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How One Moisture Reading Uncovered A $40K Bathroom Fix · That Home Loan Hub

• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a buyer and you've done a builder's report and you're wondering whether you can pull out of a purchase because of the builder's report and what warrants it, this is the episode for you.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Listen up.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: I've got Evan with me today from Czech Home Building Inspections.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, Evan.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, how's it going?
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Good, thank you.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now, you've got a story for me today.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so this would have been maybe about two years ago.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I did an inspection on a house in Lower Hart.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: It was quite a big house.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was about 280 squares, multiple bathrooms, really well looked after.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: The exterior was a stucco-clad house, so that inherently has some risk areas, but the exterior was actually in not too bad condition.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: I discovered some potential elevated moisture readings in a fully tiled bathroom.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: But that's common, isn't it, in the bathroom to have elevated moisture readings?
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yeah.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: So we never test on the inside of the shower.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: And the way that the waterproofing systems work is even if we do get elevated moisture right next to the shower, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's failing.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: It just means that moisture is moving in behind those tiles.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so as long as it's like pretty localized and it's not ridiculously high, you can kind of say you need to monitor this.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: The good part was that you could get into the subfloor.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: I crawled all the way under the access hole was on the other side of the house, so I had to crawl the entire length of the house, which was always fun.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, job sounds fun.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um needs Pilates.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, ducking and diving underneath uh the ducting um for the heat pump system and stuff.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: Got over to the bathroom and I couldn't really see any elevated moisture or moisture staining to the timber.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: There was a little bit, but it's pretty common with stucco clad houses where the bottom plate will have some moisture because the cladding will absorb moisture, moisture will run down.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: So it was a a little bit here and there, but it was nothing out of the ordinary.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I pulled it up in the report.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: The buyer wanted to do a little bit of further investigation.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: The the vendor allowed it, which was good because they obviously wanted to sell the house.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: They ended up pulling off a couple of tiles and the studs were rotten on the inside.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: And to redo that entire waterproofing system and bathroom, they would have had to redo, they had to do all the tiles and and waterproof the entire thing because I think the bathroom was only about four or five years old.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: So uh it's failed, and so then you need consent and go through the whole process.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I think they ended up getting a quote for something like like$40,000 or something.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: I was about to say that'll be about$50,000.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: In today's money, two years later.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, true, true, true, true.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I think the vendors obviously didn't want to negotiate on the price they pulled out because essentially they classified it as a lemon.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it it's it's one of those wild things is you get a a small detail like that in a building inspection where there is potential elevated moisture because it's it's hard to tell my moisture meter could have been reacting with something on the inside of the wall.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: And they could have opened that up and it may have been fine.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: I've got a pretty good track record of when I say that there's elevated moisture and they've opened up, there's elevated moisture.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm pretty confident when I do say it is, but you just can't 100% confirm without invasive testing or destructive testing.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: So that really saved those people from buying something that would have cost them.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, look, I still have clients that would have gone for something like that anyway.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely same.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: If they know what they're doing, yeah, if they've got the money to do that, then yeah.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: But I guess if, and again on the flip side of it, we do deal with a lot of first-time buyers that don't have the funds to renovate.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: And most most often than not, the bank will actually turn around and say the funding will be declined for that sort of property.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because if the clients don't have the money to renovate, even though they might have the skills, like sometimes you know, I might be a plumber saying, Hey, I can do it myself, I'll fix it myself, or a builder, the bank may still not approve that.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, it it's tough because at the end of the day, you just have to you have to go with your gut.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: If you have the ability to do the renovations, I I'm not there to kind of you know turn buyers away.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: I want I want people to be buying houses, like otherwise I'll be out of the job.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, my job is to tell you what's there and the and the risk areas, and and luckily for that, that one instance, I highlighted a risk area and it turned out to be right.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there was a lot of dry rot as well in the wall.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: So my moisture meter wasn't picking up anything like that, but the studs were failing.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, that's why it ended up being quite a significant quite major.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Evan, thank you so much, and um hope to see you soon again with more stories.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, great.