Transform Your Denver Property: HVAC & Plumbing Remodeling Secrets Revealed

John Harcar (00:01.654)
All right, guys. Hey, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, John Harcar, and we’re here today with Robert Tucker. We’re going to talk about besides his experience in business, his experience in real estate and working with investors. Remember, guys, at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, mean, all entrepreneurs really 2 to 5X their business by providing tools and resources to grow the business they want to grow and live the life they want to live. So Robert, how are you, Awesome. Awesome.

Robert Patrick Tucker (00:29.089)
I’m pretty good. Yeah. It’s the end of the week, so I’m a little tired because we’ve been slammed all week. I think a lot of people try to get stuff done before Memorial Day weekend when they’re having family over and stuff.

John Harcar (00:30.934)
Appreciate you coming on here. Right? Yeah.

John Harcar (00:39.222)
because they want to relax and have people over and all that fun stuff. Well, I’m excited to talk to you kind of about how you work with investors and whatnot. before we start all that, why don’t you tell our audience a little bit about you, kind of your background and how you got to today.

Robert Patrick Tucker (00:54.991)
yeah, well I’m actually an engineer background. We have about 11 techs that run around and fix everything all around Denver, Colorado. Denver, Colorado is kind of an interesting place, especially in the news and stuff always. They don’t say the best stuff about Denver, it’s a great place to live and everything. Great place for investors, know, over the last years since I was in, you know, I’ve become an investor myself.

John Harcar (01:14.09)
Hmm. Right.

Robert Patrick Tucker (01:24.733)
A lot of people you know, but people are always selling a lot of investors are selling right now And we’ve been doing a lot of budget remodels in the area All right, can I recall budget friendly remodels because they’re just not the highest highest quality But it’s enough to get that high price point that most investors want, you know with that second third highest comp, you know Yeah, most savvy of us know you’re not trying to just

overspend on everything and just overspend on budget, know, so we just call it budget friendly, you know remodels we’ll go through and we’ll renovate an entire house with all the mire stuff get it to look really good in the photos and really good in person as well, but not, you know, buying Carrera marble for the the showers, you know what I mean? Which we do too, you know, we started out more specializing and more of the higher end

John Harcar (01:56.747)
Yeah.

John Harcar (02:13.142)
Right, right, right, right,

Robert Patrick Tucker (02:23.612)
and everything. But what has happened over time is the people that live in the higher end houses, know, the multi-million dollar mansions, want to use us for their investment properties, you know, and that’s a totally different, as I just kind of said, it’s a whole different bracket, a whole different strategy, a whole different end result than somewhere where you actually live, you know, day to day to day. And so we obviously handle all the emergencies and everything else. You know,

The emergencies are interesting because, that is something I should probably bring up that investors would be interested in hearing about. Cause we do, we get called when things get really, really bad, you know, and I wish I could, maybe I could send you some videos or photos or quite fascinating after we’re done or something, but you know, where it looks like it’s raining indoors or somebody. And that was one such instance. They had hired somebody for about four and a half years to do their

John Harcar (03:15.958)
Yeah, crazy.

Robert Patrick Tucker (03:23.34)
plumbing because he was an investor and they just found someone to do stuff for cheap. But unfortunately, he was using shark bites on everything. And I know, know, shark bites is something that we could have a whole topic discussion on. We’re short on time and everything right now. But, you know, people think, or investors, you see a lot of them in investment properties and a lot of them probably from investors themselves that use these things.

John Harcar (03:28.276)
Yeah, right.

John Harcar (03:39.638)
Yeah, right.

Robert Patrick Tucker (03:51.307)
Once the temperature gets too hot or too cold, they tend to fail. so one such instance we had, I had some guy that they’re probably paying nothing, you know, for years to shark bite everything, but they all gave out at the same time, all throughout the ceilings and everything. And it was pretty, pretty intense, but we were able to go out there and we fixed everything. You know, it was late of course, you know, like nine 30 or.

John Harcar (04:07.616)
Cheers.

John Harcar (04:13.664)
That’s nuts.

Robert Patrick Tucker (04:20.235)
you know, whenever 10 we had to go in there and, um, we’re a pro press. That’s pretty cool. I would advise, I mean, if you own 10, 20 properties, you know, we may be done, you know, $5,800 investment in a pro press. That’s much better. If you are going to cut corners on your, your plumbing costs, you know, and try to do it yourself, learn how to use one of those as opposed to the shake and the shark bites. But, um, people are really finding out now, at least here in

John Harcar (04:34.976)
Mm-hmm.

Robert Patrick Tucker (04:50.037)
climates that you know can get really cold that those aren’t those aren’t always great once the heat goes out and it starts getting too cold they tend to fail

John Harcar (05:01.6)
So how did you even get started in real estate?

Robert Patrick Tucker (05:05.743)
when I was in college, I was stuck in college for four years anyway, I figured. So I was going to college for free for wrestling. So I my college pay for it. I do, I think I got my internships, my, my following summer and those paid very well. And, so was able to cover my tuition. So I had excess money and I was able to start buying up tax liens. So I figured I had three years anyway.

Back then tax liens were actually, I don’t know outside of Denver, I lived in Denver my whole life, but here in Denver before, or right after 2008 and stuff, they were actually worth buying. Now, not so much. mean, here in Denver, pretty much go upside down in interest rate where you’re paying to pay for somebody’s taxes. Back then, that was great back then. Now, back then you’re probably pushing around 8 to 12 % returns.

John Harcar (05:56.886)
for someone’s taxes, right? Yeah.

Robert Patrick Tucker (06:05.11)
And I was stuck in school anyway for the three years and some of those substantiated and I turned around and bought a few more properties and everything. Now I’m a little different though. I like to do stuff with cash. don’t, I don’t know.

John Harcar (06:18.922)
You don’t like to use a hard money or private money or anything like that?

Robert Patrick Tucker (06:22.666)
No, no, I just use my own cash for everything for, um, for our prop. First of all, like even for this business, you know, I just, I just like to do everything myself because, um, I don’t know. I guess I worry about, uh, the economy and stuff too much. And I worry if I owe a bunch of money, you know, then my, and I owe a bunch of, you know, ongoing expenses if something turns over, but most people aren’t like that.

You know, investing, very much the minority there. It’s kind of slow and steady with my own cash as opposed to, you know, and I, and yeah, I only have, you know, four or five properties as opposed to like a hundred dollars or something, but I just didn’t like the overages. Yeah, currently. And we got into assisted livings for a long time and those are really great. That, that are golden age period too.

John Harcar (07:06.282)
Right. So you have four or five properties left right now.

Robert Patrick Tucker (07:21.129)
Now, after COVID, not so much. mean, they raised all the bar on all of the mandates and all the additional work and all the additional paperwork and all the, you know, but they never went away. It’s still there. Granted, Medicaid did go up.

Robert Patrick Tucker (07:52.21)
Did it cut out at all in your end?

John Harcar (07:54.388)
Yeah, cut out. The voice cut out a little bit. That’s okay.

Robert Patrick Tucker (07:56.881)
sorry. It’s because I’m getting phone calls and stuff, Medicaid, it went up to like 3,800 or 3,600 here. It was, but it was stayed stagnant for a very, very long time all throughout COVID around 2650 a month and per bed. And, you know, we, we’d have a few private pay, but it was mostly Medicaid.

John Harcar (08:00.848)
yeah.

Robert Patrick Tucker (08:26.68)
focused and smaller properties, but we ended up selling those off shortly after COVID and

John Harcar (08:34.774)
just because all the regulations and all the new things you had to do or just you guys just kind of got over the space.

Robert Patrick Tucker (08:40.858)
Well, our units were only like 10 to 16, so small assisted livings, 10 to 16 beds. So basically, kind of like owning a single family property, you end up doing most of the work. If you want to make profit, you know what I mean? The margins are not quite there. And here in Denver, there is a drastic sharp.

John Harcar (08:47.848)
Okay. Yeah.

John Harcar (09:00.948)
Right. Sure, yeah.

Robert Patrick Tucker (09:09.649)
inflationary period over the last six, seven years. So, you know, and the income was staying about stagnant, you know, about 2650 until they recently raised it. And so it just got really, really, really tight, you know. And you have to have them 24-7, you know, you have to have it staffed 24-7. And we didn’t cut any corners with.

you know, having them be, you know, we’d send them over to get their, you know, everything that they needed. And so I was actually an administrator. My wife was an administrator. Her mom was an administrator, you know, and all the laws were kind of designed. Oh yeah. Well, you can only, yeah, you can only, you can’t have them to be an administrator for more than one property. We’re, doing four of them, you know, so you can’t just be like robber, robber, robber, robber than all of them.

John Harcar (09:54.142)
All in the family.

John Harcar (10:07.488)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

Robert Patrick Tucker (10:08.369)
You know, so, and if you’re going to hire someone else to do it, there’s not much more money. Yeah. And plus it’s no money, you know, you’re not really making income at that point. So, um, I think now after that bump up, it might be okay, you know, but all that stuff that they, they raised never went away and it just kind of lingered around, which causes, you know, requires more man hours and stuff. So we got away from that and got into this industry years ago. Um,

John Harcar (10:12.608)
Why not be family?

John Harcar (10:17.813)
Right.

John Harcar (10:37.654)
And that’s the plumbing HVAC industry.

Robert Patrick Tucker (10:41.584)
Yeah. And the reason why was, well, a, with the engineering background, I used to project manager and I used to manage techs all the time anyway. But I had jumped into a already existing company and bought in with like a 20 % ownership. Uh, and ran everything, ran his company with him. And we grew that very well. You know, we grew it from like, uh, about 40,000 a month to about 280 a month. And, um, yeah, it went really well. And I was, and my wife actually was the one who really enjoyed it.

John Harcar (11:05.28)
Well, awesome.

Robert Patrick Tucker (11:11.312)
She’s like, we need to do this. She’s like, well, you know, and him paying my portion when it was 40,000 a month was no problem. Something weird happened when it became 280. I don’t know. Psychological aspect of that. And so he got a little weird about writing the bigger checks, even though it’s the same proportion. And so I was like, all right, well, I’ll just take off and do my own thing then if you don’t want to, if you can’t, you know, well, no, he could afford it. had access to all bank accounts. He just didn’t want to at that point. And so.

John Harcar (11:24.244)
Right, exactly.

Robert Patrick Tucker (11:40.526)
We took off, started our own thing. It’s been very, very, very successful. As you could tell, I could see from working all the time. So we’re working day and night, you know, at this stuff and it’s great. And we love it. You know, it’s, very lucrative business to be in. If you can do it right, you can execute and you’re charging a fair price. You know, we have a very good reputation. we don’t charge, you know, like the big boxes, obviously.

John Harcar (11:56.245)
awesome.

John Harcar (12:02.912)
Right.

Robert Patrick Tucker (12:10.596)
But then we don’t charge anywhere low, low, low, low end because we’re delivering a higher end product.

John Harcar (12:17.142)
Yeah, you don’t want to discount your cheap in your products. Yeah, for sure.

Robert Patrick Tucker (12:20.845)
Well, insurance is expensive. Licenses are expensive. mean, you know, this stuff is all overhead and, you know, if you’re not Joey Bagadona, it’s, know, claiming to be a plumber, you know, or a plumber or whatever you want to call it, you know, then you have overhead, you know, and so you do have to charge more than, you know, just whoever, but you’re getting really high quality. think on the last, we go over our analytics, which we just did. go over in segments of 250.

John Harcar (12:24.49)
Right?

John Harcar (12:33.376)
Yeah, right.

Robert Patrick Tucker (12:50.649)
jobs, you know, we do a review and run numbers and stuff. we had one call back, which was the person had bought a, some pump from home Depot, but didn’t check it. And for some reason, my tech didn’t check it either. So we installed it. And so she called back a week later. It like, this thing’s not working. And we pull, pulls it up. I said, another tech to go check the other techs work. And he’s like, this is like.

30 years old, somebody had reboxed their old sub pup, returned it to Home Depot in this new box. Somehow no one noticed. So it wasn’t an actual plumbing issue, but we fixed it right away and replaced it. I was like, oh God, guys, so stupid stuff happens. You know, that’s just stupid stuff, but it wasn’t an actual plumbing issue or whatever, know. But a lot of investors are having us go in and kind of

John Harcar (13:22.87)
The Reeboks and all the one.

John Harcar (13:32.342)
There’s an old sub pop.

John Harcar (13:38.74)
Yeah, yeah.

Robert Patrick Tucker (13:48.875)
After years and years and years of rental, I have noticed this trend recently. You know, they’re having us go in and do these budget friendly remodels, you know, where we just have a big list of things we do, you know, and might be a master electrician comes in one day, master plumber comes in one day and organizes with the journeyman stuff. And then, then we also do the drywall. So we’ve hired a drywaller that’s really, really good because we’re always busting holes in the walls, like Kool-Aid mat.

You know, it’s like you clean up our, you know what I mean? Make it look nice and build access points. And so he does that. And so it’s not a big deal for us to do the drywall or tile in the bathrooms for some reason. And that’s another thing I see. So we’ve done about nine bathrooms so far this month. So there’s been a real big uptick in bathroom remodels. Only three of them were investors, you know, but.

John Harcar (14:20.63)
That’s fun, yeah, right.

Robert Patrick Tucker (14:44.194)
All the rest were just people that are like, hey, I want a pretty bathroom. You know what I mean? So it’s springtime, but yeah. Is there any questions that you have that you think?

John Harcar (14:47.807)
Right, right.

John Harcar (14:53.11)
No, I’m just, yeah, just kind of finding more about your business. So where you’re in Denver, what areas do you service? Do you service just residential? Do you do commercial? Do you have a preference?

Robert Patrick Tucker (15:04.91)
We cover all of Denver and surrounding areas. We don’t have a preference, but the people that prefer us tend to be, um, Beaumar, Littleton, Castle Rock, Castle Pines, uh, Cherry Creek, obviously, cause that’s where we’re located. And that’s where we really started was the luxury market. Um, the people that, the people that use utilize a lot of services tend to really, really like us a lot.

because they know the difference, you know. New homeowners, they use this as well, but they’re kind of like, you know, they’re a little confused. think like any, you know, you need $5. If you charge them five, they’d be like, wait, why not 250? You know what I mean? It’s like they’re just confused, you know, a little bit about how everything works and they haven’t been burned yet by, you know, cheap labor. So they don’t know. And so, yeah.

John Harcar (15:50.806)
Sure, right?

John Harcar (15:59.606)
cheap labor, yeah, bad repairs.

Robert Patrick Tucker (16:04.44)
But we do a great job and we have our plumbing contract and license too. So we do the heavy end stuff. So, you know, what always happens is the sewer lines and stuff. So usually we run around doing scopes for people all the time, realtors and investors. And we were honest with all of our stuff. I think that’s another aspect that people like is that how honest we are, you know, we’ll take them through. We had this one such character. I’ll try to say this story fast, but.

He had two other companies come through. think it was like brothers and some other company. remember some other big company and he’s like, I was so confused because they gave me two very different stories. I’m like, well, did they use a camera to tell you what’s going on inside of your pipe? He’s like, no, no, neither one used a camera. But he said there’s roots and wood and the other one said that there’s probably a collapse and stuff. And I’m like, but they never did a camera because these cameras are a lot of people on a stem. They’re like $28,000.

John Harcar (17:02.13)
Yeah, expensive.

Robert Patrick Tucker (17:03.317)
if it’s a decent camera, you know, so they’re a little pricey so not everyone has them, you know, at least the ones that you can actually see that’s not like a ultrasound, you know, but so we put the camera in there and there’s nothing wrong. It was just a belly. I mean, there was, that is something wrong, but there wasn’t all this stuff that they’re saying, root intrusions.

John Harcar (17:13.557)
Right.

John Harcar (17:20.854)
Mm-mm.

Robert Patrick Tucker (17:26.401)
not sure I what else he’s saying. partial collapse. He said he got mud out of there, so it’s collapsed. He’s like, but I’ve been here for four years. I’m like, if it was collapsed, you wouldn’t be using it for four years. I was like, just let us look at it. So we walked him through and everything, and it worked out great. Thanks. He had to run my keys. That was one of my favorites.

John Harcar (17:28.982)
partial collapse here.

John Harcar (17:36.242)
Yeah.

John Harcar (17:44.064)
Awesome.

There you go. Well, if there’s people in your area, in the Denver area that maybe want to work with you, use your services, if any other, I mean, heck, I don’t even know investors listening to this. So if there’s anybody that’s out there listening that wants to get in touch, how can they reach you? How can they contact you?

Robert Patrick Tucker (18:05.045)
well, we’re online. We’re not hiding. Yeah, good Google easy repair the letter E the letter Z and then repair Yeah, that’s that’s pretty much it And or you could call me anytime, you know 970-589-0006 We do emergency hours and everything and you know, we’re straightforward. It’s pretty simple process

John Harcar (18:16.532)
Okay.

Robert Patrick Tucker (18:34.176)
We come out, we tell you the price upfront. If you want us to do it, you say, okay, and approve it. If not, you don’t. Yeah, it’s easy.

John Harcar (18:41.51)
Easy peasy. And I’ll take all that stuff. think I have the website here that you sent to me too. I’ll put it in the show notes. Yeah, so that way if anybody wants to reach out, they can. Robert, I appreciate you coming out and spending some time with us.

Robert Patrick Tucker (18:51.255)
great.

Robert Patrick Tucker (18:56.916)
do you want me to send you that video of that place flooding? It’s pretty cool. Okay. It’s pretty cool. All right.

John Harcar (19:01.768)
No, that’s okay. I mean, yeah, you know, you don’t have to do that’s all good. Yeah, that’s all good. All right, guys. Well, I hope you enjoyed the show Robert I appreciate again your time and sharing some stuff with us and I look forward to see you guys on the next one. Cheers

Robert Patrick Tucker (19:13.984)
Thanks for having me. Have a good one. Bye.