The Ultimate Guide to Thermal Efficiency in Affordable Housing Solutions

John Harcar (00:01.536)
Hey guys, welcome back to the show. I’m your host John Harcar and I’m here today with Brian Iverson. And what we’re going to talk about today is building more sustainably. Remember guys, at Investor Fuel, we help investors, service providers, I really all real estate entrepreneurs, 2 to 5X their business by being able to have the tools to grow the business they want to grow and live that life that they want to live. Brian, welcome to our show.

Brian Iverson (00:27.138)
Hey, welcome John. I’m pleased to be here and I’m smiling. have a giddy grin on my face and I’m excited.

John Harcar (00:36.352)
excited to talk about our topic of building more sustainably. mean, I think that’s you know, what our World needs as a whole but before we get into all that tell our audience a little bit about you Your background and kind of what got you here

Brian Iverson (00:50.254)
Okay, well, I’ll tell you the fun version. I think I’m the first person to get fired as a realtor. Okay, yep, I did, I did. I ran an ad, I ran an ad that said, this is Hobbs and Herder. I ran an ad that said I was gonna guarantee my commissions. wait a minute. I got 14 listings. Okay, I already had 90 to begin with. Okay, my best year I closed 268 transactions with one assistant. I made the money.

John Harcar (00:53.362)
you

John Harcar (01:01.28)
Okay.

John Harcar (01:12.48)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (01:16.426)
Wow.

Brian Iverson (01:19.35)
She kept the money and that was it. If the deal was falling apart, don’t call me because it’s just commissionectomy. Didn’t want anything to do with it. Yep. it’s a but I forgot I ran the ad twice and the next week I had 26 people reached out and I was now going to have more listings than the next four producers combined. So they fired me.

John Harcar (01:27.654)
You

Wow.

John Harcar (01:42.974)
Wow, all because you put on there, guarantee commissions or my commission is guaranteed. Okay.

Brian Iverson (01:47.19)
I did. Yes. Yeah. It was a Hobbs and Herder advertising marketing thing. Guarantee your commissions. It didn’t guarantee the selling side commission. Just as a listing agent, you guaranteed them. So, So the next year I closed 268 transactions. I went to work for another company, top listing agent in the Midwest. So I have a fun history and background.

I’ve designed 750 places that have been built and I’m a certified energy auditor. So I have a crazy skill set. I’m being very fortunate.

John Harcar (02:24.255)
have you always been in real estate or is this something that know a career that came on you know after you already started doing something else I mean

Brian Iverson (02:33.102)
I’m 60, I’ll be 65 this year. So started out in 1974. Went to work for the neighbor doing sheetrock. So I hauled sheetrock, hauled block, hauled brick, hauled two by fours, plywood, you name it. Don’t stop, keep moving, bend over, don’t turn around, don’t talk. Yep.

John Harcar (02:46.815)
You’ve done it all.

So you built it all and then you got into to being an agent, right? Yeah, what what were some of the challenges? I think when he got into being an agent, you know from doing the obviously you look sound like you’re doing some construction type of work.

Brian Iverson (02:58.146)
Yeah, I did.

Brian Iverson (03:06.786)
Yep, I’m a journeyman carpenter. And so when I got out of high school, went to school for two years, VOTEK school for architecture and civil engineering. And and so unfortunately, I had some bad people on the job. They were shooting at each other with with 16 penny nail guns. And the one guy got a nail right above the eyeball, right into the bone. And I fired them all and said, I’m done.

And I think 30 days later on the back of a Cheerios box, and probably 25 bucks, I got a real estate license. So, yeah.

John Harcar (03:42.815)
There you go. Cheerios box at $25. You know that was a long time ago.

Brian Iverson (03:49.454)
That might have been a little bit made up.

John Harcar (03:52.256)
Yeah, I know. Okay, so talk to me. You gave me an interesting stat. You were in Asia, then you went to work with a bank, right? And you said you helped their foreclosures and you closed 3,000 foreclosures?

Brian Iverson (04:00.333)
I did.

Brian Iverson (04:06.158)
Yep. in ninth, well, March 14th of 2006 is when the media said that gas was going to four dollars a gallon. And on that day, well, up to that day, I’d sold 150 lots a year. And after that day, I sold eight and they were all for 50 cents on the dollar. That’s 2006. So real estate started going down then, not in 2008. 2008, we were already we are already swimming at the bottom. And so you you rolled the cycle down.

John Harcar (04:33.055)
Yeah.

Brian Iverson (04:35.694)
And everybody, they threw all the TART money and everything else at the country, but it was on the way down. Well, you can’t throw money on the way down. You got to wait till it hits the bottom and then throw the money at the bottom and ride that sucker back up. So you got to be a little bit patient. And I thought you said we only had 25 minutes. OK, so the in 2006, I’m not I’m not going to say I was retired, but I went to the gas and oil industry and

figured out how to turn fly ash into ceramic beads for fracking whole nother subject but the bank local bank they were in trouble and They ended up foreclosing on 3,000 properties But they had to hire in they had to hire somebody with the broker’s license in order to manage all the real estate So I managed that section for the bank, but in 26 months we could only sell 1,000 properties and I mean they were

John Harcar (05:09.151)
you

Brian Iverson (05:31.182)
25, 30, 40 cents on the dollar just unloading them for whatever. But the valuation of the bank was going down so fast, real estate was going down so fast. Didn’t make a difference with all the ancillary other products that they had, insurance, mortgages, and they were all busy, but the valuation went down too fast and they tipped over. So.

John Harcar (05:35.294)
Yeah.

John Harcar (05:53.821)
Okay, so why the pivot to building sustainably?

Brian Iverson (05:57.822)
I’ve always been a conservation guy, always been an ecology guy. I sat in North Dakota and thought of my first product and I don’t know, where are you located at John?

John Harcar (06:10.995)
Personally, I’m in Boise, Idaho.

Brian Iverson (06:13.25)
Ha, you’re in Idaho. I was in the gas and oil industry in Dillon, Montana. Okay, okay, so you’re in cold country, right? So like a Yeti cooler, you put ice into Yeti cooler and sooner or later the ice will all become water. Okay, it doesn’t make any difference. Mother Nature is gonna win. But I wanted to minimize the ability of Mother Nature to affect your pocketbook. So I created and invented, well thermostuds.com is the website.

John Harcar (06:14.622)
Yes.

John Harcar (06:18.064)
okay.

Yes.

Brian Iverson (06:42.488)
thermal studs and I created studs originally that minimize the ability of Mother Nature to come through the wall, not including in the cold, but also in the heat. So in the heat, we air conditioned using electricity and the cost of that BTU is three times as much as the value of a natural gas. So the return on investment is three times as fast. So I kept on inventing.

John Harcar (06:51.071)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Brian Iverson (07:08.736)
I literally made a stud hold 8600 pounds. yeah, you can build a five story building and still be 24 inches on center on the bottom. Yeah.

John Harcar (07:20.943)
Wow. Did you have all this prior knowledge to do all this or this stuff that you just learned over time or?

Brian Iverson (07:24.78)
No, just came to me. The first stud came to me. Then there’s five studs in total. There’s a metal stud that I made a serpentine belt out of that. It slows down the heat on a commercial building. Now I have appointments in the next couple of days. So if your crowd base is mostly investors, they’re looking for, if you can reduce the heating and cooling bill over the lifetime of the building.

You just made the building worth more money. So I can, I can prove in it that we have the most energy efficient buildings in the planet. We have the most energy efficient houses on the planet, all built on our studs. In fact, there’s a passive house in Logan, Utah, 14,000 square feet. And they cut their air changes per hour. You know, the amount of air that comes through your walls and your curtains and drapes are moving kind of like in the old days.

they hit .0457 their very first try 14,000 square feet so we just uh… uh… yeah so ask away

John Harcar (08:34.119)
What made you decide to do this? Like what popped into your head that said like, I need to do this?

Brian Iverson (08:36.538)
I literally came to me and I tried to I fried out on real estate a few times. So if you got real estate people here, right, we fry out. You just you you can sell real estate at 3 a.m. You just yeah, you just you just keep going and you become a machine. And I became a machine. So I didn’t want to go back into real estate. So I started trying to figure out how to reinvent myself.

John Harcar (08:55.657)
Yep.

Brian Iverson (09:06.154)
in doing something and started out, went to the gas and oil industry, tried to figure out how to build roads. I mean, I built roads, 24 miles of them, but I just wanted to go do something else. And all of a sudden, one day this R19 T-Stud comes to me and we can’t make enough of them. The guy who is manufacturing, he’s 10 weeks out all the time. So I kept on inventing more and more solutions to stop Mother Nature from coming through the floor, the walls and the roof.

And now we have all the assemblies and we’re licensing that technology out to anybody and everybody. Yep.

John Harcar (09:39.647)
That’s awesome. So tell us about your company, right? Tell us about this product that you invented and stuff. Tell us how it helps, why people should use it, et cetera.

Brian Iverson (09:51.436)
Okay, so let’s just talk walls. The exterior of a house, the house that you’re in right now, I guarantee you that there’s probably 18 % of your exterior wall is a solid connection, a bridge, from your pocket book to Mother Nature on the outside, all through those studs. And so in a thermal imaging camera, all of those studs, it’s colder out today, those studs are not

blue, they’re red, they show up red. And so that’s conduction. Then you get convection, it goes into your insulation, and then the cavity starts to radiate. So you have convection, conduction, and radiation happening all the time. And unless you’re going to make net zero energy ready, passive certified, lead certified, unless you’re going to do all that, you have to unhook all of what’s going on on the outside. So our first products had 98 % complete

disconnect from the outside to the inside and now we’re 100 % and so we have the least expensive solution to solve for affordable housing. We have the two most energy efficient habitat for humanity houses in Mason City, Iowa. They’re cut through utility bills in half. We have houses and buildings 75 % reduction of BTUs. I have a house on the south shore of Lake Superior

And that one is 2500 square feet. They heat the garage and their utility bill is $45 a month. That’s it for everything. Yeah. So I’m a sustainability guy, affordable housing. You can literally set the walls on a habitat house and walls on the roof, probably in four hours and be gone. And then that’s you’re ready to set the windows the next day.

John Harcar (11:27.401)
Mmm. That’s crazy.

Brian Iverson (11:45.55)
put on a metal roof or whatever you’re going to do the next day. It’s all dried in anyway and you can’t tell me that you can’t finish that house in 28 days after that. yes.

John Harcar (11:55.55)
Wow.

So is this a product that you’re now bringing to market or is this a product that’s been on market?

Brian Iverson (12:02.254)
No. As you know, and if you have builders that are listening to this, you suckers are allergic to change. Okay, you’re worse than anybody. Okay, you’re allergic to change. All right, so we had to fix that. Okay, I’m being a smart alley. But we had to fix that, right? We had to keep going and using the products that you use every single day. We had to do that. And so I kept on making it simpler, but it just didn’t come.

You just don’t wake up one day and you’re going to be you’re going to be a an inventor. You don’t nobody. Nobody does that. You just have to think of stuff along the way. And I have 200 shareholders that believe in me. And it finally got to the point where you’re actually my first person to talk to forever. I actually had to write it all out. I had to write it out in a book called Carbonless, and it’s on Amazon now. I had to write it all down so I could because I can’t talk enough. So you’re actually my first podcast, but literally

We made the houses and buildings more energy efficient that it changed the HVAC system in whole.

John Harcar (13:05.831)
Wow. Okay. So now where is your business at? What does your business look like? What’s the trajectory? Where are you guys going? How is this going to be a new trend?

Brian Iverson (13:18.126)
Absolutely. You can’t stop energy codes from coming and you have to have a solution and we’re the only deliverable that’s out there. So for your people, if they’ve heard of a SIP panel, structural insulated panel, OSB on both sides and foam stuck in the middle. And that’s been the kind of the new kid on the block for 20 something years. And we just tipped them over. I was in Canada a month and a half ago with a Hutterite colony straight north of you, actually.

in Saskatchewan and they want to do a gymnasium 26 feet tall and so I told them exactly how to do it they can stand up walls like precast concrete panels and it’ll hold 1,500 pounds or something a foot and you can I talked to one company today and they want to know if they can set up tents on a job and actually build all these panels on a job without a factory and I said absolutely so

We’re licensing off the technology. So as an inventor, you have a choice. Either you can go ahead and manufacture, but you got to remember that you own all the IP. So we have 24. We have 20 issued patents and four pending and thousands and thousands of houses and buildings out there to prove up that there’s valuation and what we did. And we made the wall more. We made the wall effective and now we make the roof and the floor effective. So.

You know, as, as time goes on, unfortunately for us, we see more and more people living in apartments and condos, townhouses, and less and less being able to afford an affordable house. So I did meet out of city the other day. Nebraska evidently has five cities that’ll pay you to move there, but they have no, they have no commerce, right? So you move there, there’s no jobs to be had. So we can literally for, you can set up shop for about $150,000 and start making.

John Harcar (14:52.829)
bright.

John Harcar (15:02.473)
Hmm.

Right.

Brian Iverson (15:11.746)
panels and roof panels and floor panels and flat pack and ship them all over the country. So I created an opportunity for everybody who was listening. But the end result is these are 50 to 75 percent more energy efficient than what energy code calls for today.

John Harcar (15:28.593)
Now when you say you make an opportunity for everybody after do you mean like an opportunity to go and start a business selling these? Okay.

Brian Iverson (15:33.4)
Yep. yeah. Yep. I’ve sold, well I sold six licenses in two and a half weeks and these people are already up and running. It’s that fast. It’s $50,000 for a license and, and actually there’s 50 different wall panel, floor panel, roof panel to test out. All you got to do is test out one, prove that you know how to make them.

John Harcar (15:45.695)
What kind of cost is involved to get it up and running?

Brian Iverson (16:00.268)
and we put all the rest of the testing into a library and you’re qualified to be able to make them all. We just pick up a little royalty piece, 30 cents a square foot for a royalty, and we manage the system. I’m the mouthpiece. Being a certified energy auditor, I just run the math. And the math is the math.

John Harcar (16:14.943)
Okay.

John Harcar (16:21.747)
Got it.

cost and time efficiency for a builder with this product versus traditional products.

Brian Iverson (16:31.477)
We might maybe shouldn’t have gone down that path. A lumber yard typically makes 35-40 % on a house. if I’m going to say that because you buy everything wholesale, like if you bought a license, John, we teach you how to buy all the lumber, same prices as lumber yards. We teach you how to buy all the foam cheaper than anybody. We teach you how to buy everything wholesale.

John Harcar (16:50.815)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Iverson (17:00.462)
And so your cost of goods for all seven control layers, so whoever understands that on this, from the studs to 100 % thermally broken structure, we filled part of the cavity with foam, 1,000 pounds per lineal foot. So you get the sheathing, a water-resistant barrier, you get all that. Your cost of goods is $6.93. So if you make $4 a square foot profit, can…

do a house a day about $7,500 a day gross profit margin. Yep, flat pack and chip.

John Harcar (17:32.697)
Wow. What about the time? Is there any time benefits?

Brian Iverson (17:39.502)
I did sell a license to a gentleman. Well, I can already tell you, Gary Hess is a in upstate New York. He is a Superior Walls franchise. So Superior Walls has a thermally broken wall assembly for a foundation and they bring the crane out there and they set that whole wall assembly for your foundation in about three hours. Well, he bought a franchise from us. Now he’s going to be able to he’s already there with the crane. He can set the floor, the wall and the roof, and he’s gone in eight, nine hours.

John Harcar (18:09.279)
as

Brian Iverson (18:10.87)
Yeah, so we created a system, but it took a long time, but it was just it was sitting in front of you, John. You just didn’t know how to put A, B, C, D and F. And we have millions of dollars invested into this and it didn’t all come. I just kept on trying to figure out how to make it inexpensive. And I just figured it out. It just all of a sudden, it’s like dumb. That was right in front of me. So.

John Harcar (18:18.559)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (18:36.415)
Why do you think people aren’t using more of this type of material or processes or whatever?

Brian Iverson (18:42.318)
We’ve never been commercially available. People would call in and the orders would just keep on coming and you’d swipe their credit card and off you go. So we have to find more people to manufacture everything and we get about a thousand stud orders a day and they can’t make a thousand in a week. so for your listeners, you want to, there’s no guarantees in life.

But if you want the best thing that’s out there, we’re not some, we are not a mousetrap. We’re reality. I can’t stand mousetraps. Your shade’s behind you. They save energy, right? They stop the wind from blowing in the whole nine yards. That’s a mousetrap. Yep, it’s total stales. But when I was in real estate, I did not,

John Harcar (19:29.63)
Yep.

Brian Iverson (19:35.19)
I represented four builders at the same time and every builder had to rep had to had to build exactly the same way. Because I didn’t I didn’t have I didn’t use sales. I just delivered the facts. And so you walked in the door. I designed you a house, priced the whole house out. You walked out three, four hours later with the signed contract and then they started building your house. They just went fast. But you had to have a deliverable. And until the deliverable came, which was no

John Harcar (19:47.231)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (19:57.854)
Yeah.

Brian Iverson (20:03.918)
December 15th I put it all together. All of it. Yep.

John Harcar (20:07.359)
Okay. So what are the challenges right now of growing your business or getting it more out there so people are more aware of this?

Brian Iverson (20:16.494)
Well, I wrote the book first and second year the first podcast that I’m gonna be on and I’d like to be on others I’d like to teach people this at 65 You don’t know how long you’re gonna have to walk the face of the earth and the next book is gonna be how to build a house in 28 days and As some of your listeners if you’re developer Builder there’s a lot of people who can’t afford a 20 % margin on

for builders anymore and I can’t believe how much a 2400 square foot house costs in the country but I just saw one the other day, 850,000 bucks. Now I’m old, okay, so I remember when that was really cheap but still it’s like I’m gonna build a dad pad next to my kids’ house down here in Chattanooga and 400 square feet on the main floor, 400 up, it’s designed.

John Harcar (20:55.135)
Okay.

John Harcar (21:00.229)
You

John Harcar (21:08.297)
deadbed.

Brian Iverson (21:12.142)
No wasted space, no nothing, but 100 % thermally broken through the wall, the floor, and the roof. I probably have air conditioning mostly, but I’d say $25, $30 a month. That’s it.

John Harcar (21:27.795)
What does something like that cost to build?

Brian Iverson (21:30.574)
I think I’m gonna have 70,000 maybe 65,000 in the driveway though all the walls the floor I’ll set it up on posts The sewer water and that let me this is all material I’ll build the whole thing myself, but we’re gonna set the whole thing two stories and all we will set it mmm Maybe five six hours Yeah, so Gary again Gary Hess is gonna come down

John Harcar (21:55.071)
That’s incredible.

Brian Iverson (21:57.834)
and some of the other people that do superior walls, they’re going to come and use this as a training. they’re right. we’re all going to get here and it’ll all be laid out. All the panels will be here. Just come in on one truck and we’ll just set them as fast as you can go. Yep.

John Harcar (22:02.335)
Well, nice.

John Harcar (22:13.331)
Nice. What other information or facts or things should our audience know about building sustainably, about our topic?

Brian Iverson (22:23.734)
There’s In Europe, there’s sometimes I keep going back to the wall Why do you solve for the wall? Is that because all the windows the doors and everything all the openings the electrical? Everything is in the wall and the wall holds up the roof and the wall takes the brunt of Mother Nature Okay, so you have to start with the wall you solve for the wall you solve for the rest actually the rest is a no-brainer and So but in Europe some of the wall assemblies have 28 layers

John Harcar (22:45.439)
you

Brian Iverson (22:51.212)
Like, holy crap, this is complete insanity. So we just have, you know, have studs like you normally build them. you put we tried to figure out a poor foam, but we couldn’t pour in a foam panel in 40 minutes. And so that wasn’t sustainable. We can spray one in in five minutes, switched over to an HFO blowing agent. And if somebody’s making notes, I’m talking pretty fast because I did swallow some coffee before we started and.

John Harcar (23:05.599)
you

John Harcar (23:09.204)
Yeah.

Brian Iverson (23:21.102)
Global warming potential is four, that’s it. But the operational carbon reduction for your investors on the call is over the top. If you can rent out or lease out or you own one of these structures, you can say you are fully sustainable. Your carbon footprint is probably in half. commercial and industrial buildings, we got a 15,000 square foot building, $100 a month for…

electrical and heating. That’s it.

John Harcar (23:53.801)
What’s the difference in environmental impact?

Brian Iverson (23:59.19)
Okay, environmental impact. There’s a year from Boise, Idaho. During the pandemic, we were actually a Canadian company when they shut the border. And I got to the border and they wanted me to quarantine. We had just hired 40 people. 39 were considered inessential. And so we had to shut down, lost $2.8 million.

And it took us nine months to steal our equipment out of the company, out of the country, nine months. So there’s there’s something called embodied carbon and there’s and there’s operational carbon reduction. Most of your people listening, probably I’m going to say, unfortunately, don’t care about embodied carbon. But if I’m in Chattanooga and you’re in Boise, the amount of effort it takes for you to ship your studs from you to me in Chattanooga, that’s called embodied carbon. That adds to the carbon footprint of my structure. OK.

John Harcar (24:53.791)
you

Brian Iverson (24:54.07)
except for during the pandemic, I needed studs tomorrow. Well, you could get in a truck and drive them to me. Well, that was worth more money than trying to figure out embodied carbon. I just needed them and I wanted them straight. Heaven forbid. What’s a straight stud? So operational carbon reduction is going to win all the time because your structure is energy efficient for the life of the structure, not for as long as you’re going to be there, but forever. before before I end, got to I got to

John Harcar (25:04.883)
down.

John Harcar (25:10.143)
you

Brian Iverson (25:23.648)
say one important fact and that is the most more energy efficient that you make a structure doesn’t make a difference if it’s a tiny house or if it’s an accessory dwelling unit which you’re not allowed to do in Boise and doesn’t make a difference if you’re a commercial building so your HVAC system runs and as long as it’s running you’re controlling moisture because we as people create moisture inside of a structure but when you don’t need heat and you don’t need air conditioning

John Harcar (25:25.257)
Please.

John Harcar (25:35.295)
you

Brian Iverson (25:53.634)
then your system doesn’t run, but we still create moisture. So you have to have an ancillary system to dehumidify that space.

have to have so don’t forget. There I remembered the most important part. Mold mold can’t stand mold. did million square feet of moldavate.

John Harcar (26:05.097)
Right. Okay.

Perfect. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. The mold is not a good thing. I’ve had a couple of different places that I’m fortunate to experience that. Well, if our audience wants to reach out and maybe pick your brain on this a little bit more, maybe they want to get your book. How do they get in touch with you? How do they get the book?

Brian Iverson (26:29.206)
Okay, the book is on Amazon. It’s the only place we could still put it. Brian Iverson, Carbonless. So you just go type in Brian Iverson and Carbonless. Even in Canada. It’s in Canada and we make a whopping six bucks and that’s because it’s full of colored photos. You can’t look at thermal imaging cameras because you want to have the proof in the pudding and if they’re all in gray and black and white you can’t tell, is that good or bad or I don’t know what that is.

Anyway, and then the website is called Thermal Studs, T-H-E-R-M-A-L studs dot com. And you can find me and I will talk to any one of your listeners. Sustainability is a big story. It’s a it’s a big part of every one of your followers. And I hope we get a million views.

John Harcar (27:04.895)
Perfect.

John Harcar (27:08.263)
Yeah, hey guys

John Harcar (27:17.971)
I do too and guys you heard the invitation. He is more than happy to talk to you and don’t hesitate to reach out, right? Brian, thank you for coming on and sharing a lot of that. I know we probably could have talked for another 30 minutes, but guys, I hope you enjoy the show. Hope you got some good information. You know, let’s start building more sustainable. I love the idea. Brian, thank you again and guys, hope you had a great show. See you on the next one.

Brian Iverson (27:26.467)
Yep.

Brian Iverson (27:40.664)
Yep. Yep, thanks, Theron. That’d be great.