KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Doctoring Our Homes with Dan Thomsen

Episode Date: July 3, 2024

Welcome to Home Green Homes podcast. I am Izumi Tanaka, a green realtor and the host of the show. Dan Thompson, owner and founder of building doctors in Los Angeles, is my guest today. While he built his business of comprehensive service to improve home performances, he has a variety of credentials in the field of building science and building performance, and also currently serving on the board of efficient. First, California, and member of the steering committee for Tech Clean California. His passion for improving the energy efficiency of existing home is quite palpable.

I found his journey of getting to where he is today as a building performance specialist is very enlightening as well. Please enjoy my conversation with Dan. So Dan, thank you so much for your time today. today. Very welcome. Thanks for having me. Oh, thank you so much. So if you could just start by telling me briefly about who you are and your background.

So my name is Dan Thompson. I have a undergraduate degree from the School of Forestry. I wanted to be a NASCO Park Ranger growing up. And I got my master's degree in Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management. I was flipping homes here in Los Angeles for 10 years. And then the real estate world collapsed in 2008. When I had my, I put my last house on the market the same day, Washington Mutual declared bankruptcy. It was a rough day.

God, it was a rough day. Yeah, yeah. I lost a ton, ton of money. And I was trying to figure out what, what am I going to do for a living? and then I went to this thing called the Go Green Expo and in the LA Convention Center and started walking the floor just trying to get a motivation

or trying to get a feel for what was going on. The world would, those are crazy times, you know, because nobody know what was going on, you know, the real estate, but not on the real estate market, but the financial market. Everything kind of in a spiral. Walked the floor, met a wonderful woman that had said,

oh, you should be an energy auditor or a Greenpoint Raider. And there is a class coming up down in Orange County. And I got that information. And then I was walking around a little bit later. And Ed Begley Jr. happened to be the keynote speaker of this convention, the Go Green Convention. And I've always been a big fan of his. He's a great environmentalist. You know, he's been fighting the good fight.

for a long time. So I stayed late to watch him give the talk. And this was two days after President Obama had become president. And so, you know, everybody asked a few questions, da, da, da, da, and then somebody said, oh, what would you do if you had 10 minutes of President Obama? And he'd tell him that everybody should get a home energy on it. And he tells the story that a local company had came to him and said, hey, can we do an audit on your home? And, you know, he tells us the story that, you know, I'm Mr. Green. You know, you're not going to find a long, but we use all these. great advanced tools that were building science-based tools to test things. And they discovered a bunch of things that was wrong with this house.

And he says, hey, it would be really great. You know, it's a really great to quantify when you have problems in your home. And then on that night, I went home. And then on the John Stewart show, the Daily Show, they played a clip of Katie Kirk interviewing new president, Barack Obama. And the quote was, he was like, Katie, we're going to weatherize every home. We're going to put people back to work. We're going to be less dependent on countries don't like you so much and lower people's bills.

You know, it's a believer. And I'm like, oh, this is going to be the next big thing. I took that class. It happened to be a week later, whatever it was that in Orange County. And I took the class and then I talked to the teacher. And he's like, he goes, yeah, you can do the audit. He goes, but you really want to be a contractor. And, you know, doing the work, you know, doing the ratings, you really can't make a business out of it.

And there happened to be a class coming up up in Northern California. And I called to get on the, get into the class. There was a bunch of RRA funding money, American Recovery Act, you know, that they were trying to stimulate the economy that was coming down the pike. I went to a local meeting and somebody said in the back of the room like, oh, we're like house doctors. And I swear to you, in that millisecond, I'd always had a set of doctor scrubs as my backup Halloween costume. And at that second, I was like, wait, we could all wear doctor scrubs as we go check in the houses. And so I went home that night and went on GoDaddy. And I researched everything with the word doctors in it.

And I still own like 200 different dot-coms, you know, domicons, house surgeons, house medics, level. every version of it to kind of protect the brand. And then I bought, they wanted a bunch of money for buildingdoctors.com. They wanted like $10,000. So I bought the building doctors. Started the whole thing. The class that was available,

they said it was all waitlisted already. There were no classes for another year down here in Southern California. But the lady said, listen, there's usually a couple people that don't show up if you want to drive up to waitlist on it. and I drove up there.

I remember I was butt broke. You know, I've gotten completely wiped out from the real estate clubs. I sold my last house for a $400,000 loss after working on it for a year and a half. It was horrible. And then I went up and got into the class. I got to the second to the last seat that was in there. And so I got to jump on anybody else that was doing it down here in Southern California. It took the classes and, you know, just haven't really looked back.

I've always been a science nerd. And so, you know, combining building science and construction, you know, it just really fit, you know. And so that was a long win in story. So that's how building doctors came about. What a great story. Building science, praise principles and tools to measure and test homes and treat them as a interconnected thing. So that all the systems work together. and you can achieve better results by, you know, looking at the house.

It's a system. The problem that we have in the construction world is that contractors don't talk to each other. So drive all guys do one things. Plumbers do one thing. Electricians do another. Everybody kind of messes up their own stuff. And they don't really understand how to make things work altogether as a system. So this new industry being what's called a home performance contractor,

We just understand how everything works better together and we can achieve better results, you know, make people more comfortable, breathing better air, healthier homes that are safer and that are actually more valuable. It's actually a really incredible story, Dan. I'm so glad I heard this because I didn't know anything about your background. I just kind of knew what you do. But yeah, so tell me what building doctors do. So we usually start with a comprehensive energy on it. So we have all these building science-based tools of a big thing. It's called the blower door, which is an adjustable frame that goes in an exterior door. And then we have a fan in there. And then we fill up the house full of air.

And then we have a gauge or monometer gauge where we can read the pressure, where you can determine what the overall leakage factor is by pressure versus what the size of the hole is in the ring. and then that determines how much air is leaking in and out of your home. And then while we have it set up in that scenario, we take an infrared camera and we go around and we look at ceilings, we look at walls, we can look at air leakage points and we can determine all these different things with it. You know, I call that like getting the x-ray on your thing. That's the name building duct just kind of fits because you're literally getting a physical on your home. You know, you buy the most expensive thing you're ever going to buy. in your lifetime and you don't know anything about it you know and most people have never been in their crawl spaces they haven't been in their addicts that they don't really know what's going on with it so we measure and test everything that it it sets the baseline for what the current conditions are and then we use energy modeling software where we put in all the current scenarios you know lack of insulation you know air leakage factors we also use thing called a duck blaster that determines how much air is leaking in and out of

your ducts and quantify all that. And then we put in that energy model what the current scenarios are. And then we can say, okay, if we insulate this, put in a more efficient piece of equipment, put in a smaller HVAC system, but with better design ducks and better airflow, blah, blah, blah, what would be the model to energy reduction? And then we put all that together in a big report. We call it, you know, we call it the treatment plan. and for what is the right thing to do for your home.

And a lot of it we get away from preconceived notions of what you've been conditioned to listen to on the radio of changing your windows and changing your doors, which is just not true, especially in our climate zone. And then we teach our homeowners from a building science point of view where they're losing energy, where they're wasting it, where their money's best well spent. and then we come up with our treatment plan, okay, let's insulate the walls, let's, you know, get rid of this old gas furnace, put in a heat pump, all electric HVAC systems that are half the size but are more comfortable than they've ever been with it.

And we do the work. And then after the work is done, we do that same energy audit that we started out with. We do after we're done, it's called the test out energy audit so that we can document, we can document. we can document the exact improvements that are done in the home. And I'll let your listeners in on a little secret that people lie and contractors lie, but the numbers don't lie. Right. So, you know, I can tell you exactly how much air leakage we've reduced in the home, what the thermal load we've reduced it to, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all these different things. And it's all third party verifiable. there's one of our certifications is called the BPI Building Performance Institute, you know,

certifications of they have standards of how you test a home and health and safety things and natural air changes per hour and blah blah, blah, all those factors that we adhere to. Yeah. So it's really great. So we have ridiculously happy homeowners, you know, that have never been more comfortable their home that are using less energy. They're breathing better air. It's their home is safer.

We've made their home more. valuable Cal Berkeley and UCLA did a white paper that showed that homes with these energy efficiency improvements in these certifications actually appraised 9% higher than ones without. And then on top of it at the very end, we also put solar towards the end, right? So we like to say reduce before you produce, reduce the load on your home before you start producing it up on your rooftop. And then you put in the right-size system. You don't have to put an oversize system.

So if we cut the usage of energy down on this house, then we can power the house next door and so on and so far. And keep ahead of the game. If you notice we really haven't any brownouts or blackouts in the past few years. Because we're reducing the energy usage on the current, on the existing homes. Energy code in California, we've got the best in the nation for new construction. That didn't start until 1978. Right. So our business model is we've found.

focus in on the older homes, you know, that, that, that, that, um, they were built really well, but that are not, they're not insulated, no wall insulation, no adequate, you know, maybe attic insulation, but it's not doing really well. Um, but leaky old homes with giant, you know, oversized X-FX systems and, uh, and size it all correctly, yeah. And, and we're also big advocates of, of electrification as well. So getting, getting, uh, um, Californians off of fossil fuels, it's, you know, switching to an all-electric. future, which you can't avoid it. It's the way we're going to go. I try to tell people it's like, I don't care if you're pink, purple, gay, straight, Democrat, Republican, there's a limited

amount of resources in the ground. And that bright, shiny thing is going to be coming out pretty much every day for the next couple billion years. We need to reuse that and capture that and power our home. So every other one has had an electric car in five, 10 years. Every house is going to have an heap up eachback system. It's, you know, the gas appliances and fossil fuels, it's a limited resource, but I want to put the gas company out of business as soon as possible. It's actually quite impressive. The scope of services that you offer all the way from energy audit to installing solar panels, you do comprehensive work. Tooth and nuts, yeah. Yeah. What was the one saying I was starting to come up? You know, you're in charge of your own personal energy and your home.

Let building up and take care of the rest of it. you know like cutting the bills down and then you know putting a little solar ray up on the top and sizing it yeah yeah so because i i actually hired you to do a blow or draw test on a listing i had that was a flip right and um you said 9% on the based on the study but um my the certification i use was pearl certification and their study shows four to 15 percent you know It varies, right? Depends on the home, right? Yeah, exactly. What's climate zone?

What's the wind orientation around it? If it's two-story, one-story, and there's a bunch of... Right, right, right, right. So who actually hire you? Is it mostly homeowners? Yes. Yeah, I mean, we get the occasional renter that wants to be breathing in or breathing better air and what have you. Or they have comfort issues or dealing with a landlord that hasn't done any stuff to, you know, that does.

right in their home. But yeah, typically homeowners. There's big stuff in in multifamily. I mean, everybody can use it, you know. And I think homes that are just not really well, well, uh, uh, insulated and very, very sneaky would greatly benefit from from the building science points of view. And do you know what actually prompt, prompt them prompts them to contact you? Because I mean, that's the, that's the thing that most people are. are not aware of what you do. Right, right. So I call it the pain points, right?

So if you get somebody that calls that because, oh my God, they got a really big giant electric bill or a big gas bill, or they saw an environmental crisis, you know, when the big oil spill happened in the Gulf, they're like, hey, I want to do my part of getting off of fossil fuels. Or if it's, hey, I can't, in the summertime, I can't go to the second floor of my house, because the bedroom is just too crazy hot.

Or every time the furnace kicks on, my kids' eyes tear up, whatever that reason may be. Yeah. You know, we call it those pain points and we can solve all those problems with it. Right, right. That's amazing. So all the things that you were talking about, weatherization and electrifying everything, we now have this thing called. inflation reduction act.

Ira, yes ma'am. Right? Yeah, so the Biden administration, our current administration, is big advocate for it. And of course, California was ahead of the bell curve already. We had a program called Tech Clean, California, where they're dangling the carrot, thousands of dollars of getting people up with furnaces, you know, getting their heating of their home off of fossil fuels, and then their water heating because it's really easy to keep that.

Those are big things to do. yeah. Right. So the tax credit was already available this year at 2023, but the rebate part is what I've been really anxiously waiting for. Yeah. I was just on a webinar today about it. It's realistically not going to roll out until mid-2024. Mid-24. I was hoping it would be two-one. But you're still be eligible. We just confirmed that any of the work that we was done actually after the IRA law was signed into effect. We just need to figure out what the process is to do it. You know, depending upon what the contract, we, I'm on the steering committee for it.

So I'm not worried about us qualifying for it. But, you know, I would definitely be concerned if you use a contractor that isn't aware of the program and they don't do the steps that need to be done, then I don't think you'd be qualified. I just got, I'll email it to you. what the pre-qualification steps are so that they can go back retroactively. Pre-qualifications for the contractors or the homeowners? Both. It's what needs to be done. There's language that needs to be in the contract.

You need to show that there's going to be an energy reduction. You need to use modeling software. You need to be very vocal with the homeowners to say, hey, these are the options, you know, all the stuff that we do in our audit. But definitely, you know, not all contractors are up to speed about what's the best way to do it. Right. Right. So I know that each state has to set it all up.

And so do you think that California is going to be one of the first state in the country? Oh, we are. Yeah. We already have existing programs and they're trying to, instead of reinventing the wheel, they're trying to figure out how can they piggyback like on the tech clean California, which is already statewide. That's what they're working on. it's just it's just not rolling out as quickly as they thought we'd all hope that it would be rolling

out by the by the third quarter of this year this year not even close yeah and you know we're also dealing with the government you know to move a big monstrous thing like that yeah each state state needs to come up with their own program IRS just I think it was just two weeks ago they just thought they just did a release to understand about this is what the rules are now that you know rules, how are they going to implement the state programs? What are the quality control aspects going to be? A whole bunch of different steps. They got to hire folks and then they got to figure out how do they implement it.

Who's going to be writing the check? How are they going to write the checks? Yeah, it's going to be a bit of a pain. But we'll jump through the things that, you know, what we can. But the tax incentives are already active. Right. And you can break up measures over a couple years. Like we have fine.

We're doing some of the work next week. and then we're going to do more week into 2024. So they can write off, you know, wall insulation this year and then attic insulation next year, whatever, you know, the write-off. Right, right, right, right. And what do you think this IRA is going to do for us, for the homeowners, for the environment? What is your hope that this IRA is going to accomplish?

Well, I mean, just people talking about it is a great thing, right? The word electrification wasn't on anybody's mind or, you know, on their tongue at all. So, you know, the conversation about heat pumps dispelling some of the myths about heat pumps, right? There was a big problem with there were some crappier models that were out 20, 30 years ago, and they didn't do a great job. And also when you have guys and gals that don't know how to install them, you know, you get the bad rap, you know. So it's, oh, they're crap. Like, you know, there's heat that people say, oh, they don't work well in cold weather. Well, at the Arctic Circle in the test labs, they use heat pumps to form their place there.

And that's as cold as you get, you know. Yeah. So those are cold weather heat pumps. They're different to die. But we don't need those here in Southern California. But anything to get the conversation going about where we need to go as a future, as a nation, you know. We don't need to be drilling to try to get to. a little bit more of oil out of the ground.

I call it, it's like, you know, if you have a towel and you're trying to ring, you know, a little bit of the moisture of the towel, well, we've done that with fracking, right? And so we can turn the towel just a little bit tighter here and we're squeezing a little bit more stuff out of the earth. But at some point, it's going to be kaput. So, again, that bright, shiny thing is going to come out pretty much every day for the next, you know, however many generations. Let's figure out how to capture that and be the talk for you.

So to me, to talk to it in anybody, you know, if we can help offset the cost a little bit, it's great. You know, in my humble opinion, though, the reality that the IRA, they're really trying to bring in lower income folks and middle income folks. Yeah. And let's be honest, you can't own a home, especially here in Southern California, and be considered low income. Sorry. Unless you, unless you inherited it from somebody. But, you know, average home here is, what, $800,000 here in Lale County? Well, I mean.

If you qualify for an $800,000 loan, you've got to make so much money that you're not going to be able to get the highest amount of incentives. Exactly. But so be it. If you can still get a couple thousand bucks and you're doing the right thing for the planet and doing it for your own, you know, self, you know, health and all these other things. Again, it's still a win-win situation all around. Yeah, I agree. I totally agree. So how, what areas do you usually cover building doctors?

just Los Angeles or how much farther out of L.A. do you go? But, you know, we're trying to, you know, when I first started, I went anywhere. You know what I mean? Somebody that because you're kind of hungry for business and you want to learn and you get experience from being in different buildings. Right. You know, going down to San Diego, going up to Santa Barbara and stuff. Wow.

But with gas prices the way they are, you know, up to five, six bucks a gallon, we got rid of our diesel vehicles and we've, switched over to compressed natural gas trucks, you know. Oh, wow. Which I think is the step before. There aren't good electric trucks out there yet. That'll be the next general, you know, the next step, but we, we, we're trying to keep our circle a little bit tighter just because I see. You know how it is commuting and unless, you know, we're doing a job in Santa Monica right now. And it took me an hour and 40 minutes to get back to the office. I know. I know. Horrible. Yeah. You know, luckily.

H. 145 from Santa Monica to you're in mid-city, right? Well, that's our thing, but we just, we have a shot now on the east side of L.A. near Cal State, L.A. Yeah. Oh, we've got to cross downtown, you know, it's the opposing traffic of it all. Yeah. So we're trying to keep our-to-you-life light. Yeah, give me a nightmare.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it could be a nightmare. But we, you know, we try to help people out as we can and steer people in the direction of how we can help them out. But the longer, we're, we're also a little bit pickier of who we hire and who we fire as a customer now

just because we know what, who's a good fit, who's not. I see. But we love people that are data oriented, you know, doctors and engineers and all these people do stuff because we can kill them with data and say,

hey, listen, this is what we've done. And, and there's, you know, we're really trying to be, you know,

super, we're numbers people here. And we're, we try to be really transparent. and I'm like, hey, this is not what's going to happen. And, you know, when we're drilling and filling your walls, it's a week of hell for a lifetime of comfort. You know, we've got to do a hold of the lower two-downer walls,

fill it up. There's going to be mess. You can't have a perfectly clean house when you're an instruction thing. But, you know, after the two-week process, you know, we brag that we're multitasking kings, that we've got somebody in the attic, you know, vacuuming it out, like somebody's in the crawl space air sealing it,

all the other guys who are moving the H-back system. And, you know, so we're always doing stuff. Yeah. Currently, while other contractors, they have to bring in four different crews to do different things. Right. Right. They're on their schedule. And that's why it's really well for us.

Yeah. Just because we do everything in house. I love that. So how can people find you? Buildingdoctors.com is our website. Okay. It's the best way. Yes.

And yeah, take a look at that. I try to educate people as much. That's part of the best that we do is we love our customers with our, you know, people get after the energy audit, they get a 50, 60 page bus report. But it's actually an easy read because it tells everybody all the different systems in their house and, again, where they're wasting energy, where the health and safety aspects and things that are in theirs and where their money's best well spent. Right.

I love your website. It's very informative and has a lot of great information, useful information. I hope people can find. And I teach classes on this at national conferences and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's always kind of fun to get, you know, in the know of what's going on and new things that are coming around the corner too. So, you know, I absolutely love the business that we're in, you know, again, we've got, you know,

we're at a 99% being of really happy customers. because we don't lie, you know, there's a lot of crappy contractors that take advantage of people and don't do what they say. And I like to sleep well at night. We try to do what we say we're going to do. We make mistakes, but we fix it, you know.

But then we also give proven results, too. Again, we guarantee no more than a three-degree temperature difference in any room or any floor on your home. Wow. People just can't do. They're used to 20-degree temperature stratification. Yeah. Hopsores and downstairs.

And, you know, people that can't use the second floor of their house in the summertime because it's just too hot. It's like, well, yeah, I don't think that. And people like, oh, my God, I can't believe how quiet it is and efficient, all this, like, yeah. And people's bills, one of our videos, I remember this was way back more when it was gas stuff. He's like, he goes, we got a $20 gas bill, Dan. He goes, we've never had a $20 gas bill in our life, you know, we got rid of the furnace stuff

and things that's in there. So, yeah. I really appreciate the work you do. It's very, it's unusual to find somebody like you, you know, your company that do all that stuff. So I really appreciate it. Well, it's also the future, right? We're trying to get people in the industry.

It's not easy. Absolutely. It's definitely not easy. And you have to understand the building science is kind of neat to understand. But once you learn it, you can't unlearn it. Because when I was flipping houses, I was like, oh, I did it wrong. these times to insulation. Like, oh, that's not the right thing to do.

And oh, I think, you know, bad scenarios. And I don't think most people are evil. I think they're just not well informed of it. Like, okay, there's a better way to do things in sizing of HVAC systems and how well it's designed and how it can be done. So, you know, I clearly, I like to talk. So, but I also like to educate when we do stuff. So, and try to teach people as you go like.

I think we can be a better world, we're all, better industry and things like that. So that's what's great. about home performance is that we get rid of the crappy contractors because you have to be responsible for your numbers and your work and held accountable. And there's not a lot of that in the construction work, but they go on and they close up shots and months and next one, but not the stuff that we do. Yeah. That's why we kind of have, we got a really good reputation of, you know, we're honest and we do what we say we're going to do. Yeah. I agree. Thank you so much, Dan. You're very welcome, yeah. Yeah, Izumi Tanaka with Home Green Homes Park.

Thank you so much.