be a two story, because that could be catastrophically financially. That would pay for everybody's footer in the entire neighborhood

Austin Gray  46:19  

cost, and you're constantly seeing it. And I had a realtor reach out to us last week saying, hey, there's a certain builder, national builder, here in Jacksonville, that's starting to charge customers $150 to hook up an electrical outlet to a light now. So these builders aren't even putting lights on your bedroom ceilings anymore, but you're not required to have, you only have to have a switch that operates, you know, like an outlet. Yeah, right. And so she's like, is this to code? Is this for code? Is this fine? I was like, unfortunately, they're cutting costs everywhere, yeah. So for them to go in, for them to go pour, you know, just that much more concrete to cover their butts, ain't gonna happen. So, you know, found that. And then, you know, when I got to the house, originally, I verbatim, is what the builder said, Hey, you the Inspector? Yes, sir. All right, do what you got to do report tomorrow morning. I said, Okay, no problem. You know, that's whatever found that one, two, I look at it. I didn't have to look at the plans. I just

Tracy Hayes  47:12  

look now, how much do you think you just saved him? Because there's, there's, you can't

Austin Gray  47:16  

put an amount on that once you get to that point, right to where, if your footers are insufficient, and then the house won't stop settling, right? You're gonna start seeing cracks. You're gonna start seeing things. But no one is going to be able to tell you, Hey, your footers four inches too shallow. And, you know, four inches after the house is constructed, right? No one will ever know why the house keeps kind of settling and developing cracks in areas. Every house will settle to an extent. Every house will develop a crack here or there. That's normal. But when you get it to that extent, right?

Tracy Hayes  47:47  

Do you know of neighborhoods? You went off to name them, obviously. But there are, I have a feeling there are builders from the past 20 years ago, because that's when these footer this is when you're starting to you're going to get those cracks in the slab and so forth, because they did not have, someone did not have that. Someone go out there and double check, make sure the builder was putting the proper footer for the Bright House in there. And now today, you've got numerous homes in the neighborhood with foundation issues.

Austin Gray  48:15  

Yeah, and I don't, I don't want to slap issues, yeah, and I don't want to go off on that, that kind of people out because, you know,

Tracy Hayes  48:20  

it's, it's happened. It has to happen.

Austin Gray  48:24  

It happens, right? It's the human error effect. But one of the most common questions that we get, we'll dive right back in this new construction, because I really want to get into that. It's kind of important. But we always tell customers, and it's the truth, concrete and stucco have two properties. They're gray and they crack, and when they do, you got to seal them up. And it's just, it's just what it is. So we'll try to get through this quick, but the pre slab stuff, so we get to that all right? So bam. We saved the builder and the customer headaches from that too. I get there, I didn't have to look at the plans, but I see the bathroom, tub drain and the sink drain right next to each other. And I'm like, Man, that's not right. I take my tape, it's a foot away from each other. And I'm like, That's

Tracy Hayes  49:06  

brushing your teeth in your toilet. I'm like, the

Austin Gray  49:08  

VIS Queens already in place. The guy told me when I came there, he's pouring tomorrow morning. And I'm like, Okay, you got to think your tub. I'm pretty sure everyone knows if you sent your tub it's wider than a foot, just the tub. How did that one, had the plumber not see this? Two, how did the builder not say anything? You know? And so anyways, I took the plans out in a measurement. I'm like, Okay, it's supposed to be three foot six, you know, three foot six away. That's what they're calling for in this to have space. Blah, blah, blah. So find that then.

Tracy Hayes  49:34  

So you went from a foot they were supposed to be really three, three and a half feet

Austin Gray  49:38  

apart, right? You gotta think, if you're pouring the slab. And basically what I did there is, I just saved the plumber, you know, a half a day worth of busting up concrete and labor, you know, material costs, and then, you know, pushing the home back, you know, maybe a week or two on the closing side.

Tracy Hayes  49:53  

It would have took one of his guys a day to repair that. Yeah, they would have had to have had somebody

Austin Gray  49:57  

go out there bust up the concrete. Then they would have had. To, you know, do another static pressure test on the plumbing, you know, 24 to 48 hours, and then they're gonna have to core back down. So then the last thing on this house, you know, pretty, same house, Yeah, same house, same house. And the lady, the story about this customer, is her best friend, referred us to her because we did a pre slab inspection on her house, and we found very similar things on her house, also in St John's County, in a higher end neighborhood. And so they're both just shaking their head at the end of us doing these inspections like we can't believe what's going on. So the third thing was this, and I come in and you've got, you know, your monolithic footer on the outside right, and then just about every house is going to have at least one interior footer wall. It's going to be where all the weight of this house is designed to be sitting right. Your trust is sitting a certain way. And they're designed to have all designed to have all this weight on a certain part of the house. And that's just as important as the exterior wall of the monolithic footer. And I'm we're seeing this on, if not 6070, 75% of the houses, it's that frequent right now. And I come into this interior footer and I'm like, I take all my measurements, and I'm like, Man, this thing's just not adding up to the plans, you know, at all. Like, not even remotely close. I mean, if there's a footer that's three or four inches off, it's fine, you know, we're gonna call, you know, there's a little bit of giveaway, right? So I go in and this thing from the it was, it was the interior footer for the master bedroom area up above and to the family room down below. And the footer was something like six feet off center, six feet, yeah. And then it was supposed to be, I

Tracy Hayes  51:30  

believe, six feet off center, not that's what, that's what it's supposed to be.

Austin Gray  51:34  

Well, no, six feet off so, like, from the exterior wall. It was supposed to be something like 14 foot off the exterior wall from the left side. And it was something like eight or nine. Oh, my God. And then, and then I take it, you know? And from that point, I said, Okay, let me just make sure that nothing in the plans have changed. They didn't like flip the house, right? And so I just marked it down and said, Okay, well, we'll talk to the builder whenever he comes back. And then, not only that, the footer was also supposed to be, I can't remember the exact number, but it was like, three feet short, right? So it goes this way. So it was off center from the wall, parallel, and it was also short by three or four feet. So the builder comes back, and we call him, said, Hey, man, we're all wrapped up. Would you mind coming by and take a look at it? Customers there? And he's like, Hey, how'd everything go? And I said, Well, I got three problems. I said, Two, I know kind of you know you're gonna want to take a look at but the third one, I just have a question on. And so I took the plans to him. I said, Hey, have the plans changed? Have they deviated from this? Right? Because they're poor tomorrow, county signed off on all of this. St John's County signed off on all this. And he's like, nope, everything's good to go, right here. I said, Okay, well, let's walk through. So I walked him back through all through all three of these things, and then his tone completely changed, yeah. You know, the plumbers have been having to bust up a lot of concrete in this neighborhood, you know? And now you're seeing why, and like, you're seeing all this stuff. And it's like, man, do you not look and read? And they don't. They've got 2030 houses at a time. I don't know it could be a little bit more, a little bit less, but you talk to some of these builders, and they just rush through these things. So that's the pre slab side. We're saving people money there, right? Pre drywall, if you just want to see some funny stuff, some crazy stuff, some scary stuff, go to the Instagram page, kind of look at some of the videos that we're doing. But really, there again, we're not trying to scare a single person. These houses, structurally speaking, for the most part, are not going anywhere. You know, they're nice homes, but a lot of times you get in there and they're cutting corners, they're they're doing things sloppy. You know, you've got broken stuff here. You've got,

Tracy Hayes  53:24  

do you see it as a disconnect? Because, I mean, obviously the builder is not trying to do this. He has the plans like, isn't to the subcontractor. And the subcontractors either not very good or just throwing it out there.

Austin Gray  53:36  

These builders not bad people. They are good humans. They truly are. But there's a lack of oversight. And, you know, it's kind of, what we tell people, is, when the cat's away, the mice will play, and we go into these houses, and it just, every time we go in there, we just kind of shake our heads, you know, it's just like, I can't believe this is going on. But the crazy part is, too, is that they're just letting it go, you know, because

Tracy Hayes  53:57  

it costs money to repair, yeah, time, right? That's another thing. Time, I know they're getting these homes completed in a reasonable period of time with all the other delays they got going on, exactly.

Austin Gray  54:07  

Yeah, so, yeah, that new construction stuff is really important. And I know that they've got a year. And when you walk into those new construction sites and they say, Oh, you don't need an inspection, you know, we have a code inspector. You know, I had a blower door contract with a company. Doing all the blower door and duck blasting for a lot of the new construction homes around here. And what they started to do was some of these builders were starting to pay my guys are asking, Hey, why you're doing these blower doors? Do you want to do a QC inspection? And like, how much you guys want to pay us to do that? Like, 55 bucks. They were like, What do you want us to do? And with $55 on a 2000 square foot house, like, just go through here with this checklist, you know, and this will be our QC inspections for our customers. And I'm like, You're not looking at anything, you're not testing any electrical problems, you're not looking at plumbing. You're just kind of like, you know, Lazada, you know, looking around this house and making sure, you know, paint on the wall.

Tracy Hayes  54:54  

I think you know, it's, you mentioned the code inspector. I'm sure there's some code inspectors. That are maybe have been in the construction business for a long time and whatever, and just at that time in their life, they're like, hey, we'll just go work for the county. Got benefits. I'm a little older slow, you know, although it's a fast pace here, but it's working for the government. But you also have some guys that don't have the experience, don't have thing out there, so you don't know who you're gonna get. So to trust that situation. And then you got subcontractors who are working for a builder, and they're basing their income based on volume, based on how many times they can do whatever they do in a quick so the faster they can do it, they can make money, versus if they had just as many jobs, working in a visual residential home, they would make, I wouldn't say, twice as much money, but they would make more money because that residential job, they have to go get the builder contract. They're just getting volume, and they're just running through that. Do you agree

Austin Gray  55:51  

100% and what you're seeing too, is you'll see new contractors. I talk to guys when I'm on job sites all the time, all the time, and one of the things that will happen is you'll have, you know, these you have company A, and then Company A has got three or four crews, right? Well, you might have this guy over here, you know, Jobo. And Jobo is awesome. All the builders love him. He's great. He's He's good at what, no problems, no problems. And then all some what these bills are doing is they're like, hey, Jobo, would you like to come work for us directly, doing this, right? And so Job is like, Yeah, this is awesome. And then the builders like, hey, but we need you to do 50 houses next month. And then Jobo is like, well, I can't go higher. These are like, let me, I'm doing third all my friends. Yeah. Just help Yeah. And you're seeing that, and you're seeing these subcontractors on this new construction stuff. If you go sit in your truck, just go twirl your thumbs, go eat lunch and see who's running in out of your house, you might go, You know what? Maybe Austin is, right? And that's what's happening. And you're seeing it not only on the side that I do, but also on the full on custom inside of, you know, stuff like my dad does. He's got three houses under construction on the ocean right now that are five, $10 million plus. And he had a very, very, very similar situation where a customer called in about one of the builders, trying to get another plumbing contractor who was newer, trying to do some things. Long story short, you're seeing it everywhere. And we're just trying to educate the customers. What we're trying to do, you know, we're not ever saying, don't buy this new construction house, you know. And we're just saying, hey, there's these things that are popping up that we're seeing that could potentially cause you a pretty big problem down the road. One of the things that we see that, you know, just a few months ago, we had a house that a customer backed out of because on the duct work connections where, you know you've got it basically sealed up two or three ways. They'll take this flex duct back, they'll seal it up with a zip tie, and they'll put aluminum tape, and then they'll put what's called mastic, which is like a ceramic coating all the time. We'll go into these houses, and these guys just take this brush, basically, and they just kind of go around the duct once or twice, and doesn't really do anything. It just looks like it's on there, right? It's on there, right? So your house is under warranty for a year. You typically don't see problems until about 234, years later down the road, when you go to sell it. And but the builders have wiped their hands clean at this point. Hey, no problem. And then everyone's kind of pissed off at each other, kind of mad. So what's happening with these air ducts is that with these really, really energy efficient homes, right, they're getting in there, and when you're creating all this cold air, and basically, like this igloo of a space in your attic, right? If you don't have those ducts sealed, this is more important now than what it was in a house 2030, years ago. But if you have those ducks sealed properly, you're going to create a lot of condensation, a lot of condensation, a lot of water, whether it's water and condensation, it's conducive for, you know, microbial growth, right? So we're starting to see a lot of that coming into these resale homes three, four years, you know, you can kill off, you know, fairly

Tracy Hayes  58:34  

inside the duck or on the outside, all the

Austin Gray  58:36  

connections, which eventually goes to the inside, right? And basically, these problems would be fixed had they just applied a better sealant. Of what they needed to do took an extra two minutes, right? That's it. So, you know, just little things like that that, you know, looking from the ground up, when you're walking in your pre slab, it's like, okay, everything looks good. It looks like it's there. Well, most times not, you know. And so it's just guys kind of going in and getting in and out.

Tracy Hayes  59:02  

I think, you know, we yeah, we trust the code guy. Oh, the county guy is going to come and inspect. Oh, we have a warranty. But again, you don't know that if it doesn't come up in the first year, two or three, four or five years, when you go try to sell it, and you got another now you got a home inspector coming in on an existing home is going to find it, and now you're having to pay for the repair, versus just giving yourself that peace of mind, paying the fee upfront for to have you come in on the new construction. The peace of mind is, is priceless. I mean, I'm sorry, it is. And and then knowing that you either go pay now or pay later, because you're going to be making those repairs when you go to sell that house, because somebody didn't do it properly from

Austin Gray  59:42  

the front side, absolutely. And you know another thing too, we always tell people that, when we find it, the most consistently inconsistent thing in these new construction homes is the insulation. And basically, it's not an exact science. You know, to an extent, you've got to have basically our 30 which is approximately 10 inches of loose fill blood insulation, right? And so what you're seeing on. A lot of times is you it's called fluffing. Or basically, what they'll do is they'll have their guns up there with their insulation, and they'll float the sticks. And what they'll do is they'll take their gun and they'll just kind of shoot it, because you've got those insulation measuring sticks that you might see in an attic. You may have seen those on our Instagram or Facebook posts. But basically they'll fluff it right there, around those those marks, and you see it day in and day out. And when you're talking 10 and when you're talking 10 inches, you know every inch is 10% essentially, right? So we, what we do is we'll go up and we'll walk your trusses, and we'll take our tape measure, and it's non invasive, basically, you know, we're going to disturb your insulation, but we'll poke and we'll probe through that insulation or tape measure, and nine times out of 10, we find low spots, 234, inches of insulation in these people's houses. Now, it's not done maliciously, right?

Tracy Hayes  1:00:48  

But at the same time, volume trying to move quickly get out to the next house, exactly.

Austin Gray  1:00:53  

And so that's what we tell people, like, hey, they're not doing this. Like, here they are sitting back, like, can I save a couple boxes? That's not what they're doing, but they're not doing what we're doing and checking that quality control, right? So when we go in there and we're doing, you know, three, four inches, or sometimes just completely missing, right? They couldn't get to a part, or they for, you know, they maybe they didn't have enough run in their in their hose to reach the certain part of a house, right? It just happens. But that's why we're here. And so many times we find that, and then every single time that we find it, customers get more insulation blown in, and then now their home is really efficient and whatever now they get more than what they initially signed up for, all because they hired us to come in.

Tracy Hayes  1:01:29  

If I was a builder listening to you telling me this right now, or I was the site supervisors that are handling those subcontractors, I would let them all know when they start working on this house that Austin Gray is the home inspector, because you're either going to do it right or Austin's going to find it and you're going to be back in here. So what? So you need to realize this house has got an inspector attached to it, and this other house next door, well, he's not gonna tell them that, but that they know the houses that are on your list right, and they they better they take a few extra minutes and make sure it's right, or you're gonna have to come back. Gonna have to come back and it's gonna take you that much longer to re hook up your equipment, get everything up there. Just blow that extra three or four inches to make

Austin Gray  1:02:09  

it right. Yeah. If you could find a building who wants to do that,

Tracy Hayes  1:02:15  

give them a call. I would do that as a supervisor. I would tell all the actually, I would probably tell, hey, every house in here as an inspector, right? So you better do it, right?

Austin Gray  1:02:23  

I'd love the opportunity to work with a builder to kind of get that opportunity to do so and be great for everyone. You know, it's just really looking out for everyone's best interest

Tracy Hayes  1:02:31  

at the end of the day, even just a spot check, quality control, something

Austin Gray  1:02:35  

and so, you know, and what we do, and kind of what separates us, and I'm not overstepping here is there's, there's a there's a standard for what an inspector is required to do, right? So sometimes we pick up agents who have been in the business for 2030, years, and then if we have a customer that you know called us from Google or just from word of mouth, this realtor of 2030, years, all sudden, goes, my inspector doesn't do any of this stuff. And it's kind of shocking, like, to be honest with you, like, really, there's, there's good inspectors out there. In Jacksonville, we have some good inspection companies

Tracy Hayes  1:03:09  

out there. We do. There's good contractors, and there's, yeah, right, that's Florida. And we see

Austin Gray  1:03:14  

so many of you know, so many times where they're like, oh, wow, they don't do this. My inspector doesn't get up there. Wow, my inspector doesn't do this. And all sudden, they're like, like, to give you guys another shot, it's almost once a week we're picking up a real two it's been in business for 2030, years because of the things that we're doing and the way that we are talking about what we find right? Kind of goes back to we're talking about earlier. And so they're like, this is great. Let's keep rocking and rolling, because I'm not required to get up in an attic, and we do. We walk them. That's how we're finding these problems, right? It's not like this revelation of, oh, this new thing. It's like, No, we're just that's

Tracy Hayes  1:03:46  

kind of amazing, because as a homeowner, or, you know, any home buyer you bought, you have our home inspector, you would expect them to crawl in the crawl space. You'd expect them to go up in the attic. There might there might be a leak, there might be mold, whatever you know is up there. I mean, you'd expect that to be a standard. And I think unfortunately, like a lot of things, unfortunately people look at dollars too, they go, Oh, that. Well, this guy's only a couple 100 bucks. Well, yeah, because he doesn't do those things that you want him to do. But you're, you're covering your eyes to hope it didn't, it's not bad. And you're just gonna save yourself few 100 bucks when it could cost you 1000s. Could cost you 1000s, 10s of 1000s,

Austin Gray  1:04:24  

you know. And some of the guys, whether they're able to do that, is, you know, they might charge, you know, you know, 400 bucks for inspection, right? A lot of these inspectors will do three or four home inspections in a day a day. Me, personally, I could maybe handle three condos in a day. And I mean that wholehearted, in the same building, in the same building, yeah? But when I'm there at a house, I am there, you know, for, you know, in a condo, you know, two or three hours. And I'm going to make sure that I have just covered everything in your house, right? I want to make sure that when you move into this thing, you know exactly what you're getting into. You know exactly what's going on, you know, life expectancies, of problems, whatever. But, yeah, that's the thing. You know, you might have these guys that are doing, you know, a couple $100 $200 less, or the end of the day, that one problem might cost you 10 grand. Or, you know, might cost you five grand. Or, you know, whatever. And you're, we're not talking about $150,000 homes.

Tracy Hayes  1:05:19  

We're talking three, four, $500 million homes. I'm sure you get those out in Ponte, vedra and so forth, or, I mean, shoot, even in Palencia, you got $2 million homes on the intercoastal. That is just one area. I just thought, yeah, the mindset that you're going to invest this amount of money into a place that you plan to be for a long time, and you're in Florida where you do have mold and, you know, termites and all these other things that could go on with a house, and everyone's all concerned about but I think they get the passion, and then they just thinking about the clothes and realize, hold on second, just sign the contract. You're just starting the game. Yeah, you know that take the time. I always hold back from morning the appraisals until I hear from back from the inspection, it's good, oh yeah, it's good. But we got a couple repairs, no problem. We're going to move on. And then I go and order the appraisal. So then they can, you know, they don't spend that money and not a home that they may just say, you know, because, again, because that way they're not that much more committed financially either they're. They can go and say, yep, no, we're going to cut it right here. Don't order the appraisal. Don't waste our money on that. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'll tell you what we this is going on longer, but, man, this is jam packed full of information. Austin, I like to leave me like once a quarter and come on and tell some stories, because we only got the new construction and we're over an hour now in the show. So as a football official, I got my two minute warning questions. These are just some fun stuff. Is it more important who you know or what you know?

Austin Gray  1:06:45  

I think it kind of goes off of, man, that's a tough one.

Tracy Hayes  1:06:51  

If I was to answer for you based on your story, because I see you thinking, there you took steps based on who you know, which led your dad, right? And then the guy gave you the job at the railroad, which, you know, got you back here, but got your mind thinking. And then you took the initiative to go over and get to know that that home inspector that you went and basically, you know, interned with or apprenticed with. So that would be my suggestion, if I answer the

Commercial  1:07:21  

question for you? Yeah.

Austin Gray  1:07:22  

I think in order for what to know you have it's who you know, it goes hand in hand, yeah. So gosh, I don't know if I can give you just a straight shoot and answer on what you know or who you know. You kind of have to have both.

Tracy Hayes  1:07:36  

I applaud you, because I think who you know led you, and then when you you saw something, wow, I can really do something. You went and you went and learned the No, you took the effort to find out who you get the information or learn to yourself, whatever it was, the experience there. You're, you're, I mean, this is a great story, as has to go now. You're obviously a mom and pop shop more. I mean, it's your business. It's gray inspections. There's some franchises out there do home inspections. What are the advantage of disadvantage? Just real quick.

Austin Gray  1:08:13  

Well, those, those franchises there, you know, we're a really hands on approach, truly. So we're there with you just about every step of the way. Whereas, when you might have a franchise, you might be calling into a call center trying to get a hold of, you know, the owner of, you know, one of these franchises might be a little bit more difficult to actually get a hold of them and talk to them and get a good understanding. But those guys really, who are franchises, you know, it's kind of, it's kind of one of those. You see them as a competitor in this market. I don't, personally know. I really don't look at as many of the inspectors in town as competition, to be honest. You know, there's a couple there that, you know, we work in secrecy with each other, and I think it's kind of, you know, a rising tide lifts all boats, right? So there's a couple inspectors in town where we'll meet up.

Tracy Hayes  1:08:59  

You guys have raised a level of quality. Well, we want to kind

Austin Gray  1:09:01  

of talk, and it's, yeah, we raised that level of quality, but we want to kind of get on the same page of, hey, what what are your customers seeing? What do they expect? What are they wanting from the inspector, you know? And so we're all trying to get together and just say, Hey, how can we better the home inspector industry? Because it's so new, right? Because inspections 30 years ago didn't really exist. So it's somewhat of a new piece of the puzzle to the real estate, but it's become such an important piece now that

Tracy Hayes  1:09:25  

in the demand in Florida, you guys, yeah, really, yeah. I mean, I can't imagine you can actually take every call.

Austin Gray  1:09:32  

It's difficult, try. Yeah, it's difficult. Yeah, absolutely.

Tracy Hayes  1:09:37  

All right, so when you go out on the town we talked about a little would you rather go to a jumbo shrimp game or a Jaguars game? Jaguar game, Jaguar game. Travel bucket list, Jessica, right is your wife saying, Jessica, Jessica, where you and Jessica have never been before, but it's on your bucket list.

Austin Gray  1:09:53  

Alaska, we love doing the National Park things hiking, so anytime that we get the opportunity, we've got three kids. I. They're four, two and 10 months now, Piper, Parker and plumber already at this point and whatever. When Parker, Piper, girl, girl, boy, when the two year old is, you know, slamming a chair on the concrete outside, or Pipers, you know, doing whatever. They just call him. It. Pick a pepper so, but anytime that we get the opportunity to take them outside and just just do the outdoor things, like the kids, they don't have iPads, they don't have anything. So anytime we've got the opportunity to go out of town to, you know, Charleston, or, you know, South Florida, or, you know, Crystal River, right? We just try to get them outside. That's our thing. So traveling is really huge to us. The National Park things we like. We've been to Glacier National Park together. We've done Zion out in Utah. And so that's, that's really what we just is

Tracy Hayes  1:10:53  

there anyone on your immediate list right now? You're like, we want it. We're focusing on this.

Austin Gray  1:10:58  

Yosemite is really the one that I want to go to next. But right now, what we're what we're doing is those really popular national parks are just with covid. They're just so overrun. They're so crowded, everyone's wanting to get outdoors now. So we're kind of putting that one on the back burner for now, just because we see how crowded it is. So for now, we're sticking more to the southeast, and we're trying to find some of the smaller parks and areas that day and weekend, right? Yeah. So we're doing two, three day stuff.

Tracy Hayes  1:11:24  

Cool. Austin, how can that someone reach you? You mentioned your Facebook and Instagram. What is the call signs for them? Yeah.

Austin Gray  1:11:33  

So if they want to give us a call, we text messaging is available as well. You can call 904 500 gray. That's 904500

Tracy Hayes  1:11:41  

Wow. What a great number. 500 Gray, yeah.

Austin Gray  1:11:43  

So there you go, Easy enough, right? And then also you can contact us via email. That's info at gray and specs calm, and that's gray with an A, info at G, R, A, y, I N, S, P, E, C, T, s.com, you can visit us on the web, w, w, w, dot Gray, inspects.com and you can request an inspection on there, or fairly quickly to respond. Instagram. Instagram, yep, the gray home inspection. Just gray

Tracy Hayes  1:12:08  

home inspections on Instagram. You got pictures on there, yep, and some stuff. So yep, man, like I said, I'd really like to have you move back quarterly and talk about stories. Because this, this was some really good information today went on about a half an hour longer than I normally was, but it was so good. I'm like, This is great. Information is a great show today. I appreciate you coming by.

Austin Gray  1:12:27  

Yeah, this was great. I'd love to Excellent. Thanks. Thanks, awesome.

Podcast Intro  1:12:35  

This may be it for today's episode of Real Estate excellence, but we both know your pursuit of excellence doesn't stop here. To connect with the best of the best and really take your skills to the next level. Join our community by visiting Tracy Hayes podcast.com where you'll meet more like minded individuals looking to expand their inner circle and their personal experience that's available at Tracy Hayes podcast.com you