A foundation company said this house needed major work and steel piers everywhere. I got under there myself and found a very different story.

We had this house under contract and moving along fine until a foundation company came out and dropped a bid that changed everything. Steel piers everywhere, structural leveling, big scary numbers. The buyers were already under the gun with a lease deadline, and when that report landed, the deal fell apart.

The thing about some of these foundation companies is that some of those guys are real scare-tactic people. They come out, take a quick look, and put together a bid designed to make you panic. And it works. It can blow up a deal before anyone has a chance to dig deeper.

So I took the house off the market. I wanted to do some real discovery before we relaunched it, because my job is to make sure we're putting a solid product back on the market with full disclosure of everything we actually know, not what one company scared somebody into believing.

I changed clothes and crawled under the house myself.

What I found was nothing like what that bid described. The structural beams were in good shape. Old beams had been removed and replaced with new cantilever beams. The front porch beam had been replaced at some point, too. Everything was sitting on the pilings exactly the way it was supposed to be.

The only real issue was two tilted piers in the far back corner, and those were leaning because of water intrusion on that side of the house. The fix for that is straightforward: correct the gutter so the water diverts away from the foundation, grade the area, and stabilize those two piers. That's it.

“They wrote up that big, scary bid without ever getting all the way back there to look.”

But here's where it gets really interesting. When I got all the way into the very back corner of this house, and I could barely fit back there, I found that the old pilings that looked like they were falling apart were just sitting on a 2x4. Behind them were brand-new pilings installed when the addition was added to the house. 

The foundation company that wrote up that big, scary bid never got all the way back there to actually look. They saw the old pilings, slapped a number on them, and walked away. If we had gone with their bid, they would have charged us to replace piers that had already been replaced.

We brought in our own foundation expert, someone I trust and use regularly. Their assessment matched exactly what I saw under there. No structural leveling needed. Three out of four people who looked at this house said don't touch it, just button up the water issue and the two piers. That's the advice I'm going with, because I trust the people who give me honest answers over the ones who hand me a scare-tactic bid.

Be very careful where you get your advice from. Double and triple-check everything. And if you have to crawl under the house yourself to make sure they actually did a thorough job, do it. Because sometimes they're not doing a full enough look, and they're just going to bid it out.

I saved this homeowner a ton of time, money, and heartache. And we can say with full confidence that somebody can move into this house without having to mess with anything beyond those minor corrections. We'll have the certification to back it up.

If you need someone in Austin who's going to go the extra mile, literally, call me at 512-587-4050, email me at [email protected], or visit savvyreg.com.