Disaster-Resistant Real Estate: Hurricane, Flood & Fireproof Home Building

Wayne Furlong (00:00)
we’ve got a builder that we’re going right right now and basically doing disaster resistant homes that are fireproof, hurricane proof.

There’s no

metal in the rebar, it’s basalt. There’s no sheetrock. There’s no wood for termites. Our insurance bills, we have one house that was $14,500. Right now it’s $1480. It went down 92 % cheaper because of way it’s built.

Michelle Kesil (02:04)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Investor Fuel podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil. And today I’m joined by someone I’ve been looking forward to chatting with. We have Laura and Wayne Furlong, who have been making serious moves in the real estate space. So really glad to have the both of you here today. I think the listeners are really going to take something away from how you’re approaching real estate and supporting investors and their solutions.

So let’s dive in.

Wayne Furlong (02:36)
Thank you. Thanks. Yeah, so we what we’re doing right now is we’re getting into the investor fueled rehabs on rehabbing to make it hurricane proof because we have a problem here in southern Florida with the hurricanes.

we’ve got a builder that we’re going right right now and basically doing disaster resistant homes that are fireproof, hurricane proof.

There’s no

metal in the rebar, it’s basalt. There’s no sheetrock. There’s no wood for termites. Our insurance bills, we have one house that was $14,500. Right now it’s $1480. It went down 92 % cheaper because of way it’s built.

Michelle Kesil (03:26)
Great, yeah, so what is your guys main focus for those that are not familiar with you?

Wayne Furlong (03:33)
So I would say that our main focus right now is providing solutions that fit with the buyer’s needs in our marketplace. We not only are doing that in Southwest Florida, but we still continue to consult over in California. And California was just hit and continues to be hit with fires. And this

type of building system and design is fire resistant as well, up to 240 minutes or four hours, fire rated. So what we’re attempting to do is to provide cost effective solutions for people in the markets that are being hit heavily with natural disasters. And even if the house floods,

There’s nothing to, there’s no sheet rock. You don’t have to cut walls away later on. There’s no wood in the, any of the structure at all. So it’s just what we’ve been looking for. We finally found the right person to do it with rock solid structures.

Michelle Kesil (04:50)
That’s great. So yeah, what has been like the key to keeping this business running smoothly?

Wayne Furlong (05:45)
Well, one of the keys is to try to find something which we did that just outpaces anything else. Nobody’s building something like this. We have people here, they’ve lost their house and they put 100, 300,000 into it to rehab. And the next hurricane, they’re going to wash their house away. Our structures are not going to get washed away. That’s the biggest thing. It’s just, you you invest money, you want to get a return, but you want to be safe. This is a safe home. One of the things we’re doing

Michelle Kesil (06:13)
Yeah.

Wayne Furlong (06:14)
to make it appealing and to actually market and advertise the solution is we’re collaborating with investors and other real estate brokerages to allow them to offer it to their clients as well. Because what you see down here in Southwest Florida, and you see this over in Southern California too, are a bunch of vacant lots. Because once a house burns down, right, they come in and they do the demolition.

and then you’ve got to rebuild the structure. So we’re actually offering something a little bit more unique to our investors and to our buyers. I actually have become an expert in the permitting process as well. So what I can do is now I can go in and I can offer my services.

to the investor who’s building maybe a new home or doing a very extensive renovation on a property and I can advise them on, you’ve got to go get a permit from either the county, the city, the jurisdiction that that house or that structure requires that information from. And by the way, Mr. Investor, have you thought about rebuilding a property that is going to

it’s going to last a lifetime versus, you know, going and building with what we like to affectionately call toothpicks or even concrete block structures because those crumble and the steel rebar that they use in them actually contorts and actually rust and it spirals. So ⁓ that’s that’s I would say that’s a positive challenge, but it is a challenge.

because people need to be educated on this type of building system. The other thing we’re doing is we are meeting with architects. We’re meeting with some of the renowned architects in both Canada and the United States that are doing new age things. not like NIH, right? So they’re not.

just like focusing on it’s always been done this way. We’re going to just continue to do it this way, too bad, whatever. We’re going out and we’re starting to collaborate with guys that see it, that understand the difference that needs to be had in the construction industry right now. Why would you build a house that ⁓ you’ve got to be worried when you’re in Monaco or in Egypt or whatever and there’s a hurricane coming or there’s a fire coming?

With our house, you just shut the blinds up and you go. ⁓ Did you see that house that was a famous one in the Palisades? Everything was absolutely wiped out except one concrete house that was done in the same kind of a system and it was the only one standing. was a similar system. did not, it actually did have some faults, but it at least was still standing and there was minimum amount of structural damage that.

had happened to that structure. And so that’s what we’re proposing to people is, hey, take a look at this. And the only other challenge that we kind of come up against is that we can build these houses with curves. And we do quite frequently because of the aerodynamics of the house with the wind.

⁓ The only problem with that is people love them and those are a little more costly because they do require more materials and they do require more specialty ⁓ finishes and construction. ⁓ So they’re a little bit more expensive. ⁓ But we tell people we have options that are not. We have options that are cost competitive to your standard stick-built or CBS structured home.

It just doesn’t make sense. Like all the people on Sanibel and the barrier islands here, they’ve lost their house. They’ve got flooded 12, 15 feet and they think elevating their house up in the air, a 30, 40 year old house and they’re elevating it now 10 or 15 feet. That’s not the way to do it. It’s going to come back again. There’s going to be another hurricane coming. This is the way to go.

The other thing that I need to point out as well is as we come into a more distressed market again, and investors are out there and they’re making offers to purchase these homes and they’re coming well below ⁓ maybe market value or they want to do pennies on the dollar and things like that. One of the things that we always advise our investors to do that we represent

is you’ve got to do a comprehensive title search on these properties and make sure that number one, that you’re actually buying a house from the right person, the person that actually owns the property. But number (239)771-777, always take a look at the lean situation because with the destruction comes insurance payouts and

There’s a lot of liens on these properties and sometimes when they do a title search, they don’t do it extensively and you could be in for hundreds of thousands of dollars of liens on these properties. That’s why we use (239)771-777 title companies that don’t make mistakes. We’ve been really lucky like that. Right. Fortunate. We use very well known, ⁓ you know,

title companies that have been in the business for 40 plus years and really understands the problems that you could come into. Because when we were doing fence jumping in California at the courthouse stairs, we had a title company on standby at seven o’clock in the morning that would pull title and tell us if there was any liens against it. It’s called scrubbing the title. They would scrub it. And so we would make them scrub it.

We even have situations in that one or (239)771-777 in a very long, maybe thousands of homes, but one or (239)771-777 came back and we thought they were scrubbed, but there was a tax lien on them. And so you’re not going to make the return that you expect to make if there’s a mistake like that on the property. So you really need to be with a group of people that really knows what they’re doing. That’s what our value is, you know?

Michelle Kesil (13:47)
Absolutely. So what is like the big goal for your business?

Wayne Furlong (13:53)
⁓ We would love to scale. I think that the biggest goal that we have is to scale and get the word out there that there are partnership teams. There are teams like mine and Wayne’s. The name of our team is Tripec the Home Group powered by OPT Realty. And, ⁓ you know, we’re out here and we’re willing to educate our clients and educate investors and work with them and even

help train them, you know, to get their money out on the Ken from Rock Solid Structures, he even does license agreements where he’ll teach you how to build under his program and he will send you the proprietary ingredients that go up to make it. It’s not just ordinary contract. It has a lot of secret sauce in it. It’s like KFC. Right. So if you’re an investor builder on your own,

That brings about a whole host of other issues, especially when you get into permitting and when you get into building your own structures or renovating your own structures. So one of the things that we love to do is to certify these contractor groups and building groups and allow them to use our materials and start getting

the building system out in the world, not just nationally or ⁓ in North America. We actually, it’s our vision to see this in other areas that have the same like natural disasters, fires. It’s build it once, build it right. You don’t have to worry about any kind of natural disasters coming. If a fire’s coming, there’s no wood in it. You don’t have to worry. ⁓

If it’s a 250 mile an hour wind coming from a category five, I’m not saying you don’t have to worry, but you really don’t have to worry. It’s like a bank vault. We don’t have typical roofs. We don’t have apex roofs. It’s a pretty much a flat roof. It’s a flat roof. And the beautiful thing about it is on the luxury homes, the flat roof also serves as an outdoor living area in and of itself. With a pool or a Florida room or Yeah. So down here in Southwest,

Florida, you know, we have, we have creatures, have bugs, have mosquitoes, we have no-seems, you name it, tropical area. If you get the pools up above the structure, up above like the second and third floor, it greatly minimizes, if not gets completely rid of the little pests.

In California, it’s also a very nice thing to have it up on the roof because the views and some of the wind and some of the, ⁓ you know, not so savory air layer is lower. So you can basically just enjoy your living area upstairs. And we do projects everywhere. mean, we’re in California right now. We’re in Tennessee.

⁓ Sarah saw, we’ve got three projects going. We’re doing okay. We just need to get the word out there more.

Michelle Kesil (17:56)
Yeah, amazing. what kind of networking efforts and relationships are you hoping to build in order to support your business?

Wayne Furlong (18:08)
Well, we’re going

to our architects and realtors and telling them what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. ⁓ And, you know, getting the word out there. When we go to architects, you know, we’ve heard of this system. And then when they look at it, they say, why doesn’t everybody do this? Yeah. So what we’re doing is Wayne and I in particular are helping Ken head up.

the real estate division of LPT or I’m sorry, Rock Solid Structures. ⁓ And then we’re going out and we’re actually networking with our broker connections ⁓ and ⁓ our top producing colleagues in these disaster ridden areas where they have a lot of either vacant lot listings or they have clients that come in and say,

I need a new home. I’ve got to go get a different home. I don’t even know what to do with my destroyed home on the beach. And we’re coming in with a solution for them saying, well, here’s your solution. You your insurance company is paying you out, like Wayne said, know, 300 to 600,000 or whatever they’re going to pay you for that. We just basically tell them, hey, we can probably build you a house.

Pending permits, of course, within about a 10-month conservative timeframe. From permitting, yeah. From permitting. And in the meantime, we help them find maybe a long-term or mid-term rental property. use resources like our multiple listing service. We also help them property manage.

⁓ If they’ve got their own condominiums or things like that, either they move into them or we help rent those out for people that have been displaced from a storm or a fire or something of that nature. Now we just try to find another niche and this is a good niche for us right now.

It’s just getting the word out there.

Michelle Kesil (20:24)
Yeah, absolutely.

And how are you pairing this with investors? Like how is that relationship working?

Wayne Furlong (20:33)
We’ll just show them. mean, if you tell anybody, hey, how much is your insurance? It’s 14,000 a year. Well, we can get it down to about 1400. You’ve got an instant audience. They’ll listen to you. If you tell them it’s 280 mile an hour wind resistant, which is over a cat five, if it’s over a cat five, there’s nothing left anyway. There’s no concrete and nothing stands at cat five.

But if there’s a fire going to roll through, this is the answer. It’s fireproof. There’s nothing combustible in the whole damn house. And so, you you asked specifically for investors. We work with a lot of investors that are coming in and making offers right now. We just had a phone conversation with somebody about a couple of our fearless leaders homes, his homes that he renovated and made. ⁓

you know, with the rock solid structures, walls and floors and whatnot. And ⁓ we’re telling investors that, hey, if you’re doing renovations on your own homes in these areas, and you’re going to not fix and flip, but you’re going to fix and hold, because a lot of them right now with the interest rate are fixing and holding, you are better suited to do it this way, because these are these are

What’s the word? Penetrable? I mean, they’re like tanks, right? So when you have short-term rentals, you have people coming through those houses, destroying those houses, because they don’t treat those homes the way they would treat their own home. We all know that. We don’t have stuff like carpet. We have ⁓ concrete floors that are like epoxy, and it looks like marble. looks gorgeous.

I mean, if somebody brings little kids to the home and they take a pencil or you can take a quarter and they start drawing on these walls, all you have to do is take a moist rag and wipe it down with water. You don’t need any cleaning agents or anything. It literally wipes right off. So it’s almost like magic eraser. You know what I mean?

Michelle Kesil (22:51)
Yeah, absolutely. That’s amazing. Sounds like you guys have created something super valuable and unique. So thank you for that. And yeah, before we wrap up here, if someone wants to reach out, connect, collaborate, learn more from you, where is the best place for them to find you?

Wayne Furlong (23:08)
⁓ they can actually text me or call me, ⁓ directly. I can be reached at nine five one six nine one six six four seven four. They can call the direct line for rock solid structures that will get me to that’s two three nine nine seven seven one seven seven seven. And if they want to reach Wayne, they can reach Wayne at nine four one nine nine nine zero seven seven two.

⁓ Email is [email protected] When I left California, it was exiting Southern California to get out of there. So we’re ready. If anybody’s interested learning how to do it, if they’re a contractor and they want to know the system, give us a call. We’ll give you demonstration. Bring your 45 gun and see if it’ll go through it.

Michelle Kesil (23:57)
Perfect.

Okay, thank you.

I appreciate your time and your story. So thank you for being here. Yeah. And for those of you that are tuning in, if you got value from this episode, make sure you’ve subscribed. We have more conversations coming soon with operators just like Laura and Wayne who are building real businesses. And we’ll see you all on the next episode.

Wayne Furlong (24:05)
Thank you.

Thank you.