Bob Brown Reveals the Foundation Repair Trap Costing Property Owners Thousands

RK Bob Brown (00:00)
Well, typically not, and I’ll tell you why. Because most of these problems are not structurally deficiency problems. They’re what they call ⁓ serviceability problems, functional problems. And so the end result is that nobody’s having their house fallen on them or anything like that. I sometimes if they do the wrong thing, it can make things a lot worse, and I’ve seen that happen. ⁓ But most of the time, it’s what I call the silent fleecing of America. People pay $80,000.

Cody Crabb (02:01)
Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast by Investor Fuel. I’m your host, Cody Crabb. And today I’ve got Bob Brown with me. He spent 30 years owning and operating a foundation repair company and forensic engineering company. And now he works as an advocate for property owners and investors, helping them understand what’s really going on with their buildings, their foundations in an industry that he says is way more unregulated than most people realize. Bob, thanks so much for coming on today. This is going to be an interesting one.

RK Bob Brown (02:28)
Yep, I’m happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

Cody Crabb (02:31)
So ⁓ just to kind of kick things off, ⁓ something you mentioned to me as we were chatting before,

Before we started the podcast, you were mentioning that you’ve seen so many people get taken advantage of ⁓ in foundation repair and things, ⁓ and that it’s extremely unregulated. Can you tell us a little about that? that sounds like something that anybody with a foundation under their property probably should know.

RK Bob Brown (02:56)
Yeah, well, mean, honestly, ⁓ I was one of the few contractors that actually utilized engineering teams to evaluate the problems and come up with solutions. Almost everybody else does ⁓ it with commissioned salespeople. And so, you you have foundation problems, you know, maybe you’re in a transaction or whatever. You call a foundation repair company.

They send out

Joe Smith, who ⁓ maybe was selling cars ⁓ a week before or a year before. ⁓ And his training consists of a seminar put on by a supplier on how to sell more materials. ⁓ And he’s really basically doing engineering work without a license. And I tried to fix that from the foundation repair from within.

Cody Crabb (03:51)
Yeah.

RK Bob Brown (03:56)
the foundation repair industry. You know, I showed them that you could do it right. You could do it ethically and have a high degree of precision and still make a lot of money because I did. If you took all your competitors and stacked them up when I sold, it would be half my company size. So I was dominating the field and I was doing it right. And I tried to show that to everybody. Unfortunately, nobody listened. Nobody cared.

And in fact, the company that bought my company after a short amount of time canned the whole engineering department and ⁓ basically went back to doing it the way everybody else does it. And so that was my signal that,

change is not gonna occur within the industry. It’s gonna have to come from outside the industry and it’s gonna probably be a lot less fun for them. But that’s my goal in life is to… ⁓

affect these changes. so the fact of the matter is, like for instance, I’ll just tell you one of the lies that they quite often tell people, these foundation reports. By the way, there’s no regulation of what, know, holding these guys accountable. There’s nothing. They could tell you that the moon is made of green cheese and there’s nobody holding them accountable for anything they say or do. And so what they’ll tell people,

Cody Crabb (05:54)
Yeah, please do.

RK Bob Brown (06:11)
A lot of times, don’t worry. When we pull permits, we’re going to have our engineer look over everything and make sure it’s good. And that is a bald-faced lie. And I’ll tell you why it’s a bald-faced lie. Because engineers are statutorily prohibited from opining and making recommendations on data that they have not collected themselves. Or…

Cody Crabb (06:36)
Hmm

RK Bob Brown (06:38)
a bona fide employee of theirs under their direct control collected the data. It cannot be collected by another company, a salesman from another company, and given to an engineer. The engineer would lose his license if he did that.

Cody Crabb (06:52)
So you’re saying even if they are doing what they’re saying, it still isn’t even valid or even legal because they’re doing it the wrong way.

RK Bob Brown (06:59)
Well, when you pull permits right now, and I’m trying to get this changed, but when you pull permits to do foundation repair work, the only thing that jurisdictions require is a spacing calculation. What do I mean by that? So you’re gonna put in these piers that go down 20, 30, 50 feet. And then that stabilizes, goes past the soft soil, and it locks up into hard soil, maybe rocks. And then you can use that to lift and stabilize the structure. Okay. So.

What the city wants to do is to make sure that these two these piers are not too far apart from each other because if they are they’ll droop between them and so ⁓ That’s the only thing they check. That’s the only thing they check so You could have the piers on the wrong side of the house You can have too many too little you may not even need piers at all You all you might need is grading and drainage Which I find the majority of the time solve most of the problems and is significantly cheaper ⁓

But the permit process doesn’t check for any of that. It doesn’t check for one drop of it. All they do is look at the spacing calculation. Spacing calculation there? Okay, great. I’ll give you an example. There was a lady up in the mountainous area of Arizona who had a stem wall. Now the stem wall is the short wall that goes between the footing and the walls of the house. It’s usually about 18 inches tall. And a lot of times they make them out of concrete, but in this particular area they make them out of cinder block and then they…

they put rebar in the holes and fill up the holes with grout, called grouting the cells. Well, they didn’t do that in this case. They never did do it. Which, you know, mean, it happens. People make mistakes in construction all the time, right? ⁓ So this wall was sitting underneath the house, and because it was not structurally sound, it started moving out away from the house. And so the house was just barely hanging on to like an inch.

So she called out a foundation repair company and I know the salesman, he would sell his mother for five cents if he could. ⁓ He basically told her, ⁓ yeah, we’re gonna put Piers down and we’re gonna rotate that wall right back into place. Yeah.

Cody Crabb (09:08)
Jeez.

Like

I don’t know anything, I am not an engineer. I don’t know anything about like the physics involved here. That sounds create like impossible. Am I right in saying that sounds impossible?

RK Bob Brown (09:23)
All right.

Yeah,

a four-year-old would know that that’s not gonna work. This guy doesn’t care, he just makes a sale and collects his commission. And by the way, these commission sales guys,

they make 200, 300 thousand a year doing what they do, it’s all commission. So they’re very well paid.

got all done and the wall was still out of position. And she’s like, you know, hired you to fix this, you know? And they go, oh, well, you know, because they always tell people, oh, we have a lifetime warranty, you know, it’s great for, you know, you can pass it on to people who buy the house. Let me tell you, those warranties aren’t worth crap. And they told her, well, look, you know, our contract says we can’t guarantee movement.

So then he says to her, well, if you really want to fix, we should hire Mason and come in and rebuild it. And that’s another $27,000. So I know the engineer who sealed the permits for that job. So I called him up. I said, hey, dude, like, what’s up with this? Why are you ignoring all this? He’s like, Bob, they didn’t disclose any of that information to me.

All they did was send me a floor plan with the piers on it, and I did a calculation for the spacing plan. That’s it. That’s that’s required. And so that’s a perfect example of the current permitting process that gets completely bypassed. And there is no regulation of the designs of these guys who have no clue what they’re doing. No regulation of the designs whatsoever. The state contractor boards,

Cody Crabb (11:22)
Cause that’s all that’s required, yeah.

RK Bob Brown (11:44)
They don’t regulate designs. They only regulate workmanship. The professional design boards that govern engineers have no jurisdiction over contractors. And there is no oversight whatsoever of these designs. And I told you about they have lifetime warranties. Yeah, they have lifetime warranties, but guess what? They don’t warranty the design. I call it the… Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Cody Crabb (12:08)
Isn’t that like if it works? Yeah. Yeah.

RK Bob Brown (12:14)
And so, you know, then they go, well, you know, ⁓ you know, we’re not engineers, we’re just dumb contractors, you know.

Cody Crabb (12:21)
We did our best. Yeah, I could see that. I could see that not really playing too well down the line, but then it’s not their problem anymore. So like, I see what you mean. So let me ask you this. So what incentives do people have to kind of do this halfway? I mean, you kind of showed, as you said, this is not, it’s not about the money because you were doing great and you’re in parallel to all these companies.

Like what incentives do they even have if you were able to be so successful? Is it just like a time thing? it like, or can they get easily, more easily get cheaper employees? mean, what’s going on there?

RK Bob Brown (12:58)
Well, it’s just ⁓ the industry has evolved with certain procedures that everybody follows and it’s designed to expedite the process and not muddy it up with anything complicated. so they just want simple, go to the house, flog a repair plan, send a crew out to fix it. They don’t care whether it’s right or whether it’s wrong. And

Five years later, the homeowner may call the contractor and go, hey, ⁓ I’m still getting lots of cracks in my house and you need to come on to your lifetime warranty. So then they send out a really experienced guy who says, well, this isn’t from settlement. Our piers aren’t settling. This is from expansive clays pushing up in the middle of the house and causing a problem. And it says right here in our contract that piers can’t stop heave and our contract doesn’t guarantee against heave. So see you later.

And then the homeowner, if they’re really smart, they’ll go, ⁓ well, wait a minute. If it’s all he, didn’t you diagnose it wrong in the first place? And the contractor says, we’re just dumb contractors. We don’t know. We’re not engineers.

Cody Crabb (14:05)
True, true, yeah.

And we’re allowed to be dumb contractors to do this is what your point is. Yeah.

RK Bob Brown (14:15)
Yeah, yeah,

they’re absolutely covered. There’s nothing you can do.

Cody Crabb (14:21)
Huh, well, and I could really see, like I could see this being an issue for something like any household thing, fencing or roofs or something, but we’re talking about like literally the base of your entire structure. I mean, that could affect literally everything. Have you seen some kind of catastrophic outcomes because of this?

RK Bob Brown (15:24)
Well, typically not, and I’ll tell you why. Because most of these problems are not structurally deficiency problems. They’re what they call ⁓ serviceability problems, functional problems. And so the end result is that nobody’s having their house fallen on them or anything like that. I sometimes if they do the wrong thing, it can make things a lot worse, and I’ve seen that happen. ⁓ But most of the time, it’s what I call the silent fleecing of America. People pay $80,000.

for something they don’t need. And they go out throughout their whole life thinking that they did the right thing and they’ll never know anything different.

Cody Crabb (16:01)
So, okay, let’s say that we get a top down, you know, we’re making Bob in charge of this from here on out. What regulations do you think should be put into place to kind of protect people ⁓ in order to make this not happen anymore?

RK Bob Brown (16:13)
Yeah.

Good question. So first of all, people should always call a forensic geotechnical engineer to get their home evaluated.

Cody Crabb (16:26)
Now this was a new term

to me when you said this, was like, forensic engineer. At first I was like, did you solve crimes or something? What was that? So yeah.

RK Bob Brown (16:33)
Yeah,

it needs to be a forensic geotechnical engineer. Geotechnical engineers are the guys that deal in soils. They drill down, they look at the layers, they analyze them, they see what’s in them, they know how the geology was deposited over time. That’s their area of expertise. You know, these are all soil problems. And so it doesn’t do any good to call a structural engineer. They’re just going to tell you, well, in order to know if it’s going to keep moving, you got to call a geotechnical. Okay, thanks for wasting my time and money.

⁓ But a forensic geotechnical engineer is the guy that needs to go on this, you know, go to the side or send one of his employees and analyze everything carefully and make sure they understand what’s going on and come up with a repair plan. So what I’m trying to do is trying to get cities and counties, jurisdictions to modify their permit requirement so that when they pull permits,

They have to submit a report by a forensic geotechnical engineer that says, I have determined that these are the problems and these are the solutions. And then we know that nobody’s getting hoodwinked.

Cody Crabb (17:37)
Hmm.

Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, I feel like there’s a lot of ways to kind of approach that, like the penalties for the bad actors or kind of incentives for the good actors. I think that is ultimately that kind of boils it down to the main issue, which is you don’t really care what’s happening as long as the problem that is going on is get the one that’s getting solved. Am I reading that right? Yeah.

RK Bob Brown (18:16)
That’s right. That’s right. Because I’ll tell

you why. You know, it’s so easy to get heave and settlement mixed up. So settlement occurs on the outside, the edges go down, you want to underpin to fix that, right? Heave occurs in the middle of the house, makes the middle portion go up with the swelling clays, and people say, well, I know it’s settling because the edge is lower. Well, the edge could be lower because the middle’s gone up. What do mean the middle’s gone up?

Cody Crabb (18:41)
Yeah, I suppose

when you say that yeah, they basically would look the same wouldn’t they unless you really know what you’re looking

RK Bob Brown (18:45)
It’s

scratching their heads like I don’t understand the concept. So you have to explain to people all about soils and how they work and to help them understand. Of course, half these foundation repair guys don’t even understand these concepts. All they know is low area, put in piers, charge you $1,000. That’s all they know.

Cody Crabb (19:02)
Yeah. Yeah.

And they got like a like you said, they got like the basic like here’s the you here’s how you physically do it, but not like all the technical know how behind it. And really. So so my question would be how how were you able to make this work financially? Because it seems like you’re adding a very expensive. Do know what I mean? You’re having a very expensive employee and you’re still like, no, but it still worked great. You can still make money if not more. It was what you were saying.

RK Bob Brown (19:11)
Right.

Yeah.

Well, when I owned the foundation repair business and the forensic engineering business, I built a system. And so what we did is we had people that were under the direct control of the engineers that were trained, you know, $25, $30 an hour guys, not expensive like an engineer, that would go out and gather all the data in a methodological way that the engineers approved of.

And then they would bring this data back, a floor-level survey, damage map, a lot of things, ⁓ 16 things. I talk about it one of my books. And ⁓ then the engineers would analyze that data and reach conclusions about, okay, here’s what I think’s going on and here’s the solution. And we were able to streamline the process that way and still provide a service that was ⁓ very well.

vetted and profiled service, but it wasn’t very expensive. It’s not free, and that’s the problem. People nowadays, when they call a foundation repair contractor, they’re going to come out for free and do their analysis, but it’s not really analysis. It’s a sales pitch dressed up to look like analysis.

Cody Crabb (20:33)
Hmm. Of course, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, and that’s

the other issue, too, with it’s like a race to the bottom, too. Like it’s if if somebody happens to notice that, you know, you need more, but someone else can quote them a lesser need for less money. Yeah. Yeah.

RK Bob Brown (20:59)
They That’s right. They might support

one peer and go, look, I’m cheaper, you know.

Cody Crabb (21:04)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that’s what I’m saying. Yeah, that makes a lot of

sense that you would kind of need to have these plans kind of checkmarked by someone that actually does know what they’re talking about for sure.

RK Bob Brown (21:14)
Yeah,

exactly, for sure. And so, you know, all kinds of games go on in this industry, all kinds of games. Like I said, it’s completely unregulated and people are being completely bamboozled. Sometimes people, their entire life savings, they can’t even, they don’t even have $80,000 in cash. So they put them on a payment plan, you know.

Cody Crabb (21:31)
Yeah.

Yeah, so, okay, so let’s say one of our investors listening is like, ⁓ crap, I just found out I have a big foundation issue. So your first step would be to call ⁓ one of these forensic, what did you call it? Forensic, I’m not gonna remember it, what was it?

RK Bob Brown (21:54)
Forensic geotechnical, geo meaning right.

Cody Crabb (21:56)
Forensic,

right, right, it’s Forensic Geotechnical Engineer. So they come out, they look at everything and they basically diagnose what the issue is and they kind of give you a plan to be like, here’s what you could do to fix it. And then what comes after that? How do you find a company that’s actually like reputable and.

RK Bob Brown (22:17)
Well, first things first, how do you find the engineer? ⁓ Yeah, it is because these foundation repair companies spent a lot of money on marketing, a lot. I know that my supplier, when I was in business, had 100 people in the internet marketing division alone, 100 people. And I mean,

Cody Crabb (22:20)
Well, yeah, true. That sounds a lot more difficult, to be honest.

That’s wild.

RK Bob Brown (22:42)
They had direct connections to Google. I it’s really hard to beat these guys. They spend a lot of money. So it’s hard to find a good forensic geotechnical engineer. But if you go to my website, foundationrepairsecrets.com, there’s a free directory. You can go in, and these guys don’t pay me to be in my directory. I just put it in there. I’m just doing this for gratis. You can find, for every state, can find people. I’ve only vetted about half of them just because time constraints.

Cody Crabb (23:11)
Well, but even

the fact that there’s somewhere to start, that’s that, that’s a massive time saver. Not to mention the fact that you’re already approaching this from an angle where they don’t really have an incentive to sell you anything. like there’s no reason to, yeah.

RK Bob Brown (23:22)
Right, right, that’s right. No conflict

interest. And by the way, engineers are overseen by their boards of technical registration for ethics. So if they tell you the moon is made of green cheese, they can be held accountable for it. And so you’re, and they have errors in emissions insurance for their designs. So you’re much more taken care of with it, with it. Now it’s not free, ⁓ but I mean, let me ask you this. If you were really sick,

Cody Crabb (23:30)
Hmm.

Sure, yeah.

RK Bob Brown (23:51)
and you didn’t know what was wrong with you? Really sick, like seriously sick. Would you go to a pharmaceutical rep for free or would you pay money to go to a doctor?

Cody Crabb (24:00)
Good point. Well, and another thing too, like you said, I’d rather pay $50,000 once total to know everything is done and right and correct rather than $30,000 and then another $20,000 and then another $20,000. So the peace of mind is.

RK Bob Brown (24:19)
Right. Or maybe

find out none of it was needed. Maybe it was the wrong problem, right?

Cody Crabb (24:24)
And the worst of all, you find out, you do all this stuff, find out that you need to still call somebody like this, and then you spend that much anyway. So if you’re getting it done right, I mean, that’s kind of true with everything. Like, get it done right, and you’re gonna be, that’s one of those things my mom taught me. just get it done right. Do it the right way.

RK Bob Brown (24:45)
Right.

Cody Crabb (24:48)
pay the extra money, do what you need to do, you’ll sleep better at night, and especially with something like a foundation where it really can cause a bunch of other issues. So that makes sense.

RK Bob Brown (24:56)
Right.

let me answer the second part of your question. Once you get the engineering design, it says, you know, put in six piers right here. Now what? Well, now I mean, you can find foundation repair companies super easy as we talked about, just call, call three of them up and say, Hey, bid this plan. Don’t give me any extra, you know, don’t give me your opinion. don’t care what your opinion is. Bid this plan. Anything, any deviation from this plan is a non-responsive bid.

Cody Crabb (25:15)
Mmm.

RK Bob Brown (25:26)
Okay, now what’s the con, because what happens now, what happens before? Well, you got, you know, contractor, but without the engineer, the contractor A shows up and says, well, I think you need six piers over here. And the other one says, no, I think you need seven piers over here. And the other one says, no, you need 30 piers all the way around. Well, how’s a homeowner supposed to know? They don’t know.

Cody Crabb (25:26)
Mmm.

Right. Yeah. And not to

mention, mean, and on top of that, how much does 30 piers even cost? That might be a really low cost, cheap version as as as far as I know. Yeah.

RK Bob Brown (25:52)
Right.

So, okay, so the point is, is that once you get a plan, now, let me back up for just a second. What happens is, then these contractors all say,

So now what happens is the contractors say, well, in order to win this bid, I need to remove price out of the equation. So I’m going to come to this homeowner or this property owner and say, well, we’re smart. The other guys are stupid. If you want this done right, go with us. And I’ll tell you my hokey reasons why, blah, blah. And they do sales pitches of why they’re so smart. And so now maybe they can sell the customer.

and maybe they’re the highest bidder or the highest price per peer or whatever, they remove price from the equation. It’s how the industry operates. But now, now you have an engineer that says bid six piers. Now the contractor’s thinking.

Cody Crabb (26:52)
Yeah, there’s not much wiggle room there.

RK Bob Brown (26:52)
I’m sharpen my pencil,

man. I’m bidding against two other guys who are bidding exactly the same thing. I’m gonna sharpen my pencil and see if I can get this job, right?

Cody Crabb (27:01)
Like actually do it right where they are like looking at the actual cost and yeah. Sure, yeah.

RK Bob Brown (27:04)
Well, they’re going to be competitive on their pricing, right? Because they know

they’re competing. And so the money that you save there will easily pay for the engineering upfront, easily. And there’s one more thing that will save you. If you have an engineer who designed the process, looking over the job and inspecting it and making sure it gets installed properly, you’re going to be inoculated against goofy claims that come along later. What do I mean by that? Well, halfway through the job,

Cody Crabb (27:14)
you

RK Bob Brown (27:33)
on at least half of the jobs that are out there, the foreman comes to the homeowner and says, Mr. Jones, we’re going to need to add four piers. know, there was some unknown conditions. ⁓ We need to add four piers. And the homeowner’s like, no, I’m not adding four piers. You guys gave me a plan. I want you to do it. And the foreman says, well, if you don’t do it, we can’t give you our lifetime warranty then. ⁓ I guess you better do it, then I’ll spend another $20,000.

Cody Crabb (28:04)
Well, and that’s extra great situation to have one of these, another one of those things. it’s very, like you can just flash the, really? Cause this person who’s extremely accountable to the government for their license said that I don’t need that. So which is it?

RK Bob Brown (28:04)
And, yeah.

Well,

even more importantly, what they need to do is then, instead of going to the homeowner, they need to go to the engineer and the engineer is going to say, okay, hog breath, explain this to me because I designed this thing and you’re going to have to convince me.

Cody Crabb (28:30)
Yeah

Yeah,

sure. Yeah. Well, and then they’re on your so they can advocate for you knowing what they know. That is that’s absolutely brilliant. ⁓ Cool. Well, yeah, this is fantastic. Thank you so much. ⁓ This has been really great. You mentioned ⁓ mentioned one more time your website and your resources. So if someone wants to find those or get in touch with you or something, how can they do that?

RK Bob Brown (28:56)
⁓ easiest way is foundationrepairsecrets.com and don’t put a space before secrets or it’ll send you to that porn site. Foundation Repairs Secrets all over the

Cody Crabb (29:05)
Foundation repair.

⁓ I wouldn’t have expected that but I guess buzzers lots of people in the world

RK Bob Brown (29:08)
Yeah, all one word. And

I have a book that I wrote by the same title. You can find it on Amazon. It was a best seller, won a bunch of awards. I’m coming out with another book and I’m working on a third. So I’m really trying hard to educate the public on how to take care of themselves.

Cody Crabb (29:16)
Wow.

Yeah, well, I think this is fantastic information and it sounds like this is nationwide, not just where you are. So the very fact that this is something that I can’t think of a building that wouldn’t have foundation. like everybody should really know this. So thank you for spreading the word there. ⁓ again, thanks so much for your time today and thank you listeners for joining us as well.

RK Bob Brown (29:30)
That’s right.

Who was?

Cody Crabb (29:50)
If you like what you heard on this episode, go ahead and give us a like, subscribe, comment, all the things. Make sure to follow Bob and get in touch with him about his foundation repair secrets, the real version, not the alternative version. then hopefully you can catch more episodes like this one. Again, thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure, And thanks, audience. We’ll catch you next time. See ya.