Unlocking Mold Mysteries: 5 Crucial Insights Every Homebuyer Needs

Dylan Silver (00:00.674)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Dylan Silver, and today on the show I have owner of a damage restoration company out in New York and also Connecticut, Alejandro Restrepo. Alejandro, welcome to the show.

Alejandro Restrepo (00:17.794)
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Dylan Silver (00:19.732)
It’s a pleasure to have you. I always like to start off at the top of these shows by asking folks how they got involved in the real estate space.

Alejandro Restrepo (00:28.364)
So for us specifically, like you said, we own a full-service property restoration company. We were involved through real estate just because during real estate transactions, lot of, oftentimes mold is found or hidden damages are found, usually within the listing process. And so we started to see that there was opportunity to assist people in these situations. And so we really kind of dove in with our local border realtors.

And that’s really how we kind of got involved in assisting this niche space.

Dylan Silver (01:02.968)
I’ve worked with lots of flippers, and I’m a wholesaler myself. I’m an agent in Dallas, newly licensed, but I’m really passionate about the investing side of things. And investors almost have this phrase, you know, once you take down the wall, now you’ve got other problems, right? So a lot of times people, and we talked about it before, up and on here, you might do some patchwork, but that’s not gonna remediate the issue. And so that is really a difference between spraying an area with bleach and doing full mold remediation.

Alejandro Restrepo (01:33.176)
Correct. And so what happens is people are often short-sighted, right? And the reason they’re short-sighted is because, as we were chatting a little bit about, is you end up getting two parties. You get a party that wants a better deal and you want a party that wants to maximize profit. So you get kind of stuck in the middle. And so what people do is they’ll basically put lipstick on the property because it’s the lowest option or lowest alternative. But ultimately the home is not properly being remediated. The spraying bleach

will usually make, irk and make mold restores or remediators kind of like squirm because that’s not a mold remediation by any standard. All you’re doing is just literally whitening the mold that’s on the surface and it’s gonna come back and it’s gonna come back with a vengeance and it’ll cause issues down the line for the new owners.

Dylan Silver (02:27.722)
Now, I think mold’s probably in a lot of homes, but mold causes a lot of issues for people, issues that people don’t even think about. so, you know, spraying it with bleach, I guess, of course, can’t, I imagine companies can’t be spraying it with bleach because that wouldn’t be considered a mediation. But in some of these states, like for instance, I’m in Texas. So in Texas,

And a homeowner themselves, I don’t know how this works exactly, but a homeowner themselves, if they go to a third party, then they need like a remediation certificate that the work was completed. Or, in Texas at least, they can say that they did it themselves, in which case it’s kind of like up to their word whether they did it or not.

Alejandro Restrepo (03:09.72)
So what’s interesting about that, about mold itself is it’s there’s a lot of, and real estate, really it’s state specific, right? So as far as the market where we operate in, when you go to list a house, they need to do the disclosure document. And in the disclosure document, what you find is it literally says, yeah, was mold found? Yes. And was some remediation done? So you’re using the terminology, some. So it’s okay. What is some define some remediation? And so

Dylan Silver (03:36.353)
Yeah.

Alejandro Restrepo (03:39.658)
Is spraying bleach, does that kind of satisfy that legal requirement? So I think that’s kind of where it comes in that people get away with this and people leave it up to the home inspector. That’s why I know in your guys’ industry, it’s a lot about like, make sure you get a very good home inspection. But also in the realtor community, you learn of these, you learn of home inspectors that are like, they’ll refer to them as deal killers.

because they’re too thorough. And then you’ll talk about the other one that’s like the rubber stamp guy. So just making sure you’re finding the proper professional for what you’re looking for in your house, because ultimately they’re the ones that are going to point out the issues with the house. And then don’t try and cut corners. So I guess that’s kind of the direction it goes. And it really does come down to what the state requirements are and how people are either being honest with their fulfillment of their roles

prior to turning a property over.

Dylan Silver (04:41.176)
You know, I have a personal connection to, I guess a funny thing to say, I have a personal connection to mold because I was renting a room and a ranch home that I think had some mold in it, had some mold in it. And then I went and just slept in an ADU, an alternative dwelling unit, and it was kind of, you know, not fully even converted, right? It was basically a glorified shed.

And what was funny was I like, slept a lot better last night, what’s up with that? And then talking with some of other people, they were like, yeah, there might be mold, da-da-da. And I was thinking, man, that really affected me, you know, sleeping there. I wonder, I don’t know, how many other people this affects. I kind of went down a rabbit hole, and it turns out there’s all these issues, the issues that people don’t even…

aware that they might be being affected by sleep issues, know, of course anything related to your respiratory system, but also things like attention, focus, like, you know, mental clarity that can be affected by mold.

Alejandro Restrepo (05:44.748)
Yeah, so from, and we always, again, because we’re in such a litigious state, just in general, like everybody’s always looking to put liability and fall on people. So we’re very kind of cautious when we talk about the medical aspect of it. But all you need to do is do like a search online about like the negative health consequences. And there are actually mold panels that medical professionals could run on patients because usually they don’t consider mold as like this cause of

potential like let somebody goes in and the the symptoms are very very broad it’s you know respiratory scratchy throat headache there’s like a thousand things that could cause that it doesn’t have to be mold so oftentimes a lot of these medical professionals don’t think to mold at all as a source cause of the issue

Dylan Silver (06:22.785)
Yeah.

Alejandro Restrepo (06:39.544)
But so there are medical tests. There’s like a blood panel that could be run to see if people respond to it. So what we usually tell people is if you feel like there’s some kind of medical concern and you found that there is mold, like you’ve tested the air or you’ve sampled the surfaces for mold and you find it, and then you could kind of do a little bit of your own investigation. Like when was the last time that, when did this start? Did I just move into a new house? And then I would say, okay.

If all that’s kind of, you know, in check, then you could say, okay, maybe I need to go get a blood test. But yes, the consequences are bad. There’s a lot of very toxic types of mold. And then people always ask us the question, like, what type of mold do we have? Is it the good kind? Is it black mold? Which actually stemmed, the mold industry stemmed from a case in Texas years ago, and the entire family died.

And they had health consequences and I can’t remember the name specifically, but it’s really what What was the birthplace of the mold remediation industry? It was due to a house in Texas that a family bought and it was full of mold within the wall cavities and nobody knew and this family lived there forever And like I said, they all passed away within years. So I’m not here trying to scare do a scare tactic or anything like that Proper remediation is necessary. You need to make sure you’re hiring honest professionals

that are going to really help you out. And if you do feel you have a medical concern due to being exposed to long-term mold or something like that, absolutely reach out to a medical professional. A lot of holistic doctors actually, they’ll go to mold quicker than some general practitioners, from what we know.

Dylan Silver (08:21.816)
Hmm.

Dylan Silver (08:32.312)
Yeah, because like lot of these things, there’s, you know, if I said I have headaches and, you know, I’m not sleeping well, mean, mold is not the first thing that comes to mind, I think, for most people. But, I mean, you just have to think, you know, what are the homes made out of? They’re made out of wood, right? And then what happens to wood over time, exposure, so on and so forth. It almost seems like, and correct me if I’m wrong here, it almost seems like it’d be…

hard not to have mold in a home if it’s been standing for, you know, 80 years.

Alejandro Restrepo (09:04.706)
Yeah, and I can’t remember what the stat is, but there is a stat, and so I’m not going to quote it because I don’t know exactly the number, but a very high percentage of homes in the United States of America all have mold. It’s a very high number. I want to say it’s somewhere between 50 and 70 is what I’ve read, I think. If you do the search online, you’ll be able to find it. so problem is you have aging infrastructure. You’ll have a slow leak that’s hidden from a roof.

Dylan Silver (09:16.876)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (09:28.173)
Yep.

Alejandro Restrepo (09:32.972)
that wasn’t properly flashed or a window that’s not properly flashed. so water has been getting in through this little corner. And it just happens that it’s been there. And so it’s outside of the house envelope. so, you know, it’s not inside, but so does that house? Yes, that house has mold, right? And I’m sure it’s for like your property investor group, like the investors themselves, when they remove the siding on the exterior of a home,

How many, it’s so common to see the black marks around the exterior sheathing around windows. It’s like, I wanna say it’s almost what, 95 % of all.

Dylan Silver (10:09.805)
Yeah.

Alejandro Restrepo (10:16.774)
So if you want to use that, you know, and again, it’s on the exterior of the home, so it’s really not affecting the inside and the air quality. But now, mind you, if the house is not properly sealed, you could potentially have issues inside the house.

Dylan Silver (10:31.224)
I mean, I’ve only done a handful of these myself where I’ve participated in the demos or the rehabs with these fix and flip properties. I mean, once you start opening walls, it’s it’s hard for me to believe that there’s lots of homes standing to your point that are older. You know, we’re talking certainly like 70s and earlier that don’t have mold in them because they’re just like what they’re made out of. mean,

It’s hard for me to believe. I think when people are looking at buying new homes, mean, to your point, you really said some remediation. Has some remediation been done? Well, what is some? You know, the home might look really pretty. You might be in love with the kitchen. You might be in love with the master bathroom. But you just don’t want to have to deal with these problems down the line. And…

I certainly, if I’m an investor, I certainly don’t want to have any type of liability attached to a patch job that I sold someone this home.

Alejandro Restrepo (11:37.07)
Yeah, and then that runs into the whole part where you know, I’m not an attorney I know you’re not an attorney but like you run into this issue where it’s like people are doing just enough to Skate by the legal the legal requirements so they don’t get in trouble The the damage will be found past the statute of limitations whatever it might be and so people like hey, not my problem You know, so it does go back to honesty and that’s a whole other topic of conversation

Dylan Silver (11:50.039)
self-help.

Alejandro Restrepo (12:06.626)
People are just trying to make a buck sometimes and they don’t think long term and they don’t think about how they could be affecting this family that’s going into this house now. Because you know, because people just want the almighty dollar. And don’t get me wrong, we run a very successful for-profit business, but we don’t put our honesty like I want to be able to sleep at night, you know, and I want to be known as a reputable contractor. So I’m not doing that.

Dylan Silver (12:18.87)
Yeah.

Alejandro Restrepo (12:36.706)
But there’s people that don’t operate that way because they get blinded by the money.

Dylan Silver (12:36.951)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (12:41.464)
Alejandro, I want to talk about New York versus Connecticut. You’re involved in, I’m from New Jersey originally, so I’m Dallas by way of New Jersey, so I grew up 27 miles outside of Manhattan in a town called Caldwell. New York and Connecticut, there’s some differences there. Before hopping on here, you mentioned New York, you actually need, I believe it’s a license or a certificate, different process than Connecticut.

Alejandro Restrepo (13:05.484)
Yeah, so there’s five states in the US that have mold licensing requirements. I know Florida is one of them, New York’s another, and I honestly, can’t remember offhand the others. so when, and we are, our company operates between Fairfield County and Westchester County. So we’re like literally divided, right? And both the requirements couldn’t be more different. Literally in Connecticut, the requirements are non-existent. There’s guidelines, but they’re not enforced.

In the state of New York, if you’re going to be involved in the mold remediation industry, you need to follow very specific guidelines and you need to be licensed and your people need to be licensed. So, you know, to run a quick comparison, we go out to do a project in Connecticut and somebody finds mold. Now we do our work to the guidelines, like we follow IICRC guidelines, which is our governing body, anywhere we do work, right?

So our standard of operating is exactly the same. doesn’t matter if New York, Connecticut, we do the same. But if we’re to do a job in Connecticut, we do not need to get the property tested and have a protocol, a remediation protocol written by a certified hygienist. Where in the state of New York, you find mold on a job, you need to stop immediately. You need to call in a hygienist. He prepares a report and then you do the remediation based off of his

Dylan Silver (14:14.368)
Mm.

Alejandro Restrepo (14:30.734)
his report or his guideline and then they come in and clear the work after you’re done to make sure that it was a successful mold remediation. Connecticut doesn’t require that.

Dylan Silver (14:42.39)
So there’s got to be then. mean, this is just my feedback as an outsider looking in is like, well, if they’re not having the hygienist come in, then there’s got to be a lot of instances where people can say they’re doing mold remediation and there’s still evidence of mold in Connecticut.

Alejandro Restrepo (15:01.966)
Yes, there could be, there could very well be. And again, what you’re looking for if you’re buying a house to live in is you want to make sure that you’re buying a clean environment that’s good for you to live in and with your family or what have you. And then if you look on the opposite end, you’re selling a house as let’s say a real estate investor and you’re blinded by the almighty dollar.

And you’re just like, I don’t care. I just want to maximize my profit. So if this guy’s going to come in and say and alleviate my some remediation, you know, now just sell the house. I don’t care. you know, we like I said, us personally, we hold ourselves to the standard. It doesn’t really matter. We do the work the way it’s supposed to be done wherever we are.

Dylan Silver (15:25.345)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (15:47.096)
you’re at.

Now, inspections in Connecticut, do you know if inspections are doing, inspectors in Connecticut are going through the hygienist panel, or is it like, if there’s no obvious sightings of mold, you know, it passes.

Alejandro Restrepo (16:03.212)
We found, as I’m sure like in your area as well, suspected mold-like substances, the home inspectors put on their reports, because they’re not hygienists. But a lot of home inspection companies are starting to run air samples. So they’ll charge for a mold test and they’ll identify levels of mold within the environment.

However, they can’t interpret the result. All they could do is say, hey, there is X amount of Stoicobotrys per cubic meter. And it’s elevated in comparison to the control test, which the control test would be the exterior of the home. So then you’re saying, okay, the exterior is going to say there’s 10 Stoicobotrys. And then interior says it’s 1500 Stoicobotrys. So you have a problem. It’s elevated. But the…

The home inspector, since they’re not a hygienist, they can’t put together a protocol and say, hey, in order to remediate this mold, you need to do A, B, C, D, E, F. All they do is they present this. And then we get called in because the real estate community knows us and we help them. And then they bring us in and they say, OK, here’s the test. And then we’ll say, OK, we could bring in a hygienist, depending on the concern, or we could take the test. based on those results, we’ll say we’re going to do the remediation process.

following the IICRC guidelines and it’ll be fine. Now the big difference if we’re going back to the state thing, in New York we would not be able to do that. In New York we would then need to bring in a hygienist prior to doing anything. In Connecticut we could do the

Dylan Silver (17:45.258)
It might be a thing even, you if people are particularly concerned about this, they might, if you’re a buyer, you might do an air quality test. You might order it yourself, even if it’s like unnecessary. You might be like, I don’t know if this has been tested for this. want to see the air quality test.

Alejandro Restrepo (17:59.368)
We see, trust me, see the wide array. Some homeowners do it themselves and sometimes that creates more issues than not because they don’t know how to properly take the test, they don’t know how to read it, so they create concern for themselves because they’re trying to be on a budget, I think they sell it at Home Depot for like 100 bucks, 200 bucks. You could do your own sampling, maybe even cheaper. We always bring in a professional just because

It’s something that delicate and we don’t ever want to be faced with impropriety saying, well, you did the test yourself. Of course, it’s going to be positive because you want to do the mold remediation. So we steer clear from that and having a third party come in to do it, it’s unbiased.

Dylan Silver (18:46.156)
Alejandro, we are coming up on time here. Where can folks go to maybe reach out to you or learn more about the business if they wanted to reach out to you New York or Connecticut?

Alejandro Restrepo (18:56.756)
Yeah, so Puro Clean, we’re part of a national franchise, so we’re kind of all over the place. If you guys want a little more info specifically to our area, if you go to just go to puroclean.com and you do location finder, you could put Stanford or Wilton, Connecticut, and we pop right up. I know you guys are national podcasts, so if people just go to the website and they need help in their specific area, they could find that that way.

Dylan Silver (19:24.632)
Alejandro, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

Alejandro Restrepo (19:28.908)
Yeah, thanks for your time and thanks for having me, man.