PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Ian Robertson
Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk, everyone. I’m your host, Ian Robertson. And today we have on with us, fellow New Yorker state of New York. Rob Byrne. How are you, Rob?

Rob Byrne
Excellent, Ian, yourself?

Ian Robertson
I’m doing good. Thanks for being on today. You had actually reached out with us. I always love it when listeners reach out to us with ideas for podcast. And I really liked this one, you’re going to talk to us today about team inspections, we’re going to talk about the advantages and disadvantages and why you chose it and all that stuff. But I’d like to talk a little bit about you first, so that the audience knows who you are. So obviously, your name is Rob Byrne, your home inspection company is Higher Elevation Home Inspections in Long Island. And tell us a little bit about yourself, Rob, and your company?

Rob Byrne
Sure, Higher Elevation is a family owned and operated business. My son works with us full time. I have another gentleman that works for us full time as well. So there’s three full time folks that work with us. And we have four others that work part time, pretty much when you need them. You know, they’re there in a pinch, they don’t depend on it, you know, as steady income, but they work with us, everybody’s licensed. And we all have some type of connection with one another. One of them is a lifelong friend of mine that we grew up together. He, he’s an electrician. So he’s part of the team. The other gentleman Ed, is a retired, FDNY captain, from the fire department. He has a background in civil engineering, as well as myself with electrical and mechanical. So it’s a well rounded team.

Ian Robertson
Okay, great. So I’ve always said that fire, firemen make good home inspectors that kind of know how to get in and out of things and what things are going to break and what things aren’t. But that’s interesting. You guys have a lot of you have electrical background and civil engineering background, you and one of your inspectors. So sounds like you’ve built a nice, small multi inspector firm for yourself. That’s fantastic. Did you have any bumps in the road kind of getting to where you’re at? How long have you been inspecting?

Rob Byrne
Over 10 years now, was helping a friend of mine out with inspections. Prior to me actually getting into it full time. He was doing inspections for a while. And I would go out and help him out having an engineering background. Sometimes I was able to help him with some other stuff that was involved in the inspection above and beyond the inspection. And then he decided to move to Georgia. And I said, I might as well get my licenses where I can do this. And then I met Ed along the way. And that’s when we combined efforts. And then my son joined us three years full time. And it’s been it’s going pretty good.

Ian Robertson
Nice. And in addition to being in the state of New York like I am, I’m a probably a good five hours north of you. By the way, I got stuck at the George Washington Bridge a few weeks back. I do not ever want to drive anywhere down there.

Rob Byrne
It’s a nightmare.

Ian Robertson
Not my thing. Yeah, I know, right?

Rob Byrne
It’s an absolute nightmare.

Ian Robertson
Yeah. So you can stay in Long Island, because in between me and you is New York City, and I just I want to avoid all of that mess. But sorry if anybody lives in New York City, I just don’t want to drive in your neighborhood. You’re a great guy, but I don’t want to drive in your neighborhood.

Rob Byrne
It’s funny.

Ian Robertson
But you’re also a fellow New York State home inspector instructor like I am I’ve taught home inspectors for the better part of man almost going on 15 years now. Wow, how about yourself.

Rob Byrne
Probably six now. Nice. And it’s great, because you need a lot of really, really good people that I’ve built solid relationships with, throughout the years, mentored a lot, a lot of folks and you know, you’ve had a couple of podcasts, I forget the gentleman that you were speaking to about not keeping things close to the vest and kind of sharing, you know, your knowledge and what you know, I think all of us in the industry would love to have everybody kind of on the same page with how we go about things and how we proceed with the inspection, and that kind of stuff. And the only way the new folks are gonna get that is from us seasoned veterans, and I’m always, you know, willing to help out and, and teach. Well, obviously, you know, as you teach the course you have to enjoy doing it. And that’s what I do. I really enjoy doing that. So I want everybody to try to get you know, up to a standard quick because as you know, you take your 100 hour course, you do 40 hours field inspections, and you got your license. Well, yeah, your license is no different than mine or yours. We’re both licensed New York inspectors. But the difference is when it comes down to experience really,

Ian Robertson
Yeah. And that’s beautiful. And you’re a man after my own heart. I love to share all of that stuff because the people who are going to use it are ones that really deserve to have it anyways. Because people be like, Oh, what do I do? I’m like, well, here’s five things, oh, that seems hard. What else can I do? You know, it’s like the people that take those hard things and actually do them that succeed. But listen, you’re an engineer, home inspector of 10 years, a multi inspector firm owner, and a New York State Home Inspector instructor, I think you’re really well qualified to talk to us today about our subject of Team inspections. Because at some point or another, most of us have either worked with a home inspection team. And when we say team inspections more than one home inspector, on one inspection, or we’ve thought about it like man, it would be really great to have somebody check all the outlets and windows while I’m doing all the big stuff, or I wish someone could do the exterior while I’m doing the interior. There’s a buddy of mine, Matt, and he’s CHP inspections. He’s north of you, north of New York City, but New York state he does team inspections. We were just talking about it yesterday. Hopefully he’s listening. Hi, Matt. But a lot of home inspectors like it, I actually used to, we used to do a lot of that team inspections, and we stopped. And so I’d love to hear your perspective. So tell us why you chose to do team inspections, why you think that others should consider doing team inspections as well? Great question.

Rob Byrne
And I thought about it a lot after we had our initial conversation. And for me personally, it’s about the quality of the inspection. Because as you know, and I say this to all of the folks coming up, you do a quality inspection. And it’s just great marketing people like it, when you’re a two person team, you can give the client your undivided attention, which is very difficult to do as a single inspector, as you know, you’re doing everything and you kind of pull away from your client, because you know, you have a job to do. But at the same token, you want your client to feel important, and you want to share that information. So for us, what we do is we have a routine, you know, Christopher and I or Ed or whoever, we start on the outside together, get a good perspective of what’s going on with the house. And then once we get inside, I usually go straight downstairs Christopher goes into on the first floor does everything running water while I’m down the basement, which is the best place to be if there’s a problem with water, because if you’re running it upstairs, you might not get downstairs for five or 10 minutes. And by that time, you know, if it’s a really bad leak, it could be a problem. So that’s what we like to do. We’ve streamlined it to where we can actually get, and I’m talking quality inspections, we can get three to four inspections done in a day, with a two person team, you have the routine. And what’s nice about it is if you get stuck on that inspection with that client that has a lot of questions, I never ever, ever want to run out on them. So it’s very simple. I say, Chris, I meet you at the next inspection. He shows up, you know, 15 minutes early, get started on the outside and introduces himself and then you can just tag along doing it that way even on you know, two inspections in the day, you’d never have that fear of not getting there on time.

Ian Robertson
Yeah. And that’s kind of been my experience with Team inspections. So I want to say this outright, I haven’t done a lot of team inspection personally, anybody who knows me or has inspected with me, it’s my show, and this is what we’re doing. And, you know, I’m just not the personality type to say, Hey, let me let me work with somebody. I went into business for myself because I like working myself. So it just never really jibed and also, you really do have to jibe with the person that you’re inspecting with. You can’t have like a weird distant office relationship, you have to know, oh Rob’s down in the basement right now he’s going to want to shower on. Oh, Rob, I need to make sure this is on and I’m not outside because Rob might call me for this. We need to be able to read the other person’s mind. You know, somebody who I’ve often worked with on big projects as Jay Wynn he’s on our on our show sometimes, me and him always..

Rob Byrne
Drinking With Jay.

Ian Robertson
Drinking With Jay. Yeah, you’re a real listener.

Rob Byrne
When do I get on that podcast? Are you serious?

Ian Robertson
Yeah. Anytime you want to drink with us and talk, hop on in and what we’ll do another episode, because I’m sure you have a lot of stuff to share.

Rob Byrne
Great. Oh my god. Yeah, some good selections of different scotches and whiskies that my son my other son has been turning me on to. And it’s kind of nice, because when you chill out and you’re writing a report at the end of the night, that’s the perfect, just chill out have a couple of sips and mellow out.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, let’s do it. We’ll do it. We’ll do another episode and we’ll drink on it. Absolutely. That’d be fantastic. But you know, it sounds like you do team inspections with your son. So that’s going to be an easy jibe, like you’re going to be able to read each other pretty quickly. The problems that I ran into with Team inspections for my companies are two things one logistics for money purposes. But number two, we kind of broke even on quality of inspection because here’s what we ran into. And I’ll give you an example. Me and Jay were actually inspecting the house one time and whenever we inspect together we kind of know what the other person is thinking and do going next we have very, very similar styles. It was a giant mansion of a house Jays like, Hey, can you help me out? This was many, many years ago. Yeah, sure. So man, it’s probably like, a long time ago. But anyways, I remember this very specifically because me and him have a habit of never taking offense when the other person checks our work. So when I’m done, I’m like, Hey, can you check back what I did? And he said, yeah, just go back through what I did. And what happened was, there was this window up on a balcony. And I took a picture of it because it was all rotted out, and it looked like it was coming from it was missing saddle flashing against the wall, where the balcony meets the house. And so ran down and run out this window. Meanwhile, Jay’s in the basement, and he’s looking at the sill plate pressed up against the deck, and he’s like, Oh, this rotted out, because the deck is missing, flashing, it was missing flashing. But what ended up happening was it ran down from that balcony and rotted out everything in the wall in between all the way down. So we found what we thought were two $3,000 repairs, when it turned out, it was one big $37,000 repair. But we figured it out. Because when Jay went back up, because this window is right above what I saw, when I went back down and like this was right below that window, and we figured it out and put it together. Interestingly enough, the people who had inspected the house before us missed it. And if I remember, right, I know who it is. And they were a team inspection. And that stuck out in my mind that memory, when we talked about team inspections, you do better and that you cover more ground. And you can do things that you can’t do as a single inspector, like I always had an agent there. They were always with me in the inspection, they would be running the showers, I’d ask them to turn off the tub, and they’d work with me with another inspector, you can cover a lot of ground and test things out. Hey, can you turn on that light? No, I can’t. Hey, did you turn off that GFCI all the way from another building an apartment building? Yeah, that was all great stuff to figure out. But it found that sometimes the connecting the dots was hard. So how do you guys seal that gap? Do you guys walk back over each other’s work? Or how do you go about sealing that gap?

Rob Byrne
Absolutely. That’s a great question. And Communication is paramount. We use walkie talkies during the inspection. So if I’m down the basement, and I say, Hey, Chris, or Ed, you know, did you just what do you just do? Because I’m getting water? And then you can communicate? Yeah, I’m running the shower. Okay, great. So seems like it’s coming from the shower. Clearly, you know, when when the toilet bowl flushes, you could hear that. So we definitely communicate that way. But you did bring up a good point, we double check all work.

Ian Robertson
Good.

Rob Byrne
And when I say that, like Christopher does the whole first floor, I don’t ask any questions about anything, he’ll walk the client around on the first floor and show them the deficiencies, what I do is I use the old fashioned camera with the SD card. And I’m just snapping away, open up the cabinet taking a picture underneath the drains, just backing it up with a physical SD card, Christopher uses the mobile app, plugging everything into the mobile app, as we go along. 90% of the inspection is done when we walk away from the house, we go home, we tweak it. So again, added benefit. And if you if you’re thinking about you know, dollar cost averaging, well, if you’re a single inspector and you’re going home, and you’re writing a report for X amount of hours versus two guys, two team inspectors on the job, and you go on home, and maybe you know, a half an hour each watching a hockey game, sipping a little scotch, and you communicate again, even after the inspection. And you’re right, you need that relationship, you need that, you know, just orchestrated dance. And for me, I’m lucky because when I teach the course, I can see people that shine in the course. And I take them on some field inspections with us when I can kind of fit them in, I’ll even do personal training with them. I’ll say, Listen, let’s pick a friend’s house. Let’s walk through it. Let’s do it my time. But I want to see who these people are and how they communicate and how they operate. You know, not in a client based inspection where it’s just kind of right, let’s see what you got, you know, come over my house, let’s just you know, let’s do the outside of my house and see, let them try to do it on the mobile app and move forward and kind of get a feel for it. But going back to what you’re saying yes. And there’s plenty of times when I’m sitting home writing the reports, just looking at the pictures, you actually find the deficiency in the picture that you didn’t see on site. And I’ll say and here’s a perfect example, balloon frame houses, a lot of times you can’t see anything. So I have a habit, I’ll take my digital camera, throw the flash on, hold the flashlight underneath it and just take a snapshot of the bay of the wall a to show that there’s no insulation so we could demonstrate it from a picture. But a couple of times, you know, you take the picture and you’re not looking at it on your phone. But a couple of times we found mud tubes in that area that you would never ever see because it’s behind the wall cavity. So little things like that. And I’ll send a picture over to Christopher. And he’ll be like, yeah, that’s, that’s mud tubes. And I’m like, can you imagine, like, wouldn’t ever saw it, and we didn’t see mud anywhere anywhere else around. So again, it’s good, it’s quality. And you did bring up a point of how you know financially, it breaks down, where is it financially worth it probably slightly less profitable. Because just like you said, you got two inspectors, you’re doing that kind of stuff. But my feeling is, you’re gonna get way more inspections together on a two person team. And I see it.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, and there’s some legitimacy both ways on that. So just so everyone knows Rob’s talking about my point when it comes to Team inspections, just fiscally speaking, not talking about the purity of the inspection itself, because I find that there’s advantages and disadvantages personally anyways, that make it just net zero. When it comes to the the inspections that I’ve seen over my experience. Rob, you and your son obviously have a fantastic connection there. So that that’s important. But the fiscal part of things is, I found the max that we could do one a day with a two person team is three. So I could have two guys do two each. So we went from three inspections to four increasing our profitability by 33%. Hypothetically, just rough numbers, obviously. So fiscally, I found the team inspections didn’t work out well for us that way. But I see your point that it is a strong advertising point to have two guys. And I do see the advantages you mentioned before like, and we’ve had to do that before. One guy goes to the next inspection because the other one is taking a longer time. And I’ve seen other inspectors in my market, say I have to go to my next inspection in the inspection that they’re on.

Rob Byrne
Ouch.

Ian Robertson
I know, right? If you if you could see if you can see Rob’s face, if you’re listening to the podcast, it’s the same kind of pain. And I’ve seen that there’s one inspector in particular, he’s just like, I gotta go. He’s done it many times. And agents have told me, and I’m just like, That breaks my heart. That’s like, you know, we’re samurais. And that just broke the samurai code. Inspection is done when it’s done, not when you have another appointment. Exactly. But anyways, so that takes that pressure off, you have a few more questions. Let’s talk, you know what, there was one more crawlspace here than I expected. Hey, Chris, you go to the next one, I’m going to dive into this crawlspace. That’s a beautiful thing. And agents do appreciate that. And we did use that as a marketing piece. It can help us to gain more inspections overall, but not as fit as many into a day. So I guess it kind of depends on where we’re at. And I think it’s worth noting that there are different types of Team inspections. So you and Chris are both full blown inspectors. I think either one of you on your own, could just handle the whole thing. I’ve done different combinations, like I’ve had two high level inspectors on the same inspection. Great. I’ve also done one where we have a trainee. And all he’s doing is you know, testing windows and checking outlets and taking our CYA photos. So we do CYA photos. So we just walk around the house and take pictures, take pictures of freezers and stuff like that. So when they say we turned it off later on, I have I have a wine story. I’ll just digress on real quick. I had, they claimed that we had turned the their wine fridge off and spoiled six grands worth of wine on my way out. I always take pictures of every step. So I’ll either take 200 pictures just walking out of the house until my vehicle drives away or I’ll take a video. So I’ll video myself going out getting in my vehicle, buckling. And then as soon as I started driving away, I turned it off. So I had documentation that when I walked out of the basement, their wine fridge was still on. And the agents were still in the basement. And one of the agents ended up paying for it because I think that’s what I heard because they tried to come after me. But they they found out quickly that I had record that it was still on when I left and they actually recommended one of their employees to me, they’re like this guy’s thorough he covers you and himself. And so the sellers who lost all that wine actually ended up referring me anyways, I’d have what I would do is I’d have a low level Inspector, I say a low level beginner, do all that stuff. Plug in the outlet tester take a picture I like to get two or three outlets with a picture of the outlet tester in it. So everybody knows everything was hunky dory representative. Take some pictures around the house just for our own file that video of walking out get my ladder all set up, you know, make sure the closets clear where the attic access is. And he’s not really doing any quote unquote inspecting. He’s just doing all the you know, little stuff that I found that worked a little bit better, but harder to keep people engaged. You know what I mean? Absolutely. Have you ever tried that?

Rob Byrne
Yes. And what I do is one of my favorite classes to teach in the school is report writing. And so when we do report writing the classes that we do and the owner of the school, he does six hour classes, so most people would rather come in at four o’clock break for half an hour have dinner and leave at 10:30 So they come in, you know 24 hour CE credits, great four classes, you’ve done, when I do report writing, I have everybody bringing their computers, their mobile apps, and we actually do report writing, I’ll put a bunch of pictures up and they’ll say, Okay, this is an old slate roof, you know, take your take your iPhone out landscape, take that picture, take a bunch of pictures now upload it, go into your report writing and let’s actually write a report. So what I do is and exactly what you do in the beginning, take them out, just see how they interact, see how they show up on the inspection, what they look like, you know, and again, I always tell the new inspectors, Don’t say a word, whatever you want to talk about keep in your mind you’re driving home, I’m driving home, I read, have a conversation with you on the phone. And that’s great. That always works out. But what I tried to do is to get them to that next step and keep them engaged, like you said, train them on the mobile app, get all the general info in that’s required. So go into the mobile app, take a picture of the boiler, get the plead there, all of that stuff. So you go one step at a time. And before you know it, they’re an asset to you on an inspection and not as a high level inspector, like you said.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, it’s just eventually they’re gonna either want to do their own thing or be a high level inspector.

Rob Byrne
Correct.

Ian Robertson
That’s why I say it’s hard with the engagement on that level. The only time I’ve seen it work out long term is with family. So there was one inspector, his father in law retired. And he’s just like, I want to basically just grab ladders and take pictures of light bulbs. And so he hired his father in law, and he just follows them around inspections and worked for many, many years. He’s probably still doing if I remember, I haven’t talked to him in a while. But that’s the only time I’ve ever seen in the last long term. Otherwise, you get a young guy getting into the industry. Eventually he’s going to get bored. He’s going to want to expand, become more, which is great. So then if you’re going multi inspector, now you have a whole other inspector on the crew. Exactly. If if he wants to go off on his own. Okay, fine. Now you have another guy out there that you can say I trained him. Yes, it gives you street cred. But more importantly, you can call him hey, I’m sick. Can you cover me? Hey, one of my guys is sick. And I have three inspections scheduled today. Can you cover that? Those are good things to have.

Rob Byrne
Yes, yes. Yeah, definitely. Good. Good point.

Ian Robertson
Let me ask you, how do you guys handle it? How do I put this so I get into a groove. And the times that I’ve done team inspections, personally, I found that it takes me out of my groove. So I imagine the reverse of that is true, too. So you’re used to inspecting with your son each and every day on every inspection. But now maybe he’s sick. How do you handle that with maybe the agents saying why is there only one of you here, or..?

Rob Byrne
We always show up with two. And we still have Ed.

Ian Robertson
Okay, that’s right.

Rob Byrne
Just like Christopher, we got that groove. We don’t even say anything to one another one goes up, one goes down, you know, one’s grabbing the ladder, setting it up, which we could digress and talk about walking the roof ladder safety with two inspectors. Yeah, seriously, there’s a lot of times you can’t get on a roof by yourself. But with two inspectors you can because if you think about it, a lot of times, we will set up a ladder will get up on one roof. And we have to bring up the shorter ladder to make that transition to the upper roof. So we could do that. You can’t do that with one inspector.

Ian Robertson
Amen. If you really want to get our listeners going, we should have a podcast someday on getting physically on a roof versus drone inspections. Ooo, if you really want to get everybody going.

Rob Byrne
We could go off on a tangent. I think that’s a good one to do with Jay and have a couple of drinks while you’re talking.

Ian Robertson
We would need a couple of drinks to be able to present that because man it there’s nothing fire, gets people fired up on the inspection communities more than that question. I watched one guy on a Facebook group say that one day just to get everybody fired up and like, oh, man, but anyways, I digress.

Rob Byrne
Yeah, no, that’s, that’s a good point. And by the way, we do we do both. But if we can get on a roof, we’re getting on it. 99% of the time. Yeah.

Ian Robertson
And yeah, we’ll leave that at that. Exactly. Okay. I think a combination of it is good. Personally, I don’t think it should be one or the other. I think it should be a little bit of both. But I do kind of wonder about some of the other advantages. So we have a thing that a bunch of inspectors around will like message each other when we’re going into a sketchy inspection. Hey, here’s the address on that. I’m headed in. I’ll check in every 30 minutes. And we do that to keep very good point. Yeah, we did it to keep each other safe. And we had a podcast with Bob Madewell one time if you remember that one. He got attacked by a couple of squatters. Yeah, yes. I’ve had my dealings with squatters, a couple of homeless people and hypodermic needles. I got attacked by dogs. What was it three or four Dobermans? Oh, and yeah, yeah, it wasn’t fun. I still can’t feel part of my left leg. But there’s an advantage to having two people in the world that we live in nowadays, and especially like if we’re we think we’re out in the country, not much can happen. Yeah, no, sometimes, you know, if you’ve ever seen Deliverance, maybe, maybe you’ll think twice about that. You know, I live out in the country and some of the country spots. I’m kind of like, I’m more nervous here than if I was downtown. You know, at least downtown. There’s other people that will pick up my bloody body and bring me to the hospital. So do you find you feel more comfortable with?

Rob Byrne
Absolutely, yeah, absolutely 1,000% for that simple reason being there together. And I always joke around, because, you know, we carry out tool buckets or tool pails, whatever we have. And we always have a crowbar in there, you know, you checking for termites. So we, I like using a crowbar, but it serves a dual function. Let’s be real. But yes, that’s a very good point, we just a couple of weeks ago, we were in an area that was a little sketchy, but, you know, don’t look like that, you know, guy that’s waiting to get, you know, take advantage of just kind of, you know, chin up high, just walk on that scene. And when there’s two of you, yes, and then the client show up, and then it’s good. But then there’s a lot of times we go into areas where nobody’s even there, like, the agent will say, Alright, here’s a lockbox go into it, which we don’t really do much around here. But we go into areas, and it’s not the best. So I always tell Christopher, do not get out of your car till we’re both there. Yeah, and then, you know, but that that’s a good point, if you’re going out, and I’m going to bring it up in class with the folks, if you’re going out on an inspection by yourself, just reach out to somebody and see, there’s a bunch of people, you can have a phone number or even somebody at your house, that’s a really good point, I’m going to this inspection at two, every 30 minutes, I’m going to shoot you a text or something, I like that. I like that. I like that a lot.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, and I’ll set a reminder on my phone, you know, check in with so and so or make sure to text so and so or whatever it happens to be location sharing, you can do on your phone, here’s where I’m at, you know, in my area, there was a real estate agent that was murdered. And we brought out other examples of real estate agents getting murdered and you know, anything can happen not even just danger from dogs. And there’s guys out there all as well like, conceal carry and Okay, great. You have three dogs running at you, you know, hitting a moving target, or are you you’re climbing up on the roof, and all sudden you touch the power lines and you’re laying on the ground, there’s a lot of stuff that can happen. I got thrown up against the little tunnel wall underneath his old house because they they buried some service wire to the barn out in the back. And it was, you know, it was damaged. They just ran it ran it through the crawlspace. And they didn’t know was there because they covered in dirt. Threw me up against the wall. But there was a bunch of people there. I was laying there. I’m like, if this had hit me just right. Or there was nobody here? I’d die. I’m done. You know. So there’s advantages no matter how tough we are or what we think the situation is. We’re doing a dangerous job. We’re up on roofs, we’re in crazy things. You know, having two people there is a lot better. But yeah, if you’re alone, yeah, shoot a text message out. know somebody if it’s your husband, wife, sister, cousin, uncle, Rob or me, you know.

Rob Byrne
No, seriously? Yeah. You know, I think that’s a really good point. And I would have no problem being part of that so called another team, like you’re talking about, I think that’s great. I really think that anybody listening should really take Ian up on that. And, and vice versa. I’d have no problem monitoring somebody, you know, Hey, Rob, going in this place at two o’clock, great, got a text till 2:30? And yes, I think being a community unto ourselves, I think it’s I think it’s really important and help each other out and cover each other’s back. Great point, Ian, great point.

Ian Robertson
Yeah. And so to get back to, to your point of the advantages of a home inspection team, so I brought out my disadvantages and why we stopped. But I’m not saying it’s bad, because a couple of the home inspection companies in my area that have been really successful, have blown up because they do team inspections, especially if you have a lot of ancillary services. So if you’re doing home and septic inspections, really nice to have two guys on there. So you’re not there for six hours and agents like you know, what’s going on, man? What are you still doing here?

Rob Byrne
Yeah. So you bring that you brought up a good point, because there’s times we do really, really big houses. 8, 10, 12,000 square feet.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, you need two.

Rob Byrne
I’ll go with me, Chris, Ed, and Trolley. And it’s very simple. All right Trolley, you doing all the electric and plumbing, Chris, you’re doing the exterior, and we just break up. And we could literally be done in two and a half to three hours. And you know, the other guys can peel off and just go about and I stay and then walk through with the client and stuff like that. But everybody’s on the mobile app, everybody’s putting the data in, we’re syncing up. When we hit full sync while we’re on the mobile app, I can see what you did. So which is really nice. So every 15 minutes, we’ll hit full sync. And then I can see the data that you put in it’ll come to my phone as well, as well as going up into the cloud for for report writing. But yeah, that’s that’s an advantage having, you know, you know folks in the bullpen it’s like alright, let’s go here we go. Guys. We’re going out. And we we always have fun. We go on inspection. It’s serious. But people see the relationships between us and they really really dig it. It’s like wow, and you roll up with a father and son routine and..

Ian Robertson
You can’t beat that.

Rob Byrne
Kinda, cute, ya know.

Ian Robertson
Well, I love you, Rob, but I wasn’t going to describe you as cute but okay, sure, let’s, yeah, well, let’s roll that way. I don’t know.

Rob Byrne
Not me. No, but it’s funny when, when when Christopher rolls up, and he’s like, you know, you see him on the website and a lot of real estate agents like, Is he married? Is he going out with anybody? I’m like, I’m not going down that road. He thinks all women are crazy.

Ian Robertson
That’s a totally different podcast.

Rob Byrne
Yeah, oh, we’re not allowed to bash anybody. I’m sorry.

Ian Robertson
No, no, no, no, no, I’m teasing.

Rob Byrne
Can’t live with them can’t live without them. But no, it’s all good. But I think that family owned, like, for example, when Ed comes out, you know, we’re great friends. But we we teach. I tease people I said, Yeah, you know, I took my grandfather out today on an inspection. Meanwhile, they’re like, he might be 10 years old. And he’s not a grandfather. But you know, they look at Christopher. And they’re like, oh, that’s Christopher’s grandfather. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, he’s that type of guy, you know, someone you meet throughout the years, and it just does become family, it’s not even a question of a doubt. It’s like, you know, you always say, who would you want to be in that foxhole with? Well, I have a half a dozen people that it would be hard to decide one of the six to be in there with and Ed is definitely one of them.

Ian Robertson
And that’s beautiful. So I’m gonna reiterate that point that we’ve said already, if you’re going to do a team inspection, you can’t hire them, like you hire any other inspector. So I’ll be honest, when you hire another inspector, that works separate from you, you want to be close with them. But there doesn’t have to be that connection, since he’s a good inspector, great guy. But on the weekends, he does his own thing. He’s his own guy, we need to have some sort of friendship and bond with the other person, if we’re going to be on the same team. You know, it’s, it may be a wrong illustration. But it’s kind of like, you look at your marriage mate. And across the room, something’s happening. And you both know what the other thinking and you can just deal with the situation, you need to have some sort of similar connection, you can look at them and go, Oh, yeah, I got this, they know where to go, and you know where to go. That’s kind of hard to find, I guess that’s maybe why team inspections aren’t as prominent as I would expect them to be. There’s a lot of guys that do them. Well, the vast majority of our industry doesn’t. And I think part of it is because first of all, less revenue. Ultimately, I mean, logistically speaking but second of all, really hard to find somebody that you connect with like that.

Rob Byrne
Agreed, agreed, definitely at the point now where Christopher can go out with another person and be a team inspection, as well as myself, we’re definitely at that point where we’re busy enough to be able to do it. And a lot of times, we have extra inspections where, you know, I’ll just call Ed up and Ed and Charlie will go out or Ed and Chris, and, and me and Charlie. So we have a nice circle to be able to know, like, I know, I don’t call Ed on Wednesdays and Fridays because he golfs. That’s it, and the story. So he’s off, he’s off on Wednesdays and Fridays, we know that but any other time, he’s not vacationing, or anything like that. He’s there and we communicate. It’s like, we’ll talk on a Sunday and say, Rob, you know, yeah, I know, Wednesdays and Fridays, Thursday afternoon, I got an appointment, or whatever. So we kind of lay out the schedule for the week. And as we go, we just kind of slide and plug people in. So it’s worked out well. And then you know, at times, you know, we do split up. And if I know the client and I know the realtor, sometimes I’ll do the inspection by myself, because I know it’s it’s going to be a non issue if I show up by myself. So, you know, it’s rare, you know, like a small condo or Co Op, we’re not going to go with two people. So one of us will go, don’t expect to have two people there, because not going on the roof. You’re not going in the basement, we don’t have access to it. So it works out well. But yeah, the Knowing your person is important because as I teach the class, and they’re there for all those hours, and I’m taking them out on field training, I can tell right away, because there’s probably been a dozen people that I knew would not fit our team effort of how we do things communication. And here’s a big thing. When I’m with somebody or training them, I’ll send them your podcast. And I’ll say, do me a favor, listen to this. Now if they call me back the next day and say, Hey, I listened to that podcast, it was great. Let’s talk about it. Okay, but if I send you a podcast, and it’s three weeks and you haven’t listened to it, that’s kind of telling me something. Yeah. You know, I’m saying like, I’m giving you the material, let’s talk about it. Are you into this or not? If you want it to be part time, or whatever, that’s okay. Just let’s communicate and you can kind of get a feel from you know, you break bread with them. You go to lunch, maybe you go out for dinner, there’s two people that we’re seriously thinking about bringing on full time where they’re literally gonna leave their jobs. But, you know, I we have to, I have to take that responsibility to say, hey, this person has to make X amount of dollars a week. So it’s a big responsibility. So we’re, we’re working towards it, but part of the deal is okay, let’s go out to dinner. You know, your significant other, you know, you have a 12 year old daughter, I take my wife, Christopher, we all go and kind of see the interaction with people how they deal with the waiter or waitress or how they talk to their significant other or their child. So you could see a lot from that. And I think that’s important.

Ian Robertson
That’s not only a great approach, but I think more unique than you might, might might realize. I think too many of us think too much when we’re hiring another inspector instead of feeling it out. And the best way you can feel it out is how they like you just how they interact with their family. How do they interact with you? Are they are they comfortable in that situation? That’s going to tell you a lot about the connection on site that you’re gonna have with them and then your client. But absolutely, I really appreciate you plugging our podcast. But this has been great information. I think you’ve given us a lot to think about when it comes to Team inspections in general, and the advantages of it. I do want to conclude though, with a plug for where you teach, because I respect the fact that you didn’t throw that in there. But I really for our listeners who are in Long Island. You know, where do you teach? How can they get a hold of you if they want to learn from Rob Byrne?

Rob Byrne
It’s Sunrise Career Institute. The owner’s name is Bill Lupardo. He’s, he’s actually moving to a new location in Farmingdale. So and I appreciate you throwing that shout out there. And really super nice guy continuing ed. He does continuing ed classes. He does the full 100 hours for your licensing. So yeah, they can definitely look him up or if anybody has any questions, Ian, feel free to give my information out, my email, my phone number, I have absolutely no problem picking up a phone call. Because we do a lot of driving. And I tell people, Ian doesn’t do enough podcasts in a week and you listen to it, 45 minutes, done. Okay. And one of the other guys was saying yeah, I think it was, yeah, we would..

Ian Robertson
Mike Ortiz.

Rob Byrne
Yeah, there you go. Oh, by the way, that was a great, great podcast.

Ian Robertson
Oh, I love Mike. We’ve had him on a bunch.

Rob Byrne
Really. Yeah, no, solid guy. Like really valid points. And yeah, he’s he’s definitely good. But um, I enjoy the company on my drives. It’s like, how much can you listen to the radio or, you know, the news, which is another story, but you know, sports, you know, Rangers are out. Mets are kinda like, mmm…you know, so, yeah, let’s have a conversation. Keep me company. I got a 45 minute drive, and we just chat. So yeah, please, I have no problem with anybody, even with the school, if you know, they want information with that we can we can connect them with that as well. And, you know, help each other out.

Ian Robertson
Well, Rob, you’ve been awesome to talk to we’re gonna have to have you on the show again, because I think there’s about a million subjects that we could probably talk about. But again, Rob Byrne from Higher Elevation Home Inspections over in Long Island. Thank you so much. Appreciate you being on the show.

Rob Byrne
It was a pleasure. Thanks for having us. And looking forward to the next one.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, thank you, talk soon.

Rob Byrne
Thank, Ian. Have a good day.

Outro: On behalf of myself, Ian, and the entire ITB team, thank you for listening to this episode of inspector toolbelt talk. We also love hearing your feedback, so please drop us a line at [email protected].

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*The views and opinions expressed in this podcast, and the guests on it, do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Inspector Toolbelt and its associates.