10+ Things to Inspect Before You Buy a Rental Property (Foundation to Roof)

Ashley Kehr:
Most buyers walk through a house thinking about paint colors and kitchen counters. Ellie Ridge grew up scaling rooftops and crawling through half framed walls with her contractor family.

Tony Robinson:
And today as a top 1% realtor, she’s going to show you exactly what to look for before you ever even sign on the dotted line so you don’t inherit someone else’s six figure nightmare.

Ashley Kehr:
This is The Real Estate Rookie Podcast. I’m Ashley Kerr.

Tony Robinson:
And I’m Tony J. Robinson. And with that, let’s give a big warm welcome to Ellie. Ellie, thanks so much for joining us on the Riki Podcast today.

Ellie Rigde:
Thanks for having me.

Ashley Kehr:
Now, Ellie, you’ve said you were literally scaling rooftops and walking through half framed homes as a kid. What did that childhood do to you to see a house when you walked through the front door?

Ellie Rigde:
Yeah, my dad’s a contractor, and so that is just about visiting my dad at work. In particular, he’s a roof framer, so I have a special interest in roofs and how they’re framed and framing generally. But it is helpful to walk through a house and know what is behind the walls and what’s underneath the floors because that is where expensive problems often lie. And the piece of homeownership that I think feels very intimidating to new home buyers.

Tony Robinson:
I think the intimidating piece is so correct, right? Because for a lot of first-time investors, maybe the only home they’ve ever purchased is their primary residence. And that’s a very different decision than buying an investment property. And I think there’s Ellie, like a massive gap between what a buyer sees as they walk through a property and what’s actually happening inside the home’s bones. Where does that gap maybe cost buyers the most money, not being able to actually know what to look for?

Ellie Rigde:
Like what system in particular or?

Tony Robinson:
Just generally speaking, where have you seen people get into trouble by not looking at a property with the right lens as they’re doing their walkthroughs?

Ellie Rigde:
Well, where I work, we don’t have any new construction. So all of our homes are about a hundred years old in the Bay Area of California. So it can be catastrophic if people aren’t looking into the systems beyond a remodeled kitchen or a nice backyard. Replacing a foundation or rewiring a home is very expensive. So not budgeting properly for not just what your home will cost, but what it will actually cost to take care of and maintain and live there as a responsible homeowner for very different numbers. So a lot of what I do with clients when we’re initially looking at homes and doing our due diligence is start budgeting for what the next five years will look like after they’ve purchased the home itself.

Tony Robinson:
Let me just ask, because there’s cosmetic renovations and then there’s more structural renovations. What are the things that maybe can lull someone into the trap of thinking that a home’s been renovated properly when in reality it’s maybe just like lipstick on a pig?

Ellie Rigde:
If it looks really beautiful that we’ve all had that emotional experience of walking into a home that has been beautifully renovated and remodeled and people fight the urge to say, “This house has good bones.” And what they’re referring to is that it looks really pretty, I guess. But I mean, it’s not that that’s not important. Redoing a kitchen is very expensive and invasive in your life, and it’s wonderful if it’s already been done for you, but that doesn’t go hand in hand with systems having been updated, obviously.

Ashley Kehr:
For a couple properties that I’ve bought, they were rentals that were sold as completed and renovated. And a lot of the things that you can look at is just look closely like trim pieces not matching up just different things that don’t make sense into the property when you really look closely. So if you’re already seeing that the cosmetic wasn’t done correctly, then there’s even more of a chance you should be digging deeper. But when you’re purchasing the property, you should, at least in New York, you’re getting a disclosure of when everything was last updated on the property, any problems the owner is aware of. And you can look on that sheet too to see when was the electric last updated, when was the HVAC last updated, when was the roof last replaced? And that can kind of help you gauge like, okay, they did this full remodel, but yet it’s saying that the hot water heater is 20 years old, the furnace is old and the electric hasn’t been updated since it was built in 1960.
So I think using the information in front of you and also going and having eyes on the property or somebody that can and kind of using those two things together will really help.

Ellie Rigde:
Yeah. We get reports here too.

Ashley Kehr:
In what state are you in?

Ellie Rigde:
I work in California, particularly in the Bay Area.

Ashley Kehr:
Okay. Okay. And Tony, in California and in Tennessee where you’ve invested too, they all provide disclosures too.

Tony Robinson:
Yeah. Yeah, to a certain extent. But even on those disclosures sometimes, you can just say like, I don’t know or unknown.

Ashley Kehr:
That’s what I put when I fill them out. Or NA or I don’t know. Yeah. Okay. So the next thing I want to talk about is besides walking through the home and looking at the property is you’ve actually built a 255,000 following by teaching people about houses on Instagram. What was the moment you realized that most buyers aren’t knowledgeable about what to look for when they’re making the biggest purchase of their lives almost completely blind?

Ellie Rigde:
Yeah. I started making that page when I was a really, really new agent before I was even licensed. I work with my mom. And so before I had my license, I started going out on broker’s tour with her, which is the day that agents tore all the new property the day after they go live. It’s Thursdays in this area. And I was walking around seeing all these amazing houses and I don’t know if you guys have this experience. Are you guys realtors?

Tony Robinson:
No, neither one of us. No.

Ashley Kehr:
We have no desire for paperwork. We’re too lazy.

Ellie Rigde:
When I first was licensed as a realtor, every house was so amazing and mind blowing to me. And I was in the nicest houses I had ever been in. So I was like, oh my God, it’s so intense. It was so amazing, crazy. And so I started making these little videos genuinely tripping out about the houses I was seeing and how cool they were and all the weird stuff I was seeing. And then that evolved because I think people are interested in weird stuff about houses. And so I sort of backed into it. I made those videos from a place of being excited and curious myself. And then I started noticing like, oh, this could be a really real way that I’m like practice a little bit differently and really help people feel more confident like buying a house because I have a little bit of a unique knowledge set.
And my mom works the same way. We’re both very looking in crawl spaces, looking in attics, talking about systems. And I don’t know other agents that work quite the way that we do.

Ashley Kehr:
So now we know what Ellie is looking at before she walks in the door, but once she’s inside, it’s a different game entirely. After the break, she’s going to walk us room by room through the things that can quietly cost you tens of thousands of dollars and that your standard inspection might completely miss those. We’ll be right back. All right, Ellie, we’re going inside the house now. Let’s do it room by room, system by system. Take us through the things that buyers routinely miss that end up being the most expensive. So let’s start at the foundation and kind of work our way up. What are the things that you’re physically looking at in a crawlspace or a basement and what does it mean if you find those things?

Ellie Rigde:
Yeah, so there’s a lot to talk about before we even go inside the house. So I’ll meet my clients outside and we’ll walk the perimeter. There’s a lot of things that I want to point out depending on the style of the home and the construction methodology of that style and that era. So typically what I’ll look at first is the roof line, and that will tell us a lot about the risk for moisture damage to the framing, depending on if there’s overhangs or if it’s a flat roof or a low slope roof. And then I might talk about what gutters there are, like if they’re integrated gutters or if they’re just standard gutters that hang on the fascia of a roof and that just is a vulnerability or not. So we might talk about that. And then I’ll find the hat, which is the little door that looks underneath the house.
And in this area, we have raised perimeter foundations, not slabs typically and not like post and pier, which maybe you see a lot of in Texas. So we can open a little door and look underneath to like a three foot tall crawlspace. And that shows us the foundation and the condition of the soil and the condition of what’s called the cripple wall, which is the short framed wall between the top of the foundation and the underside of the floor framing of a home. That shows us a lot of things because concrete is very expensive. And so the condition of the foundation is my first concern usually. Also because I live and work in earthquake territory and we’re overdue for a major earthquake along our local fault line called the Hayward Fall. So this is what I always warn my clients up is that it’s very likely that in the time that they own whatever home they’re buying with me, there will be a catastrophic earthquake, not to be a downer, but it’s coming.
And so these homes when they were built originally had very minimal, if any, seismic reinforcement, meaning a house being bolted down to its foundation or being rigidified laterally. I mean, I could go and I don’t know how interesting this is for this podcast, but I could go into a lot of detail about the kind of stress of home experiences in seismic activity. But needless to say, the house doesn’t need to be bolted down and that little framed wall needs to be braced. So I’m looking for evidence of that. Usually it’s not there. And if it’s not, we’ll talk about what that might cost. And the fact that that needs to happen right away before people are sleeping in the home or having their kids sleep in the home and so on. A lot of houses in this area are split level homes. You walk up some stairs to go in and then walk up a half story to go up to a bedroom that’s over a garage.
That’s called a soft story condition and it’s its own kind of seismic retrofit. So we’ll talk about costs there. So these are just common things I observe outside.

Tony Robinson:
Elliot, I just want to pause you there because you just listed off a bunch of things that I never would’ve even thought to ask. How do you start building this knowledge base? Did you get some sort of certification? Is it just you walk so many houses and talk to so many contractors? How does one actually start building the level of knowledge that you’ve accumulated from the work that you do?

Ellie Rigde:
Yeah. Everything I’m talking about is called out in home inspections for the most part in maybe less language with just fewer words and less detail. So if an agent is a student of home inspections, which they should be, a lot of this, you’ll see time and again, and then you’ll start to be able to observe and point out yourself. In particular, my dad, like I said, is a contractor and he himself is a licensed home inspector and just kind of like a building nerd. And so that’s what my dad and I talk about when we hang out. That’s our quality time. I’ll go on inspections with him or visit him at the job site. It’s like something we have in common. So it’s very bonding for us, but it’s also good for work.
And so I have this great resource in my dad, but none of this information is difficult to access if you’re a realtor who is curious and interested. In this area, we have home inspections as part of our disclosures. You guys were talking about seller disclosures. We have cellar disclosures, but it’s also standard of care to provide a home inspection. They’re varying levels of quality. Some home inspections, I could write a better report, frankly. I can call things out that aren’t there and some are really, really great and they’re like the home inspectors that I really trust and admire and have learned from. So anyway, long-winded way to answer your question that read home inspections.

Tony Robinson:
So that’s the basement or the crawlspace area. Let’s maybe go to the electrical panel next.This is one of the things that a lot of buyers almost never look at. What should they be looking for and what are the red flags that could affect maybe insurance or even worse safety?

Ellie Rigde:
Yeah. So starting on the outside of the box, if it’s rusty, that’s already a red flag. You don’t want water dripping down onto your panel, as you can imagine. People should be really careful opening electrical panels because inside the door, there’s what’s called a dead front cover that’s blocking the live drop from the city or county. And if it’s missing and something touches it, you will die. I mean, it will be a really horrible electric shock. So I open them all the time, but just be very careful as you’re opening them. But once you open up inside, you should see a bunch of breakers. Those are the little switches and the amperage is listed on them. Amperage is like the … You can think … I forget the analogy. There’s like an analogy about flow of water

Tony Robinson:
Water. Oh, I was just saying the capacity of how much electricity can flow through, right?

Ellie Rigde:
Yeah. It’s like the capacity. And if there is more capacity flowing through it, then the circuit can handle the breaker will pop. So that’s an overcurrent protection device. It keeps you safe from fault conditions like being electrocuted or like an electrical fire or something. And we have modern devices inside electrical panels called arc fault circuit detectors and ground fault circuit interrupters that can sense misbehavior basically of current like jumping between lines that’s called arcing that can cause a fire or current leaving and not returning to the circuit, which means it’s traveling through your body and talking you, that automatically pops breakers. But when I’m just looking at a main panel, what I’m pretty much looking for is the capacity. If it’s 100, 125 amps or 200 amps, and that just tells me how much capacity is left and if people can electrify further. I don’t know what the discourse around electrification is in your areas, but people talk a lot in Berkeley about electrifying their homes.
So that just tells us, if you want an EV charger, do you need a new panel basically or like a heat pump or these other modern electric dependent ways to service your home. And then I’m also looking for the famous problematic brands, Cinsco, Sylvania, Bulldog, Pushmatic, Federal Pacific. Those all just need to be replaced right away because they have various-

Ashley Kehr:
I bought a house once that was Federal Pacific. It was the second duplex I re bought and right away the inspector’s like, “This is a fire hazard. You’ve got to get this out of here.” And he said too, “Your insurance will probably, if they come and do an inspection, they’re not going to insure you because you have this box in there too.” So that was one of the things that we had switched out right away when we bought it.

Ellie Rigde:
Yeah. My house had a federal Pacific panel, but so that’s just more cost. When I’m walking through with buyers, we’re doing a tally to figure out, can you afford this house and the projects it needs, right?

Ashley Kehr:
It’s like all those little things, like sometimes looking at an inspection, it’s like, “Oh, there’s nothing major. It’s just these little things here and there.” But those little things could start to add up and add up and add up or become bigger issues down the road if you don’t take care of them right away.

Ellie Rigde:
Or the other direction. I feel like the inclination of a lot of buyers is to read a panel, or excuse me, read an inspection and feel really concerned about the things … Because it’s like, of course, you don’t know what is scary or not, you’re doing your best to parse it out, but often the things that feel really alarming in a home inspection aren’t a big deal. And the stuff that isn’t really a big deal and is really expensive is not bolded and highlighted as much. It’s kind of funny, I notice.

Ashley Kehr:
We just interviewed a guest, Justin witted on, and he bought a property that was full of mold. And I guess it was a section of the area that was mold, and it was like $2,000. You think of mold in this big, scary thing, and it was like one of the cheaper cost to his $90,000 renovation. So yeah, I think there is that misconception and you have to go and get your quote and actually know what it would cost. Now, Ellie, what about the roofs? So roofs are one of the most negotiated items after a home inspection. What does a buyer need to know before they’re at the table arguing over who’s going to pay for the new roof?

Ellie Rigde:
Well, that is not the cadence where I work. We typically don’t write with inspection contingencies and then negotiate based on findings. We actually tend to write fully non-contingent offers and do all of our due diligence in advance. So I have never negotiated for a roof replacement. Also, I would never be surprised that a roof needs to be replaced. I can see instantly if it needs to be replaced. So I can’t imagine a scenario where I would be like, “Terrible news. I’m just finding this out. ” But here’s what I’ll say about roofs. They’re not a big deal. It’s not a big deal. It’s over in two days. The roofers come, they do it and they go and they give me the bid in advance. People need to relax about roofs.

Tony Robinson:
Well, Ella, let me ask a few follow-up questions, right? Number one, for you, when you go and see a roof, what are the things you’re looking at to say, okay, this actually needs to be fully replaced versus maybe just patching certain parts of the roof. And then what is the typical … Say we need to do a full roof replacement. Obviously this is going to be very specific for the bay area, but what are you spending right now to replace a roof?

Ellie Rigde:
In this area, it’s like $25,000 for a new roof. So it’s not that it’s not a material cost, but those projects where it’s a set cost that you agree to and one trade comes through and it’s over in a matter of days, to me, that’s very easy to wrap my head around. Signs of failure in a roof. So the most common roofing material in this area is called composition shingle. Is that the case for you guys? It’s the shingles with … They’re like asphalt or they have little porcelain granules on them. They look-

Ashley Kehr:
Asphalt shingles, yeah. And metal roofs are common for me.

Tony Robinson:
Yeah. We don’t have any metal roofs out here, but yeah.

Ellie Rigde:
They’re not metal. They’re a fiberglass and then they have little granules on them. I think that’s probably the most common type roof type in Southern California.

Ashley Kehr:
Yeah. No, I said that we have metal roofs. That’s why he was saying that.

Tony Robinson:
Yeah, sorry. I just wanted to ask you. She said metal roofs in

Ashley Kehr:
Buffalo. We have the asphalt sink shingles, and then we also have the metal roof.

Ellie Rigde:
Oh, not like really? Because it’s nose?

Ashley Kehr:
Yeah. They last way longer, the metal roofs. They’re more expensive, but they’re getting more and more common.

Ellie Rigde:
They’re amazing. Like a standing seam with a flat and then the seams.

Ashley Kehr:
Yep, yep.

Ellie Rigde:
Yeah, they’re awesome. Yeah, so that no side effect, they’ll never fail. They have a 100-year life. But comp shingle, which is what we see most frequently in California, I think it’s the most common roofing type in the country. Signs of failure are cupping of the shingle itself. It’s beginning to cup up, curl up at the edges, cracked shingles, obviously missing shingles, but primarily granule loss. So composition shingles are made of an asphalt butuminous … Bitumen is an asphalt material with added polymers, but anyway, whatever. We can just call it asphalt for our purposes. And then a fiberglass mat and then these little ceramic granules that protect the asphalt from the sun because the sudden UV breaks down asphalt over time and then it starts to crack and then it’s water permeable. So when you see a lot of granule loss, that’s the biggest indication of a roof nearing the end of its serviceable life.
And this is how you can spot it. If you stand back and you look up at the roof and you see it’s glimmering and glinting, that’s the sun showing the fiberglass through. Or if you see a gray sheen on it, we’re seeing fiberglass. So that means it’s time for it to go.

Tony Robinson:
I mean, Ashley, I feel like less of a real estate investor talking to Ellie because she’s just so technical about how she’s breaking everything down. We got to spend some more time together so I can get on your level of explaining these things. So we talked crawlspace, we talked electrical, roofing. Let’s talk a little bit about the plumbing systems next. What are the questions buyers should be asking that never really make it into a standard inspection when it comes to plumbing and drainage?

Ellie Rigde:
Okay. Plumbing will be in a standard inspection because the home inspector can see it and they have to indicate the material type. But shoddy home inspections, when it says material type, they’ll write … Oh, this makes me crazy. They’ll write metallic material. Metallic material is so crazy. So because there’s a major, major difference in what that means, right? Because galvanized steel is a metallic material, but a home with galvanized steel plumbing, that’s a plumbing type with a hundred years, 110 years maybe. And that’s what was used pre-World War II, well, pre- 1950s. So it very much could be coming up on the end of its service life and corroding at the interior, depositing rust and minerals into your drinking water and so on. So you should look under the house or your agent should look under the house and see. And you can see galvanized steel versus copper, which we would be much happier to see.
And if it’s an older home and you see copper plumbing, and by older, I mean pre-1960s, that means someone’s replaced at least some of the plumbing system, the water supply. I don’t see this too frequently, but you might also see PEX, which is plastic, like the red and blue plastic lines.

Ashley Kehr:
That’s really common in my area is the PEX piping.

Ellie Rigde:
Where are you? New York?

Ashley Kehr:
Yeah. Yeah. Buffalo.

Ellie Rigde:
Because they’re worried about freeze, I bet.

Ashley Kehr:
Yeah. And it’s the most flexible that it won’t burst and it’s cheaper too than copper piping. But a lot of the older built houses have the copper, but basically anyone that’s updating will put in pecs or they’ll pay more to do the copper, but it’s pretty common in our area.

Ellie Rigde:
Interesting. Yeah. I don’t see PEX out here. I know it’s huge. I

Ashley Kehr:
Like it because all the microplastics are coming into your body when you drink water.

Ellie Rigde:
Nobody’s doing the microplastics. Okay, here’s what won’t be at home section is an explanation of your subsurface drainage because they can’t see it. And so it’s like they’ll note if your downspouts are depositing into a subsurface line and they’ll probably note clean outs. But do you guys know what a French drain is?

Ashley Kehr:
Yeah.

Ellie Rigde:
So I love a French drain.

Ashley Kehr:
But explain it for the rookie if in case somebody doesn’t know what a French drain is, how it helps.

Ellie Rigde:
So a French drain is a solid, rigid, thick plastic pipe with perforations, like little holes along the bottom of the pipe. And it sits in a little trench with gravel around it and then you’ll backfill gravel or soil or whatever. And the purpose is to gather groundwater and deposit it away from the structure. So you’ll see a French drain in a U-shape around a house often or like an L shape because it’s gathering water from a plane and then depositing it away from the house in the garden or at the curb or something. They’re amazing. It’s like a simple technology, but it really is, in my opinion, the way to mitigate water intrusion under your house, which is crucial for many, many reasons, but people use the word French drain all the time and don’t know what it is, and the home inspector can’t comment on it.
So I made a video about this recently on Instagram, but I’ll kind of reiterate the main points here, which is that there is no way to know what was done unless the homeowner tells you or if they have real invoices from a drainage contractor and drainage contractors don’t even really use the term French drain in their bids because it’s such a widely misused and thrown around term. So it’s wonderful if you have it, but don’t just believe you have it because a well-meaning realtor or a confused homeowner is using that term. Really, that is one to ask for receipts or proof of work. And then if you are in a place like a state or a market where you can do inspections, camera the line and see what it actually is. Because often you just have downspouts dumping into a pipe and that’s not a French drain.
It’s a great subsurface water management system of its own, but it’s not a French drain.

Ashley Kehr:
So Ellie, if a buyer can only ask the inspector three follow-up questions in our fake scenario here during the walkthrough, beyond what’s on the standard report, what are some of these other questions that they should be asking the inspector?

Ellie Rigde:
I’m trying to think what’s not on a report. I mean, it really depends the quality of the report. Some reports are great, but yes, let’s just pretend it’s like a sort of shoddy, whatever, rando report that doesn’t have a lot of information about the foundation or refers it out to a structural engineer. Some things to know are that modern foundations and any modern concrete is full of rebar, which are steel bars that provide tensile strength to concrete. But pre World War II, concrete wasn’t placed with rebar inside of it. So it’s really important to know what area your foundation is from, then you’ll know if it can withstand certain types of forces because it may or may not have interior steel reinforcement. There’s ways to tell, I mean, would you like me to share? There’s ways to tell what area your foundation is from. Okay.
Well, if your home was built before 1910, you may have a brick or a masonry foundation and often they will be what’s called capped or a cap and saddle will be poured, which is concrete that goes on and around brick. In other areas, this is less detrimental, but if you are in an earthquake prone area, it’s really, in my opinion, unacceptable to have a brick foundation. And the way you can tell, I mean, a lot of home inspections won’t comment on it because they just, I don’t know, don’t know. I don’t really know why, but often I will observe it and I notice it’s not on the inspection. If your foundation is so wide, comes in a foot on the interior and then maybe a foot on the exterior, that’s a capped brick foundation. That’s not how any foundation was ever originally poured. So in a 1910s or earlier home, if you see this giant wide concrete stem wall, you know it’s likely was masonry or is masonry that has concrete on and around it.
And then you can just look for random bricks that are scattered around in the crawl space. When I see bricks in a crawl space, it’s like triggering because I’m like, “Why? Why are there bricks down here?” And so that’s something to keep in mind. And then if your home was built between 1910 and 1930, you probably have this very shallow, short concrete foundation that’s straight up and down on the interior and then angled at the, excuse me, straight up and down the exterior angled at the interior. It’s like a chopperzoide shape. And this has other vulnerabilities. It’s prone to tipping and rotation in and cracking, and sometimes they can be retrofitted, sometimes they need to be replaced. So these are two older foundation types to be on the lookout for.

Tony Robinson:
Ashley, what’s the oldest home you’ve ever purchased? 1786 or something in Buffalo?

Ashley Kehr:
Yeah, I don’t want to say it wrong, but yeah, it has the Stone Foundation and everything. Yeah, late 1800, 1870 or something like that. And then the other half of the house was built in 1901, I think, or something that was added on.

Tony Robinson:
I think the oldest house in my portfolio right now is 2005.

Ashley Kehr:
The newest house is only the house I built, which was 2016. And other than that, probably 1960 is the next newest.

Tony Robinson:
My oldest house right now is like a 2005. So I got to start buying older home so I can speak to speak with you guys right now. But this is the stuff that separates informed buyers from buyers who get burned, but knowing what to look for is really only half the battle. So coming up, Ellie’s going to show us how to actually use what we’re finding in our inspections as leverage and how the pre-offer inspection strategy in a competitive market like the Bay Area can be a total game changer. So we right back after we’re from today’s show sponsors. All right, we’re back. So our listeners now know what to look for. The next question is, what do you actually do with all of this information, especially in a hot market where waving contingencies feels like the only way to win? So Ellie, you’re in a very competitive market in the Bay Area.
Buyers are under enormous pressure to waive inspection contingency. So how do you actually help clients get comfortable making a strong offer without feeling like they’re kind of flying blind or maybe stepping into a big issue?

Ellie Rigde:
Well, this is exactly why I work the way that I do and why I structure my practice with buyers as an extremely education forward curriculum. That’s how I think about my work with buyers. I’m bringing them through a curriculum and the goal at the end is to feel really confident writing and empowered and very clean, non-contingent offer because that’s likely what’s necessary to get into the home that they want. So we start out just like you would if you were starting out learning anything, just seeing houses for fun, no expectation that they are writing an offer on anything that we’re seeing. We’re just learning. So I’ll try to show houses across a variety of styles and show them various vulnerabilities, teach them how to look at houses with a critical eye, and we’ll talk about costs. That really makes people feel good to know what things cost to remediate, and then they can have those numbers in their head.
And then when they go to open houses, they can look a lot more critically at the homes that they’re seeing and look past the kitchen and the cute archways and whatever and look under the house themselves and start observing condition. So it’s a very proud moment for me when my new buyers are like, “Yeah, we went to this open house, but definitely needs a retrofit.” And so we’re deducting $10,000 from our budget. And we saw Knob and Tube, which is an antiquated wiring. So I love that when my buyers have learned how to assess a home’s condition on their own. Hopefully when we’ve gone through enough rounds of this and they can really start to wrap their arms around condition of a home, it feels easy to waive an inspection contingency because it’s not that the due diligence wasn’t done or that we’re skimping on due diligence or putting ourselves in a dangerous position by waiving an inspection contingency.
It’s that we’ve already done our investigation, so we don’t need that period anymore because we’ve inspected and investigated. So that is my system for helping people safely waive contingencies.

Tony Robinson:
Yeah. Ali, what about timing, right? Because I mean, I think right now we’re very much more at the time of this recording in a buyer’s market, but we all remember a few years ago, things were just going crazy. And if you didn’t get your offer in within 72 seconds of a listing going live, you had no chance of getting it, do you ever find that maybe the process of doing this deep inspection beforehand leads to people missing out on deals? And if so, how do you try and navigate that?

Ellie Rigde:
Well, I am not in a buyer’s market. It’s very much a seller’s market and there are not enough houses. But first of all, if we miss it because it’s moving too quickly for us to answer all of our questions, that wasn’t the house. I mean, I went far right putting someone in an house where we … One, we wouldn’t get an offer accepted if we retain an inspection contingency, and two, I just could never have people waive it. If there were questions we didn’t know the answers to yet, that would be so unethical to me. But the way that timing is handled here is that we have a 13-day marketing period. So I know the cadence, that my life is structured around that 13-day cadence. Go live on Wednesday, broker store Thursday, two weekends of open houses and offers on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Ashley Kehr:
It is not like that in my market at all. That’s so interesting to me.

Tony Robinson:
So is that a Bay Area specific thing because the housing market is so tight?

Ellie Rigde:
Yeah. And it’s almost a Berkeley specific … That’s how niche this area … I pretty much work in El Cerrito, Berkeley and Oakland, three cities, and that’s it because it’s so intense. I mean, I can’t drive an hour away. I mean, it’s happening right here and now I have to have my finger on the pulse of my area. In Oakland, it’s a little different. Homes will come on maybe on a Friday or something, but for the most part, I’m submitting offers on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.That’s when offers are taken, and the home probably came on about 13 days before. So we have time. We have that week to do all of our investigation.

Ashley Kehr:
Now, Ellie, what about after closing? Are you staying in touch with your clients and are there any things that maybe come up that surprise them that they wish they would’ve known before they purchased the house and something us and our rookies can make sure that we watch out for?

Ellie Rigde:
Well, yes, I do stay in touch with my buyers, hopefully because we’re friends, but also because I want to set them up for success. And that means staying around for the long term to answer questions and be a second set of eyes and connect them with tradespeople and share referrals, excuse me, and so on. Hopefully there are not unanticipated things, right? That’s why we’re doing so much investigation in advance to get ahead of as much as we possibly can. But also I’m a human being and we’re not literally taking off sheetrock and opening walls. And so there likely will be things that it was impossible for us to anticipate. That is the nature of a giant living, breathing organism that is a house that is actively deteriorating. But hopefully we got in front of the priceiest thing so that that is less unsettling when they’re remodeling their kitchen and they open the walls and they find that there’s a lot of dry rot at the interior that nobody knew about or something like that.
So I guess all of that to say, buying a home like any investment is risky. It’s an amazing investment because it’s the only one that eliminates one of your major living expenses, which is your need for shelter and housing. And it’s a built-in savings account, right? It turns a monthly expense into this very high yield savings that you’re doing each month. And on the other hand, it’s important to have respect for structures which are made of organic materials in the United States. We build houses with wood that is actively deteriorating and there is water and rain and in your areas like snow and ice. And so the work is never done. And so I encourage people to have that mindset like, yes, it’s very important to be very cognizant of the condition of your home and the cost that will likely be needed in the first five and 10 years.
And also, it’ll never be finished. You replace your roof and then your furnace goes, and then you have termites, and then you start losing water pressure in your guest bathroom and you have to replace a run of old plumbing. So hopefully it’s fun. And hopefully the process of working … I hope that my buyers get into it and start to enjoy and appreciate their house for what it is and what their responsibility to their house is, and that is something they can be excited about instead of being like, “Oh my God, it’s never ending.” But yeah, it’s never ending, but I love it.

Ashley Kehr:
Well, Ellie, thank you so much for joining us today. Where can people reach out to you and find more information?

Ellie Rigde:
My website is elliridge.com and I am very responsive. So if people reach out to me on the … Send me a message through my website, I’ll be back in touch very quickly. And if you are interested in the stuff I’m talking about, my social media is Ellie Ridge Realtor, and I just share a lot of videos nerding out about all the things that I talked about today.

Ashley Kehr:
Well, thank you so much. You were a wealth of knowledge. We learned so much about what to look at at properties and the inspection process. So thank you so much for joining us. I’m Ashley. He’s Tony, and we’ll see you guys on the next episode of Real Estate Rookie.