Home maintenance is important and Thayer is going to share his solution by providing homeowners free access to home inspectors, appraisers, architects, contractors, designers, and landscapers in the field of home review and repair.
Welcome to Mountain Real Estate. I am really excited for my second ever interview. Today we have Thayer Hirsch on with us so welcome.
Thayer: Thanks for having me. I live in Frisco, Colorado with my wife and two daughters. We’ve hopped around Colorado quite a bit, but in Boulder and Denver, and most recently Summit County starting about a year-and-a-half ago.
Candice: Yes and I met Thayer through his wonderful wife who was my first friend in Frisco. I met her at the school drop-off. They’re a wonderful family. Why don’t you tell us about your business and how it relates to mountain real estate?
Thayer: My company, Homecheck, was started by myself and my Technical Co-Founder, Ted Coleman. His parents live up here but he lives down in Denver. Our goal is trying to simplify home maintenance. Our original idea was going around and doing home checkups. So I went out and got my inspection license, went to various homeowners, and did home checkups. Then we put all the tasks within an app we created so people could keep on top of what needed to be done with her home, whether its things like emptying their gutters, blowing out their sprinklers, or upgrades, like installing Nest Thermostats, cameras, or auto water shut offs and leak detectors. That’s how we started everything. Now we’re working on some cool new things right now to make this company a little more scalable and expand beyond Summit County and Denver.
Candice: As you were just talking I was like, oh I wish I had Thayer for this thing or I wish I had something like this so it’s definitely relevant. But I guess there’s varying levels of homeownership; there’s the beginners and then there’s the experienced homeowners that have had something go wrong. What is a piece of advice would you give a brand new homeowner?
Thayer: Homeownership is hard. Back when I was an electrician, I worked at the trades, and installed solar panels. I consider myself somewhat handy. The first home we purchased, within 3 weeks our basement just started flooding. This was not an old house and we had a pretty rainy spring and it just flooded every night. I was up when the rains came, I was running down there trying to tear it out.
“It’s not really a knowledge thing, homeownership. It’s just difficult in general. People go to the doctor. You bring your car to the mechanic. You protect those assets. But the most expensive asset, your home, you’re not really doing that. Our goal here is to bring that same sort of knowledge and ease of a checklist to homeownership.”
I think back to your previous question, you’re asking how does it apply to real estate. We have really extreme conditions up here. It gets hot. It gets very cold. We have very complex heating systems because of that. Ice bursts. A lot of things can go wrong up here and we have a lot of secondary homeowners who are not used to these conditions. They might have a little more of a mindset of set it and forget it, so yeah it can be difficult up here. We want to help inform people on how to take care of their homes.
Candice: Brilliant. I love the analogy of taking your car to the mechanic. I would love to take you to my house. I just had an inspection with a client, and I was like, I need to bring that guy over to my house to just double-check everything.
Thayer: Yeah, the home buying process is interesting. You spend quite a bit of money on a home inspection. I think they start somewhere around $400. Some people can spend more to do more like radon checks and thermal imaging. You get this awesome robust report on your house that’s like 40 pages, to long use it to negotiate it. Then, you throw in a drawer or save it on Dropbox and never use it again, so one of my goals is actually turning those inspection reports into usable data going forward.
Candice: You’re speaking my language. Real estate. Data. Saving me from walking down to a flooded investment property when I’m pregnant.
Thayer: We had one client. This was before us. Their boiler broke, because it got starved for oxygen because it wasn’t properly ventilated. The heat shut off. The water main broke. Probably about a week later, and then flooded for a week. You can imagine tens of thousands of gallons flooded the first floor of this home. Just the water bill alone will be probably thousands of dollars, and it probably caused $40,000-$50,000 in damage. They had close to 50 fans down there, humidifiers, and took over a year to mitigate all that.
Candice: Oh my gosh, so you’ve seen some experience of in Summit County and probably down in Denver. What do you think is the biggest thing that, even experienced homeowners, miss?
Thayer: Yeah so the one thing we see across a bunch of clients, I think nearly 80% don’t have the right smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors, or they’re expired. The typical smoke detector or carbon monoxide detector is only good for 10 years before it is considered obsolete. So the smoke detectors, if you pop them off, you can look on there. It has a manufacturing date so you can do some quick math for 10 years. It’s pretty darn easy to figure that out.
The other thing is Colorado passed a new law, close to 10 years ago after there was a carbon monoxide poisoning over in the Aspen Valley where a family passed away. Now, the law states that you should have a carbon monoxide detector on, and at least every level, and within 15 feet of every bedroom. Most homes we go into do not meet that standard.
Furthermore, a lot of people use those plug-in ones. As you know, kids love pulling those out so then the batteries die. We’re big fans of having the hardwired one up in the ceiling. Carbon monoxide is a light gas so it will float up higher so you get a better emergency response with the combo smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. I’d say that’s the biggest thing we see over and over but happy to talk about other ones.
Candice: Yeah, it’s so easy to forget about him and it’s like you don’t need it until you really need it. It’s very important.
Thayer: They’re making some really cool ones these days. This is something that is a really easy DIY project, so they’re making a kind of combination of smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. The prices have gone way down on those so you can get it for around $40 a pop. If you upgrade, you can get some smarter ones with voice control that can tell you exactly where the fire, air, or carbon monoxide detector is detecting, whether it’s the basement, living room, or kid’s room. It’ll tell you the parts per million that it’s detecting so cool stuff there.
Then other ones connect to the internet. So say you are down at your primary home, you could get an alert on your phone and it should say, hey there’s smoke or carbon monoxide.
Candice: That leads me to down another path. You mentioned like nests and raining and there’s a lot of digital technology that can help people, even when you’re not there. Where do you see that going and how does that incorporate into your business model, or just where you see homeownership going in the future?
Thayer: Yeah, good point. I would say there are a lot of ecosystems out there. It’s hard to use as a whole. I tried using Apple’s home kit and we made that choice; it has added a lot to their products. I really like how Apple works. I have an iPhone and a Macbook. But still, the integration isn’t perfect, so what would I advise is: pick an ecosystem that you like so whether that’s Google or Alexa or Apple, try to stick with those products. I see a lot of people mixing and Nest with Ring, and then throwing some other products that don’t even communicate with each other. Being able to access all your products from, at least one app, whether that’s Google or Alexa or whatever, can really be helpful.
You can set up a lot of cool integrations. For example, at 9 p.m., I can lock my front door, close my garage, and turn the heat down to 65. Those are some of the nice things. So we’re trying to help guide people there. We’re testing a lot of the products ourselves, at our homes.
Candice: We installed some Mysa, electric floorboard heating and we can control them. We don’t really do that because my husband likes to keep all of our thermostats at like 62 degrees, but we have the option of scheduling and changing. It’s really nice for when you’re not at a primary residence.
Thayer: Yeah that’s awesome. I remember Mysa coming up in my Instagram feed. It’s cool that an independent company and a great option. There are a lot of electric baseboard companies up here in Summit County.
Candice: So flippin back towards your business. What are your near-term and long-term goals?
Thayer: That’s a great question. We have our app. We got into both the Android Play Store, and Apple App Store about a month ago, so you can look it up. If you search, it’s home checkup. You can download it right now. It’s has a simple task list in there that you can request service from and keep all your receipts and everything. They’re having a lot of new features in there so we’re going to have contract recommendations. We’re bringing out some smart task list creation. We can pull information from a few different databases and then create a maintenance list for you. So skipping that home inspection. We can do it a little bit cheaper and actually for free and give you that task list.
Candice: That makes me really excited because these are such easy things to ignore, and be like, I’ll get to that next season and then next season, and then you’ve been in your home for 10 years and haven’t done it.
Thayer: Another thing too is a lot of people try to put money into their homes, whether it’s just regular maintenance or upgrades. You don’t really keep track of it. Well, I don’t keep track of it very well. So within our app, we have a receipt capture. You can print out a PDF report and see how much you’ve been invested. So when you are getting ready to sell your home, you can actually quantify the upgrades.
Candice: That is so nice. We’re thinking about selling a property and I’m thinking about how to even start to go back. I am awful at bookkeeping. My grandma had every printed handwritten receipt. I just don’t think about it so that is a huge feature capturing those expenses as you upgrade.
Thayer: Right. Especially if it’s not your primary home too. There are some substantial tax write-offs you can use there.
Candice: Is there anything else you want to share with our listeners of Mountain Real Estate
Thayer: I’m a big fan of the products here. And one I’m going to push. I don’t get money from them but I’m a big fan of it. We have it at our own home. It’s called Moen Flo and what this does is it connects to your water main and uses an algorithm to detect leaks. It kind of learns your habits, much like a nest thermostat, learns your heating and cooling habits. So it learns your water. So for example, if they noticed something going for 4 gallons per minute at 3 in the afternoon and it goes for more than 5 to 6 minutes, it’s going to send you an alert and then turn off your water. It can also detect small leaks in the middle of the night, pressurizes the pipes, and then sees if there is a leak, and it does all that with sensors. It’s a pretty awesome product. The cool thing is you also get a discount on your insurance once you install it so insurance companies love it. For people who want to help the environment because it pushes you to use less water. It protects your home and gives you peace of mind. You guys can contact us. We do have preferred plumbers who can install them for you.
To check out more, you can check out their website or contact Thayer directly at thayer@getahomecheck.com.
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Looking to buy a home or list your house on the market, or have any questions about the home buying process, feel free to reach out to me. My promise is to provide you with the knowledge, expertise, and leadership you need to make informed real estate decisions to secure a bright financial future while creating a long-lasting legacy.