Many years ago, I recognized the foundation repair industry has pretty much run amok. We have sales people with no engineering experience or background observing, analyzing, making recommendations, and specifying products (their own of course) on structural components of a house. On top of this they do it on a 100% commission basis…. Something that engineers would never do from an ethical practice. Additionally, it is done in one visit, with no peer review or access to online resources.
Sales people with no engineering experience or background observing, analyzing, making recommendations, and specifying products (their own of course) on structural components of a house.
We recognized this and more problems with the current industry and looked around for a better model… and found none. So we took it upon ourselves to blaze a new trail and build an entirely different model. We separated sales and engineering functions completely…. putting them in entirely different departments whose leaders answer only to myself or our general manager. In this way Sales has no influence on the recommendations of the Engineering team…. Other than to accurately communicate the Homeowner’s goals and concerns.
It seems that when you introduce new models or systems into the community that are radically different, the antibodies of that community system come out to attack any foreign items; in this case that happens to be us. Apparently, since our reports have actual recommendations sealed by a licensed engineer, homebuilders cannot just ignore them like they have done with other foundation repair contractors (as they were never sealed). Several of their Engineers have been set loose on our company to “reign us in” … or perhaps risk civil suits from New York Stock Exchange traded companies.
Regularly, our Engineers recommend that no foundation repairs be undertaken.
One of the criticisms levied on us among others, is that we are too aggressive and that our Engineers are not fair, impartial, and balanced. Of course, the only reports they see are the ones sent to them by Homeowners that are unhappy with their builders. They never see the reports where our Engineers have made no recommendations for repairs.
Regularly, our Engineers recommend that no foundation repairs be undertaken. Sometimes they may put a “protection plan” on paper for the Homeowner. This is for those homeowners who have a low tolerance for risk and want to do some proactive work at their own initiative. This protects us from Homeowners years later who develop problems and want to know why we did not have a crystal ball to predict these possible future problems. Now, we can point to the protection plan that they could have proceeded with in order to be proactive.
Quite often, we don’t even see any protection plans that could be acted upon by an overly risk adverse Homeowner. In these cases, we simply suggest a monitoring only recommendation, and allow them to bring us back over a period of a year or two to measure the difference of movement over time, where we can build what we call a subtractive manometer. This is a topographical map of the floor plan similar to what we do on the first visit, only we take the values of the 2nd visit and subtract them from the values of the first visit and then build a topographical map from those values. This allows us to graphically show how the house has moved over an intervening period of time.
Our Engineering Department does not face any pressure from our Sales Department.
The point that I am making here is that one of the valuable things that we provide with our forensic engineering report is to establish a baseline with it that can be valuable if there are future claims, real estate sales or other events in the future that are best analyzed with a baseline. Within the last year we have provided 24 such reports for homeowners. The link to them can be found here. The names and addresses have been redacted for the owner’s privacy, however all the other data is unchanged.
I hope this puts to rest any concerns that our Engineering Department does not face any pressure from our Sales Department and that the purpose of our system to make it fair, unbiased, and objective… in order to keep the Homeowner at the center of our universe.
