Water Damage, Mold, and Insurance Claims: What Homeowners Need to Do Fast | Charlie Jungbert

Charlie Jungbert (00:00)
Not filing claim fast enough. So I’m not an adjuster. I’m not a insurance agent. This is what I’ve seen for experience is that most contracts like insurance is a contract is gone. You have a contract with the insurance company that they will pay out from damages that you’ve had to your home. If you don’t take care of your home within 14 days, typically they can deny your claim because you’re not taking care of it.

Dylan Silver (01:59)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today we’re joined by Charlie Jungbert, owner of Jungbert Company Plumbing and Restoration, one of the oldest plumbing families in Kentucky. Charlie specializes in ⁓ water, fire, sewage, and storm damage restoration, bringing a strong operations background across construction and emergency repair. With deep industry roots and a focus on execution, he leads a certified restoration business, helping property owners

recover quickly while operating a systems driven company in a high demand time sensitive industry. Charlie, thank you for taking the time today.

Charlie Jungbert (02:32)
Thank you for having me.

Dylan Silver (02:33)
What was it like being part of one of the oldest plumbing families in Kentucky and how did that shape your path?

Charlie Jungbert (02:41)
So my grandfather says there’s three of them. There’s the senior junior and the third, third, my dad, junior, we’ll be calm because they’re all named Edward. So junior, he was really involved in this, in the community. He did a lot, Chugging Every Festival. He did a lot with YMCAs, boards of different organizations. So everyone knows the name. I grew up in Florida. I didn’t grow up here. So when I moved up here during COVID,

and taking over everything restarting the company back up. I’ve everyone knew me. I did not know everybody because everyone knew the name. So it was really hard to get out underneath like their coat tail and out under their shadow to be my own person. ⁓ And I’d take advantage of that as well to meet people having anyone would but I’ve tried to make my own name with the community in that sense. It’s hard.

Dylan Silver (03:38)
Walk me,

walk me through a sewage or water damage job. What’s that first call like and where do things typically go from there?

Charlie Jungbert (03:46)
So

So typically when you, when we get a call, it’s someone’s worst day. Okay. No one wakes them in the morning and wants to say, Hey, I want to have a sewage loss and call restoration company. So did we want to your toilet back overflows and won’t stop leaking water. First call they call a plumber. So the plumber comes out and they fix it. And then the plumber refers or mostly restoration company. So we have lots of plumbers that we work with. They refer us to work.

And then when we get on that job site, we assess the situation, make sure that they actually need us. if it’s insurance claims are very expensive, like some people deductible is either 500, 1000, 2500, depending on the insurance company, be 1 % of value of our home. If you have a million dollar home and it’s 1 % deductible, then you can do the math. So we make sure that the work should be filed as a claim. If it is, we help them through the process.

like what that looks like timeline for emergency services. We go in there and do the work. Do what we have to do to keep your property from being, keep them from being damaged. And then we send that off to the insurance company with justification. then repairs is the, it’s normal way. It’s when you build your repair estimate and then you send it off for approval. A bar mitigation job typically, depending on how big it is, be a day or two day process.

plus a three day dry out with air removers and air scrubbers and dehumidifiers. And then on repairs, always depend on the insurance process, but you can take up to three weeks because 15 business days is typical how long adjusters have to review the repair estimate and mitigation invoice. So your house is not going put back together anytime soon. It usually doesn’t start for another month afterwards. And then typically about two to four months to make the size of the project.

is how you’re going to displace. So total, it’s going to be a four to six month process if you have a good size water loss.

Dylan Silver (05:57)
What’s the biggest mistake you consistently see homeowners make in these situations of sewage, water damage, you know, I’ll throw storm damage in there as well.

Charlie Jungbert (06:56)
Not filing claim fast enough. So I’m not an adjuster. I’m not a insurance agent. This is what I’ve seen for experience is that most contracts like insurance is a contract is gone. You have a contract with the insurance company that they will pay out from damages that you’ve had to your home. If you don’t take care of your home within 14 days, typically they can deny your claim because you’re not taking care of it.

So if you don’t care about your property, why should that?

They use some other words that could make homeowners upset. Like sometimes they’ll use the word, you neglected to take care of it to protect it. And the homeowners like, I didn’t know I had to do this. I’ve never done this before. And I’m like, so my advice is always file a claim. If it gets denied, take the denial, take the hate on your insurance premium because you rather have coverage for sure instead of possible denial later if you wait.

We have a job that’s been going on for two years and he just filed a claim now, but he’s been, but he has like an HOA. It’s a condo association. It’s coming from outside. So he’s been trying to figure out what to do. And he just filed a claim just a couple of days ago, but I’m like, be prepared for a denial. We can fight it, but you should have filed a claim in the front end because now you’ve been working on this for two years. They can, they probably are going to deny that claim.

It’s hard because no one wants their insurance to go up because insurance is expensive.

Dylan Silver (08:28)
Right. Right. And I think in a lot of areas, especially areas where you see storms to people have heard of the government insurance being the only option if insurance companies are fleeing for a lot of these reasons that you mentioned. Now, on the standpoint of growing a business in the restoration space, what type of job has the highest margins? Is it water, fire, sewage, storm?

Charlie Jungbert (08:59)
So it would go mold, mold remediation is that you make the most profit off mold remediation. Then water mitigation, then fire and contents. We kind of put those together. I’m going to give a fire come give a fire restoration. Usually do content as well. Those make that’s marginally big repairs. Like that’s just basically for cashflow. You have repairs happening. So you have cashflow going on through your jobs. We love mold molded, molded crawl spaces are our bread and butter.

That’s where we make our most money that it’s caught. It’s the most expensive job for what you’re doing. I hate telling homeowners the price of how much mold costs. We just did a crawl space. I want to say three weeks ago is a $14,000 mold remediation job and it took. I want to say three days of vacuuming down there and made $14,000. So we probably already only spent, I would say maybe four max after we put the new vapor barrier down.

All new flex leads, maybe not for the HVAC system. So make your most money off mold.

Dylan Silver (10:39)
Bonus question here for you. Do you know if Kentucky is one of these states where homeowners can remediate the mold themselves if they’re selling their property or do they have to go to a third party company like yourself?

Charlie Jungbert (10:54)
we always recommend third party, for more remediation, just cause we have an IIC, IIC RC certifications for that. When it comes to doing it yourself, people say, just pour bleach on it. Bleach is 99 % water. It’s 1 % chlorine. So we don’t eat people. If you’re not professionally trained in it, you will do it wrong. And when it comes to disclosure and stuff, I’m not really familiar with all that with selling a house. I just tell people to hear when we do more mediation, here is the receipts.

If the agents have any questions, give us a call and we do photos. So we do a huge photo report before, during, and after for people who are trying to sell their house and testing. you gotta get tested before and tested after when you want the disclosure forms and all that stuff.

Dylan Silver (11:42)
Now with mold specifically, sometimes people think, how would I know that there’s mold? From what I understand, of course, sometimes you can see it, but you can also test it in the air. Is that accurate?

Charlie Jungbert (11:51)
Yes. So you cannot, no one can go walk up to a wall with black mold off. It’s like, oh, that’s mold. You don’t know. It can be dust. It can be dirt. People say, oh, it’s black mold and it’s toxic. well, you’re right. Black mold is toxic. Like, but there’s, I don’t know the exact numbers, but hypothetically, there’s 2000 different molds that are black. Only 200 of them are toxic. That’s the difference there. Like, so yes, black mold is bad.

But not every black mold is that toxic black mold that people talk about. So we don’t ever test the jobs that work. We are remediating and we don’t ever do our own clearance testing. We have a company that we refer people to refer clients to. They tell them use this company or another company that we give them to use one of the one of them. They will give us a more report. We will look at it, see what molds there see how bad is. We kind of know what we have to do. Then afterwards I tell them get a different

company for clearance. you ever use the same company and we don’t test our own molds at all. Conflict of interest and you want to make sure that the homeowners take care of

Dylan Silver (13:00)
Now, I’m imagining you’ll have instances where potentially there’s multiple folks experiencing home emergencies at once and you may be having to manage multiple sites. For folks who are scaling in a services related business like yourself, any feedback for how to manage some of those spinning plates at times?

Charlie Jungbert (13:22)
So when it comes to, so for us, not every, not everything works for every single person. So me and my business partner, when we did storm damage down for hurricane in late Charles in 2021, and we ran 75 jobs, we got all at once and we had to, take priorities. When you have a, it’s two o’clock in the morning and you had a tornado come through or you had a job, it makes a storm and you have roofs off buildings, everything. The way we tell people, if there’s power, you have a self pump.

even though you’re flooded and going down, you’re not priority. The ones that have the roofs off that needs tarping, the ones that can’t that has continuous damage and you can’t just turn off the switch for the homeowner can’t take it in themselves. Those ones get priority. So pick up what we do is that the ones that are continuously getting damage get priority. The ones that are stopped, gain damage, aren’t getting further damage.

Charlie Jungbert (14:57)
So if it was a safety issue, then you want to take care of that second because that becomes a problem for the homeowner and people around the community. So you have to figure out what kind of damage it is, what you’re doing, what can you do right now, what can you stop to get damage. So you’re just juggling all that stuff. Is that kind of…

Dylan Silver (15:21)
Yeah, absolutely.

one question to follow up with that, you’re talking about two distinct segments of ⁓ damage, right? I would put restoration, home restoration in one category, but then when you’re dealing with the water sewage damage and potentially devastating ⁓ damage to the system of the home itself, that brings in a whole other layer into it. In general,

How often do restoration companies have the ability to directly work with plumbing versus are they referring that out?

Charlie Jungbert (16:01)
So our company is different from our employment company. So we all the planning work that we do ourselves, we don’t sub out. We don’t give it to another company. If someone calls us directly to say, sump pump is flooding my house out, it’s not working. We will go there, put the sump pump in and we will do the restoration services. But if it is, let’s say a plumber, local plumber refers us a job and there is a, was a toilet that was shot about, popped off, flooded the house.

and they fixed it, but they refer us to negation. When we have to the repairs and we have to pull that bandy, we have to pull that toilet again, we have to take that shower out because this tile is coming down. We will refer all that plumbing work back to that plumber who referred us to that job. So even though we are a plumbing company, we work closely with other companies that do the same thing we do, but we don’t take from the jobs that they give us. We give it right back to them as a courtesy, as a thank you, as like respect for the industry.

will be how we have a lot of callways, a lot of people that we know in each company. I know the owner of several plumbing companies and we talk on the phone weekly. I’m not going to take all the jobs they give me and just do the work myself. No, that not be fair. They would stop referring me work because they know I’m a plumbing company. So we’ve worked back to all the other companies. If Joe Schmoe gives me a hot ward here that busted and we had to remove it to fix the flooring, we will call him back specifically to remove the hot ward here, fix the flooring and have him put that back.

but no one versus the job, we’ll go ahead and do ourselves.

Dylan Silver (17:28)
Now,

Yeah, and I think that that’s how you continue the symbiotic relationship between your referral partners and what you’re doing as well. I’ve seen from working with investors that there is a contingency, especially right now, of investors who are looking for fire damaged properties, water damaged properties, infill lots. And this is the situation where maybe someone waited too late to file the claim.

or so many other situations. Maybe they didn’t have the insurance on the home and the home was paid off. In your experience, what leads someone to effectively abandoning their home or at least getting into a situation where they’re considering selling it due to the damage?

Charlie Jungbert (17:57)
Good.

Charlie Jungbert (18:16)
So one of my projects I have going on is that I’ve come across many times. It’s that people that have generational homes that don’t have insurance. They own the house outright, they don’t have a mortgage, so they don’t need to have insurance by the rules and regulations of that. Well, their house burns down, now they have to everything out of pocket.

And so in those cases, people will go ahead and abandon the home. They’ll even just like walk away from it and let it get tax repos or they will just let or sell it to a wholesaler. People that have insurance that house burns down, most insurance companies won’t just give you that big giant check for whatever your house is worth. And they will give you like a percentage of it and it will give you the rest of it once you’re done.

Okay, I know they kind of started that after Katrina down in New Orleans, because a lot of people were taking an insurance check and a bang that house and mortgage and they were going to buy another house. That was happening a lot. So they changed that regulations now. So if you get that check, you have to build your house back and you have to the rest of it at the end of it. Some people still do it. They still take that first round check, that first check, and then we’ll ban that property and go somewhere else, but they don’t just get.

Dylan Silver (19:30)
We are.

Charlie Jungbert (19:38)
The rest of it will just take what they can get.

Dylan Silver (19:40)
We are coming up on time here, Charlie. Any new projects that you’re working on and then as well, what’s the best way for folks to reach out to you or your team?

Charlie Jungbert (19:51)
So we, the new project that I have going on is that I’m starting, I’m going to start a foundation to help those homeowners that don’t have insurance for the generational homes and that their house burned down or flood out and they can’t help anything. So that is kind of something that’s starting process right now. It’s kind of the newest project I have going on, but they want to reach out. They can reach out my personal cell phone number, 502-595-9895. We’re in the Louisville area. We do everything from water, fire, mold.

storm damage repairs and also board ups. And if you have any plumbing needs, we can help you with that as well.