Sustainable Building, Healthy Homes, and Austin Real Estate

0:00 Henry Vias with Christie's International Real Estate. How are you? I'm good. How are you, my friend? Good, good. Thank you for coming on and talking to us about the wonderful world of Henry Vias. Yeah. You tell me what you want to know. Let's set the stage. Henry and I have known each other for a long time because we are cousins. Yes. So yeah, Henry and I have gone on a similar journey of life together. You know, I moved from Ohio when I was nine or 10 and you were in Miami and also moved to Austin around the same time. So we are both only children and we both grew up together, age difference about 12 years, 13 years. I'm 40. You're 29. So 11 years. Yeah.

0:46 11 years. As, as, uh, As I was growing up in Austin, you were, you know, kind of doing your thing as well. And then, um, a lot of your similar interests actually tied into a lot of what you're doing today. And you know, what I, what I also became passionate about later on later down the road. So, um, I think in general, we're going to have multiple. conversations on this platform, diving into the different worlds that you've become really an expert in. So set the table for who Henry Vias is today. And then we'll start to backtrack and go through the interesting things that you've been a part of. Yeah. So been working

1:31 in real estate for shoot, almost 15 years now. Got my license in 2010 in May. moved here from Miami when I was 22 to finish school and just loved, ended up loving Austin and staying here. Main reason why was because your mom and dad moved here and just wanted to finish school and, you know, go back home. But Austin just kept me here as amazing of a city as it is. So when I was, when I graduated college from finance, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, had a couple jobs. One of them was with your mom as her office manager. That didn't really work out great. I'm not the office manager type.

2:18 And got my real estate license. And I was actually getting my license before I left Miami, but put that on the back burner until I graduated and figure out what I wanted to do and kind of just got into it. started off with a great team, Matt and Barbara Ditlow, started selling new construction townhome condos and started building my business that way. And luckily, throughout that journey, found a passion for healthy and sustainable building. And you were at the genesis of that journey, found a Facebook group. that just talked about a bunch of alternative different things. And

3:04 it had a post about, you know, hemp creed, fire resistant, pest resistant, mold resistant, and was dealing with a lot of new construction. At that time, I was like, God, our construction is really poor quality in this city. Most of the mainstream stuff, unless you have like high end builders and things like that. And I was like, huh, what is this? This is weird. This sounds great. And it was like a fly, like a Facebook flyer to go to this hemp Crete workshop that was put on by the hemp industry association. So it was right outside of Loveland, Colorado, where we had family. And so we Yeah, that was a that was a great introduction to that that space. Yeah, it was I had no idea what to expect. So, you know, ended up going to Vermont with

3:50 Matt at that time, you know, to go check out his hometown. But we took a carpentry class at a sustainable building school called Yestermal in Vermont, incredible place. And from there, you know, the little traveling and then Right when I got back, I left the Colorado to go to this hemp building workshop. It was put on by the Hemp Industry Association. They're essentially were the advocacy group for the entire hemp industry. And they brought in a man named Steve Allen. He's the founder of the International Hemp Building Association, mostly based in Europe. And this was back in 2014. So hemp really hadn't been legalized yet at that time. And I never really

4:35 heard of hemp. I've heard of its cousin and the other things that that comes with. And yeah, just was hearing this older Irish guy talk about hemp creed and hemp building and talking about vapor open walls. And, you know, we had about three, four hours, half a day of just like slides and, you know, some, you know, just some more literature work and, you know, getting to know the product, the history and what's, why are they building this way compared to our standard, you know, ways of construction. And then we spent the rest of the time actually building like a hemp creek little yoga studio for someone outside of in Berkeley, Colorado, beautiful piece of

5:22 land. And in the middle of that, it just like, open my eyes, like, I don't think I thought it would have such a profound effect on me as it has now. And we'll talk about kind of how that journey has evolved, mainly focused from hemp, but you know, to other aspects in building science and healthy, you know, construction and materials. But that really took me down a journey of doing hemp advocacy in Texas. So Hemp Industry Association started state chapters at that time. And I co-founded the Texas chapter of the Hemp Industry Association, along with some other people, Coleman Hemphill and Sheila Hemphill and others here

6:08 in the state. And we really advocated for the legalization of industrial hemp, but... coming back, you know, working in real estate again and seeing so many clients with, you know, health issues and mold issues and all that. I was like, man, we have to find a way to to bring this to, you know, the Austin market and educate people on it. So a lot of that hemp advocacy work was just also followed. by me just wanting to go to every like hempcrete workshop I can go to or anywhere I went, I wanted to see what they were doing with hempcrete. And so did a hempcrete workshop out in Marfa that I really got hands on. Like I thought I was paying to learn, but I was actually paying to work, which was great. And it was fun. It discovered Marfa in that. And then Steve Allen, I've always wanted to go

6:55 to his international hemp building symposium, but it was in Europe. So I was a little bit harder, you know, time-wise and work-wise. but he had one in Canada and Montreal and that was the first time it really, you know, opened my eyes of like, hey, there's actually markets that are doing, you know, hemp creed and hemp building and all that. And, you know, we had seven, eight, nine, 10 presentations of projects in Europe and projects in Mexico and, you know, large scale commercial projects to, you know, multi unit town homes. And it was like, oh, wow, like this is, you know, this is happening right now. So yeah, it's been, and you know, throughout my career that they've always kind of been, you know, parallel to each

7:40 other. You know, my real estate, my standard real estate career, you know, residential, buying, selling, helping investors, all that, had it really merged with kind of my, you know, passion for hemp building. And yeah, I think it's been you know, a long journey trying to continue to figure out how they can intertwine. And, you know, like I mentioned before, it's more, you know, being solely focused on hemp building or hemp creed, which funny enough just finished helping host a sprayed applied hempcrete workshop in Austin, with Cameron McIntosh and Damian Bomber of Amer Chandra and Urizi. So I still have that

8:27 passion on bringing it to the mainstream. But I've kind of expanded involved it more to, you know, healthy materials to passive house, which is really trying to improve the standard of the quality of construction and efficiency. You know, trying to find methods of, you know, making things more mold resistant and just, you know, we're just bombarded by, you know, toxic materials. So how can we educate the market on improving their air quality, improving the materials that they choose? Because ultimately, that's part of, you know, real estate. You know, not all agents really care about that. Or if they do, it's hard to intertwine it. So, you know, mostly

9:13 you're trying to get your sales and, you know, make your commissions and, you know, really serve your clients from, you know, are you making a good investment? Are you buying a good home? Are you in a good area? You know, helping them with inspections and all that. But, you know, for me being having my eyes opened. Um, to the health side of things has made me feel like I have an obligation to educate the market and people and stuff like that. So I don't know if that's a somewhat of an intro that you wanted, but that was great. Yeah. No, you, you, you talked about the, the big components there. I think if we go back to when you got your real estate license and when you started to get into the real estate game in Austin, can you bring us back to that time period? Because Austin has changed so much from 2007, eight, nine. especially,

9:59 but even in the last 10 years specifically, like the amount of buildings that have that have gone up has been crazy. The infiltration from different markets of consumers has changed. What were what were some of the things that you remember, at least from that time period that is a world of difference compared to now? Yeah, at that time, you know, when I got into the market and really started working real estate full time, I got my license in 2010, but really started working in the market. full-time like end of 2011-12. We were just starting to get out of kind of the financial crisis of 2008, you know, the housing bubble at that time. You know, people were getting, you know, non-income mortgages and, you know,

10:44 there's a lot of speculative buying. And I wasn't as educated in the market at that time when I first got into it and graduated. But compared to a lot of other markets coming from Miami, and me going back and forth, markets like Miami, like Vegas, like Phoenix, they had really hard downturns at that time, but Austin kind of stayed steady. And just Texas in general, the job market was stronger when I graduated in Texas versus back home in Miami, depending what industry you wanted to get in. And I think at that time, Austin was... you know, had experienced the rapid growth that it had. I think it was just starting to, you know, get out of, you know, that financial

11:32 turbulent period. It was blossoming. Yeah, starting to for sure. And I think people we saw, you know, the potential there. And I think, you know, I think there are a lot of builders that, you know, a couple of the projects that we worked on were foreclosed properties that the developer and investor took over. Um, and there are a lot of builders that got wiped out during that time. Like there's some neighborhoods you go back and, you know, it was a certain style. And then, uh, the new style that they're building now, uh, was because that developer, you know, got knocked out in 2007, eight, nine, 10. Right. So, but I think the potential for Austin, you know, was seen, I don't think as much as it started to evolve, you know, really we started to see, you know, a lot of that pickup of. you know, when

12:18 we were getting rated as like the top city for everything, right? Like, you know, everyone wanted to be here for South by Southwest and ACL. And, you know, there was a good job market, tech market, but it wasn't as robust as it is now, right? We didn't have the Facebooks and the Amazon and the Teslas and, you know, the Samsungs and all of that. And I think the main attraction was like, hey, there's job opportunity. It was affordable. you know like compared to other cities like you know really you know and you could be older from Austin and be like well back in the 80s 90s or whatever 2000s but from what I know you know being you know in my 20s you know way more affordable than what Miami was and just the lifestyle right

13:04 like people loved you know, the music scene, the food was really good. It was affordable, like had a great downtown, you know, presence, but you didn't feel like you're in a big city. But you would go see these incredible shows and you had such incredible nature around you. Like I was, you know, born and raised in Miami, a huge beach guy, but I felt like I didn't really like need to miss it as much because we had our green belts and, you know, the lakes and, you know, the hiking and, you know, it was just, it was a different style of, you know, nature that you're getting into. And it's, it's the same reason why so many people are still flocking to Austin today. It was a different scene and it was up and coming to where people were coming to Austin for vacation or they were coming for South by Southwest. And they were like, man,

13:49 we got to live here full time and kids, right? Like you got, you know, the, it's huge university cities. like multiple, right, you got UT, you got, you know, St. Ed's and San Marcus, you know, Texas State, and so many universities around the area. So, you know, you also have a lot of parents and people coming here, the tech industry. You know, you have second homes for people, you know, on Lake Austin or out in Marble Falls or in the surrounding areas, you know, the wine country, the hill country that's, you know, really grown a lot. And so, you know, out of all, you know, out of all the cities, people really always want to come here. That's everything's, you know, big events are happening here. And, you know, we really started to see that growth. you know, 2012, 13, 14, 15, you know, and I think it started

14:35 like to really, you know, vibe out, you know, around, you know, when you start getting into 16, 17, 18. And then, you know, we really were just constantly going up and up. And then COVID came and, you know, no one was sure what was going to happen for a few months. And then it just went insane, like a lot of other markets. And so during that time, that's like when we became like you know, I think like a big boy city, you know, big city. And you had all these big investments like Tesla and, you know, I know we had the Formula One track, but a little bit before, but that was a big thing that put us on the global stage and South by Southwest got bigger and ACL and. Austin FC. Austin FC. We have a, we have a professional soccer team now and you have, you know, the Dells and the Samsungs

15:22 and Apple was building a campus and Facebook was bringing a headquarters. It was like, they're a a month or if. two, three months, I like just every other week, there was an announcement of like a huge corporation and you just had people flocking from all over the country. And that really expanded the growth and, you know, really sucked up our inventory and prices just exploded. And, you know, we're having a correction now. We're trying to see like where the dust settles, where we'll be at. You know, we had exponential growth almost like 50 to 100 percent in certain neighborhoods and areas over the past 10 years and a lot like almost 50 in those like 2020 to 2022 time period when things were bonkers. But we're trying to see where the correction is now.

16:09 But regardless of what happens, Austin still has its core, right? Like we have a lot of the big... huge buildings now, you know, like a bunch of condos and office buildings and South Congress has been totally, you know, redeveloped and you have the domain that keeps expanding and all these like, quote unquote, domain like developments. And, you know, all these, you know, neighborhoods that have started to pop up during that time. But yeah, it's just, you know, it's interesting to see what the next, you know, 10, 20 years will be. you know, I'm excited for it. I love Austin is still, you know, it's essence is might might have changed a little bit, but its core is still there. I think, you know, people also come here because it's such a unique mindset,

16:55 too. Right. Like I think that's also part of like the attraction of the market is you have all these entrepreneurial mindsets like, you know, you have a lot of health conscious people and the biohackers and the techies and all of those things that like, you know, you really don't seeing a lot of other cities, right? Like it's like a true, like healthy mindset. And one of the big things too was like people loved all the farmers markets and like Austin was one of the first big like farm to market, you know, farm to table markets and things like that. And that's why I think the culinary scene is so great here. And, and so, yeah, it's interesting to see, you know, where it's at now and where to go and where it came from for sure. Yeah. And you have, you know, especially going off the health focus, you have the sprouts and the Wheatsvilles

17:41 and the central markets, like all intertwined, right? The whole foods, uh, location is in downtown Austin headquarters headquarters. Right. So you did an incredible job of setting that stage. It brought me back to some of those time periods that, you know, I had kind of forgotten that whole timeline of events. Um, because, you know, there, there were so many things about Austin. that we look at now. in a sort of remembrance way, but it's still the things that we get to enjoy today. I think you're absolutely right, at least from the small city mindset where we can have all of these conglomerate of people, it still feels small. It still feels like we run into these people and can go see someone that we're interested in on an everyday basis, but it still also is a big enough city now, especially

18:28 the next 10 to 20 years when we start to expand into Georgetown, into San Marcos and maybe this I-35 corridor between San Antonio and... and Waco really expands. Yeah, the Texas Triangle is no joke. Economically, it's probably one of the biggest powerhouses in the whole world right now. And you just think about it location wise, like between... you know, we're like literally smack in the middle between Canada, Mexico, like North America, like you couldn't be more geographically better located, even just within the US right to go to California or Seattle or New York or Florida, you're always you know, you're just four to five hour flight away unless you know, you know, you know, across the oceans or something like that. And so yeah, it's it's interesting

19:13 to see and you know, exciting and you know, a lot of those unique aspects that Austin has brought and has brought people together and love so much. I think from a real estate perspective, we're going to bring it back to that. And from a building perspective, you meet so many different unique people in that regard too, right? You have a great real estate market, but also a lot of people here... been into natural building for a really long time. You know, they've had groups like design, build, live, and the earth and construction initiative that are like more neat, like natural base building materials, like rammed earth and, you know, earth. compressed earth blocks and

19:59 straw bale and all those things that people have been trying to do that and you see these like cool projects around Austin like one of your mom's friends had like an incredible rammed earth house that we just pulled up on and we're like what is this and like a really good neighborhood and we're like wow but Austin has always kind of been you know a great hub for that and I think you know not only with hemp but you know the passive house community here is really great. You know, that's a group of people that, you know, to me, you know, compares a lot to like kind of like the hemp, hemp building community. It's like really passionate, you know, really strong core. But, you know, if you want to get into anything in that regard and learn more and just like improve that like quality of what you're doing, Austin is just like such a great hub for

20:45 that. Definitely. And you were talking about how your real estate profession and your love for building science like intertwined. I feel like the introduction of the hemp building while you were seeing these new construction houses, like you were seeing the poor quality of it. And then you saw hemp create as an alternative, but then you started to look at things different. And so when we started to get into the 2018, 2019 wire, where the massive expansion came in Austin, you had all of these builders come in from God knows where to start building houses. And now you're, you're talking about about the climate in Austin changing from more of a hot desert field to a much more humid climate. Now the building materials and the types of buildings that you were seeing, you were seeing issues

21:30 with, you were seeing some mold pop up and now you're really looking at other building alternatives and starting to go down that. Avenue to find why my, why my house is having issues at two years old. Right. Um, so I think it is a, a beautiful way that, uh, you know, your, your education component and your curiosity basically combined into your, your passions. Yeah, for sure. You know, I didn't getting into this, you know, I started off at new construction, right? So from it, we were, you know, my first part of my career was doing pre sales to to final walkthroughs and delivery, you know, to the people that are buying these new construction town homes. And

22:16 so you see that whole process, you see the guts of the home. But, you know, like everything in life with repetition, you get more and more educated on it. And You just see kind of like the quality of construction, the standard way of building, the building process. And that's not to say like there's not good, like conventional, you know, builders that do, you know, standard conventional construction. But when you start to see that, you know, it really opens your eyes as to like, okay, why did this fail or. you know, why on some of these new construction homes, they're already mold issues. Like you mentioned, you know, Austin was expanding so quickly that investors were just coming in here throwing stuff up. They can sell it like you can throw, you know, anything

23:01 on the market. and it would sell. Now it's a little bit different, right? Like you got to have a good quality product. But at the same time, you can have something that looks like a good quality product and putting makeup on a pig essentially. And that's not even from like an old home flip perspective. That's like new construction. Like you don't even know the guts of your home, right? So as I learned that process, I learned about, you know, what are the important inspections to do? Because when you're taught in real estate, you know, most of the time, As you get older, obviously you have, you know, if you have a pool, you get a pool inspection. But, you know, usually you just have your standard home inspection and you feel like, yeah, you're fine. Like, but, you know, as I've learned is, okay, you do your standard home inspection and then, hey, like your HVAC is one of the most

23:47 important systems in your home. And we've done many, you know, HVAC inspections together and how many HVAC systems have had mold in them and trying to figure out what's the source of that. And then you go, Hey, you should have a mold inspection, right? Regardless if you feel like there's an issue or not, but sometimes you can't even see if there is one. And, you know, unfortunately in this industry, it is such a taboo topic to talk about, but it is one of the most critical inspections that could affect your health. Like the mouth and part of the passion that I've really, you know, has grown in me is seeing so many people affected by mold, like literally debilitating issues from, you know, neurological development issues in children to autoimmune diseases in

24:35 people to just brain fog or just trying to be your optimal self, right? Like that's so critical. And, you know, we live in this world of like biohacking and taking our supplements and doing our cold plunges and saunas and, you know, grounding and like doing everything to get your body. optimally perfect, right? To like be your best self and get in a flow state. But we're not talking about, you know, the four walls around us that we're in 90 % of our life, right? Like people don't realize how much we're inside these homes and what air you're breathing and how that's affecting you no matter what you do, right? So, you know, those inspections, you know, really became something that I know it's a little bit of a cost burden to certain buyers, but ultimately, you're discovering

25:23 issues that are going to cost you way more financially and potentially health-wise on what you can discover and help remedy it, right? And if you love the home and you're willing to make it work, you know, if it's a new if it's a resale or a new construction, you know what you're getting into. Right. So it's been interesting. You know, I've definitely in my career probably lost a lot of deals because of it, but I don't lose sleep over it because I know that like I'm doing the best for that client and. I know that I have a clean conscious in that regard. I give them the information. Ultimately, they're the decision makers, right? I can only provide the information and help guide them to the resources that can

26:10 help uncover that and ultimately decide, hey, do you want to do you want to deal with this or not? This house has some issues. Nope. We love it. We love the area. We love the floor plan. You know, we're going to remodel. We're going to take these things into consideration. Nope. That's too much work for me. Whatever that might be. But you're presenting that information. Yeah, the, the education component. I mean, they, they, uh, they're making one of the biggest purchases of their life, right? So they want to be, um, aware of all of the issues that could possibly be behind the walls, especially. Um, I mean, I know, I know of a lot just off the top of my head of the issues that we've uncovered, not only from the HVAC inspection from the other detailed inspections that, you know, you at least present to your buyers as, Hey, this is what I would recommend you do as, uh, inspection wise.

26:57 when we walk into this house, because you've seen enough issues from the HVAC side specifically, but also the mold side, the plumbing side, and you've developed your list of contractors to call when you have something specific to a trade that you want to check out inside of a home. There was one that jumps to the top of my mind specifically that the HVAC had a certain amount of issues, and then it was cast iron pipes, and then it was... You have you got you got the Moltes and there was mold specifically high in the living room. And it was very strange. And it did seem like when they did the snake for the cast iron piping, there was probably a leak in the cast iron underneath the slab in the living room specifically. And now you uncover not only did you probably

27:42 have a leak or you had a leak in the cast iron piping, but it was affecting the indoor air quality so much that now you have mold in the living room. I mean, but you need three different people plus the home inspector. And who knows like what that mold could have been, right? And ultimately, you know, not to disclose too much, but we ended up finding out like not everything was disclosed to us, right? But the way I look at that is, and I remember another deal last year is, someone might feel like it's overkill to do all these inspections, but they all have different inspectors with a different set of eyes, right? You have your main home inspector who's more of a... general inspection, right? And there's some really good ones out there that'll lead you to that. Then you have your HVAC inspector and then you have a mold inspector who's also going to do some thermal imaging and check moisture and like see

28:29 if there's high spores or whatever for whatever reason, right? Like Austin is a moldy city. Like one thing I have to say I don't love about Austin is allergies and like, man, it is, you know, not to the brink that you want to move, but sometimes you're like, man, I can't take this anymore. So like you have to test the outside mold spores to make sure you know, that they're, you know, that your inside mold, you know, counts are higher, right? Because that's how moldy of a city we are to a degree. So, but, you know, then you have your plumbers and you have, you know, your roof inspections and all these things. And, you know, sometimes, you know, the main home inspector, the mold inspector doesn't catch something that the HVAC guy does. And then, or the mold inspector caught something that, and not even being mold, maybe just like a moisture thing that the the

29:16 main home inspector in the HVAC company or the plumber couldn't catch or whatever that is. And so you start to like piece together. this puzzle and try to get as clear of a picture as you can, especially in resale. New construction is much more straightforward. In that regard, you have like your three phase inspections, foundation, pre-drywall, and like your final inspection. Hopefully, if you can do all three of them, you know, you feel good, as good as you can, and you still have your issues. But older homes, you have no idea what you're going through, and you still discover things, right? But at least then, you have a much, you know, higher head start than you would have instead of just like trying to be like, hey, why is this an issue?

30:01 What's that an issue? Or be like, hey, I'm walking, I just walked into $50,000 instead of $10, $20,000 of work that I was expecting to do. So, you know, regardless if you're, you know, first time home buyer or it's your homestead or you're an investor, because that's part of your investment. And you also want the, you know, the habitat that you're giving your renters to be good too, I would hope, to be part of your equation. It's shocking when I talk to you about your process and I see how other realtors, most other realtors guide their buyer through the buying experience. One, it's a world of a difference and two, I'm shocked that more buyers have, you know, there

30:52 should be more buyers remorse with the lack of inspections that are done on most properties because, you know. as the HVAC guy specifically, we get a lot of calls from people that bought a house one to two years ago that when we walk into that home, like we're talking about some major issues inside of that house that the general inspector is not an HVAC guy. He doesn't understand all of the ins and outs from not only the HVAC system, but also the duct work. The ventilation is a big one as well that, you know. the home inspector is there from a general standpoint to really find major issues. But when you have specific inspectors from different trades go out, they are looking at different things. Like you said, a different set of eyes on multiple different things. And there's going to be some overlap in between. And you're putting together

31:37 this puzzle piece. You're putting together pieces of the puzzle that at the end of the day, your buyer is now able to look at. And they're able to say, Am I going to be comfortable in this house 10 to 15 years down the line? And how much money am I going to be putting inside this home 10 to 15 years down the line? Yeah. So you're really setting your buyers up for success, at least in terms of what they can expect. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, I would want that done for me. Right. Like if I wasn't a real estate agent and, you know, I had an agent for myself, like you would want done to you as, you know, you want to do to others. So, yeah, it's Sometimes people's motivations are different. Most agents are good out there. I think they're well intended.

32:23 What I've also seen is just, we're just not educated as an industry on a lot of these things, right? So you're just going base off, hey, you just need to know the basics of a home. How do you sell? How do you keep in touch with your clients? How do you run a market analysis? Um, obviously there's a lot of deep things that we do, you know, as agents, like your market, like, you know, from a buy side, like you're helping them find the property. You know, you're, you know, if you're a good agent, you're helping find off market stuff for them. Then they find the home and you're running them through the contract and you're running comps and all the things. And like, we do so like, there's like a list out there that the NAR puts out like 162 things that like your agent does for you, right? When, you know, they're trying to devalue. the value

33:10 of a real estate agent these days, right? So, and that does barely even includes like building science stuff, like knowing how the house actually works, right? And so, you know, yeah, is that like a level above than most? Yeah, for sure. But ultimately, I think everyone wants to know that, right? And I think some people just want a home and they don't know any better, right? And that's fine. But ultimately, we want to improve the quality of our homes because I think Everyone you know that you talk to most of the time sometimes says like man the quality of our stuff is just really gone down right and that's everything in life like from our electronics to our appliances to our homes to our cars like some things are great and they work great but. You know the lifespan

33:57 of them has gotten so short it's like it's pretty wasteful so like how do we get back to you know and especially being your home probably your most expensive purchase and your most valuable asset to having something that's going to last a long time and last quality not just having to gut your home every 30 to 50 years and build a brand new again like obviously things change and technologies change but we're doing that because a lot of the materials are just like, not great and are toxic and just having withheld the, you know, the test of time and they've just been worn in. So how do we improve that? How do you improve, you know, better air quality, better humidity control helps, you know, your

34:42 home last longer, like all those things like. proper design. So you don't have water intrusion and backsplashing and deteriorating, you know, siding and all, you know, all these things that people just sometimes don't think about because they go, oh man, the house is really cool. It's super modern. It's, you know, it's has no overhangs. It's just like no roof. It's like, cool. Like it does look pretty bad ass, but some aspects it's what are you sacrificing there? You know what I mean? And so I think educating people on that, I think, well, you know, hopefully start to open their eyes. It came from educating yourself, though, and more so when I point out the differences between you and other realtors. I think you touched on the education component. I think it's important to point out that the state only needs a certain

35:29 amount of information from you and a certain amount of testing from you to give you a license for real estate. Right? So it's not like the state is bringing you a handbook to go through all of the things that you just mentioned, which is a mouthful. No. And man, that is a scary list when I'm looking at a house. And I've now got you as my realtor saying, hey, we really need to look at these things. Right? So you're a magician to be able to walk. carefully tread the line of being that building science person and knowing that someone's fallen in love with a house and they have their own wants and dreams and they've already put the kids in the bedroom inside of this house that they're walking through. Yeah, no, for sure. And look, when you sign up as a real estate agent and broker, you don't sign up for that. You sign up to help your buyers

36:14 and your sellers and your investors and your developers and your clients, right? Like I totally understand that part. At the same time, I also feel there's a huge desire out there for this improvement of quality of construction, taking building science into account, taking more healthy, sustainable building practices. And from what I've seen, and correct me if I'm wrong too, there's builders out there that are interested and want to do this. There's... architects and engineers, you know, groups. And maybe I'm in Austin and I live in this bubble. And this is like the community I've created around myself. But they're a bunch

37:00 of architects. I want to do this stuff like that. You know, I'm part of the the Passive House Alliance group in Austin, you know, for for the chapter here. And, you know, I'm volunteering as a treasurer this year. But we had this like brainstorming meeting. And it's like, what is like what is holding us back, right? At least from a passive house perspective, like wanting, you know, there's owners that want to do it. You know, there's builders that want to do it, but like the projects aren't being had, right? And I think what we, you know, filtered it down to is just education, right? And many different aspects, right? Like educating owners and property owners, like why would you want, you know, just even a passive house, right? Which passive house essentially

37:46 is a third party certification that takes into account a much higher quality of build, really takes into account your envelope of your home, the different layers, takes into account the efficiency of your appliances, your plumbing system, your HVAC design is huge in passive house as well. The orientation of the home. Orientation. all the things that you can think of, right? And then you go to the word passive and, and it basically stems from being able to produce more electricity than you are sucking up. Yeah, or reduce as much as possible, right? Like even like passive design, you know, like, or passive solar design, like that's more of like a natural

38:32 building thing. It's like, hey, we're going to orient our house in a way that we're going to, you know, get, you know, the morning sun on this side, and then the heat load on the house that doesn't need to be cooled as much or heated as much depending on, you know, what region you're in. But, you know, with more of like the fee is passive house, you know, standards is of, you know, really taking into account every aspect of your home from the layering of your home to protect you from water intrusion and building a really tight house, which, you know, a lot of people can debate that or not, but you build a tight house, you're going to have, you know, less thermal bridging, less, you know, heat, cold intrusion, air changes per hour, air changes.

39:17 And, you know, you're going to you know, really consider, you know, how you're ventilating things, what type of appliances you're using, you know, your plumbing systems usually have like a hot water recirculator. So you're not taking, you know, one of the standards is like, hey, if your hot water comes to your sink in 30 seconds, like that's part of, you know, the approval process. Like that makes sense because how long do we just wait there and just, you know, just let water run for two, three minutes, just getting to the temperature we want, right? Like those nuances and yeah, does that cost you more? Yes, but ultimately, operationally, that is going to cost you less in the long run and improve the quality of your home because it's not even about like the materials and what you're using. It's the standard of construction to get a certification

40:04 for that makes the contractors have to improve the quality of the work that they're doing, right? You can probably build a standard home pretty decently, but you have a bunch of air gaps. You have a bunch of thermal bridging. You know, if you, you know, you just spray foam, you know, your, your little mistakes away, like how many problems does that cause, right? So, you know, it's, it's really interesting to see, you know, the differences and the market evolve in that regard. And, you know, Going back to what I was saying, like, we're just sitting in this, like, you know, passive hours, awesome meeting of like, what is like, what do we need to do to bridge that gap? And I think it really is education

40:49 on all fronts from owners to builders that want to do it, but they feel like they don't have the subs that are skilled enough to do it. So we have to educate them. We have to educate the city and, you know, the code approvals. as to why, you know, we should implement more passive house standard, um, you know, building code, which, you know, I used to be, and it's still kind of am someone that doesn't like as much regulation, but, you know, and kind of come a little bit more from like a libertarian standpoint, but man, when you see the construction out there, you're like, no code is like practically D plus in a lot of cities, right? Like just to get standard building code pass, you know, you're probably like around a D, D plus, you know, taking that

41:34 up to like an AA plus and really improve the standard of our buildings is going to have incredible benefits on multiple aspects for the homeowners, for the builders, for the city, for our grid. So many things that we don't even really think about. Yeah. And to tangent on that slightly, I think when we look at the laws that are in place. When we look at the building code specifically, there are a lot of faults, right? So we already know that there's building codes in place and we know that they are not up to a standard that can prevent a lot of issues for homeowners that really don't know the difference. A homeowner that doesn't have a realtor like you is going to walk into a new house and think that it's

42:20 exactly like the other house that they just walked into. It's just a different. color, it's a different shape, it has different quirks and features, but the rest of the house is the same. When we start to look at the building features and the upgraded building techniques that would be basically mandated. I mean, I think the biggest thing from my standpoint is the cost making it cost prohibitive for a first time home buyer, right? Because we had already touched on, at least from the perspective of prices in Austin, they were through the roof for a certain amount of time. They've started to equalize and I'm sure we'll hit another, another breaking point at some, at some time. But when we start to mandate additional resources to go into home, obviously that's going to bring the home prices up farther, but you also are gonna have less issues. You're gonna have less electricity,

43:06 right? So you're gonna have some cost savings, but then you're also bringing it to a homeowner that is at least less knowledgeable than people like us, maybe. Yeah, and I think, you know, I would put it out there that the homeowner knows and feels the quality of a house too, right? Like one of the things, going back to the hemp creed and the hemp building stuff, when you walk into a house, Like you can talk about conceptually the properties of a house and why you should do, but until you walk into one, you go like, oh, okay, I got it. Right. And like same thing with like a passive house or same thing with like, you know, very thoughtful, you know, healthy, natural build or whatever, like you have to touch, see and feel it. And I think the consumer, if

43:52 they had more of that, they would really feel the experience. And also, I think the way I see it, too, is like a lot of these great builders, you know, who started off as spec builders and all that, who build a really good quality home or did passive house or did, you know, high end and, you know, really quality stuff. They end up being custom home builders because everyone wants to hire them. Right. and it's a lot less risk to be a custom home builder than it is to be a speculative builder sometimes. When it comes to the city stuff, it's interesting because luckily, again, coming back to Austin, we're really progressive in a lot of these things. The city of Austin is looking into passive house initiatives for affordable housing. I think there's a grand program that some of the people at Passive House Austin

44:37 has been working on. A good friend of mine, Trey Farmer with Forgecraft, has been helping with that initiative to give a $2,000 credit per unit. for affordable housing units here in Austin to get them passive house certified. Part of that is, you know, helping subsidize that cost, right? And so inevitably we've subsidized many industries out there, like a big one that I always refer to as solar, right? Like how did solar become so prominent, right? It's because we had so many techs. federal tax rebates, you know, city tax rebates, all these deals to really get that industry going, right? And what was that for? For sustainability, you know, for energy efficiency, whatever that might be. Why can't

45:23 we apply that to just the structure itself, right? And healthier living. Healthier. And ultimately, to me, don't get me wrong, you know, I love solar for the certain things, you know, that it should be applied to, right? But sometimes people just like. put a bunch of solar panels on a 1950s home and they're just like, yeah, like this is really energy efficiency, like really energy efficient for you. And at least here in Austin, the numbers really don't make sense that much when it comes to how cheap our energy is here. You know, sometimes people might be like, hey, our energy bill is going up. But relatively to the rest of the country, we're pretty cheap. Sometimes that doesn't make sense to just get solar panels and subsidize that versus, hey, let's look at the envelope of our home. Right.

46:08 Is it like Do we have a bunch of gaps everywhere? Are we well insulated in our attic? Do we have a radiant barrier? There's so many little things that are such a higher dollar ROI that you can put back and like money in your pocket without having to spend 30, 40, 50 grand on a solar system. And some people might not even know what they're like. you know, what their timeline of their investment to be returned is. So, you know, sometimes it makes sense, but people really need to like break down the numbers. And if you're just covering your energy costs and replacing it with a solar mortgage, You're not making any money like your,

46:54 you know, your payback period might be 20 years instead of like doing some insulation, getting maybe some new windows or like considering the envelope of your home before you do that. And so I think that building, like improving the building code and investing in that, investing in the structures, investing in better, you know, third party certification of better quality builds or investing in materials that really, you know, improve just the health of a home or the efficiency of a home, I think could be really effective. A lot of the conversations that we've had, you are a wealth of knowledge, by the way. Every time we go deep into these discussions, it's crazy how much information you're able to retain and pull from. I know it's the... I don't feel

47:41 that way sometimes. The hundreds of trainings that you've been to in all the different topics that we've touched on. I think what... what has impacted me the most when we start to talk about sustainable building and You know, we look at the codes and we say, okay, how can we how can we make things? More efficient. How can we make them healthier? How can we build a tighter envelope? There's a certain amount that we are Going towards a passive house standard and we're still using terrible construction practices, right spray foam I would put on one of the top of the list because that's at least the more well-known, at least in terms of the chemicals going into it, right? When you talked about rammed earth,

48:28 that was kind of jogging a memory of mine where I remember hearing some of these builders that are more specific to locations that they're now pulling from 50 miles away from the building site and building out of materials that are close to home versus great, you can make this super high efficient passive house. And now you gotta spend $4 million and we're gonna ship materials. Like it's super carbon neutral, right? But we've got to pull materials from China and ship it on a boat to get here. What would be, at least in the Austin world, just out of my curiosity, what would be from the Austin world some of the more sustainable building practices that we could use that are more close to home? Yeah, you know,

49:15 The rest of like your standard construction materials are really, you know, I would love to know. I'm sure we get a lot of cedar from here, you know, people making their own cab in a tree, maybe some wood, but a lot of it, like you said, is imported, exported, all those things. One of the main reasons why I was so passionate about hemp building too was it's like potential for a circular economy, right? Like not only did I love the fact that just the building science aspect around it, the health aspects, the vapor openness and all of that. But hey, if you ultimately in a dream perfect world, you can source your hemp insulation from your local farmer. right, or within your same state that was processed

50:00 there, delivered there. You know, hemp creed is or hemp lime construction is a mixture of like a natural lime binder, a natural cement, mixed with the woody core of the hemp stock. And that's put in into your walls like a lightweight concrete insulation replacement. You know, you can source your your your lime, your hydrated lime, your pozzolins locally, anywhere, anywhere in the state, in the state or in the country, wherever that might be, you work with your, you know, with your local materials. So, you know, I think hempcrete is a great one. Ramder is a great one. Compressed earth blocks are great ones to talk about straw bale, like talk about, you know, how much, you know, straw is out there on all these farms that we have. It just depends,

50:46 like, what is your goal in terms of like, the performance of the type of house that you want and the feel that you want. Right. So I think those are, you know, going back to hemp because, you know, I love I love my hemp creed and my hemp community, but I haven't really seen anything that like, you know, seen, touched and felt that like could be so localized. Right. And just, you know, during our with Amer Chambra's sprayed applied hemp Cree contractor training, we toured two houses here in Austin. One of the homes sourced hemp herd from a farm out in Taylor, Lucas Evans, with E3 technologies. And they sourced a puzzle,

51:35 like a hemp binder. It was from Mexico, not the same country, but I consider Mexico our region, right? You know, we can talk about those nuances. And you can get your, you know, your plasters and stuff here locally, too. There's a place Austin Lime Works, you know, that was, you know, providing hydraulic lime if you wanted to make your own mixture and then you get a local pozzolin, like, you know, talk about a local, you know, economy for your building industry, which, you know, I dubbed it kind of like, you know, the farm to table movement, like we should really have a, you know, you know, farm. to home movement, right? To really know where are your materials coming from? And how do we look a lot like localize that and talk about like, really putting that in the spotlight during COVID. It was like, well,

52:21 all your construction materials just went up crazy because all this lumber and then we import a bunch of stuff from China and like the supply chain just went like totally dead for a second. And we couldn't really import much. I was like, all right, well, that really like brought a wake up call to us is like, hey, maybe we should start regionalizing our supply chains again. And so, you know, I think we don't really talk about that a lot in the building industry. And, you know, we talk about, you know, the spray foam and the fiberglass and, you know, it's pros and cons and you know yeah you know you spray foam your entire house you're gonna feel like you're in a nice cocoon right you open up that attic door and it's 78 in there and it's 74 in your house and you know but you don't have spray foam

53:06 it's like a hundred and ten up there and you know. 140 baby. 140 and it's you know 80 or like whatever in your house and. And all you have separating you is just a tiny little piece of fiberglass and drywall. And drywall yeah and that's where you know go back to my passive house people you really talk about like exterior continuous insulations and rain screens and water shedding and building that cocoon without really having to you know, spray foam, everything. And I think some of the knocks that we've had on the, you know, the passive house community in the past is like, we use a lot of petroleum based materials like, you know, Styrofoam, continuous insulation,

53:52 and, you know, all of, you know, these, these materials that probably aren't the best health wise for you, but we're seeing a really, you know, I'm starting to see a tide on these like more natural based healthy materials like timber HP or rock wool or hempotexture just came out with their own exterior continuous insulation and they have their hemp wool bats. And if it's not, you know, you know, hemp, hey, how about sheep wool or whatever? Yeah, those more expensive. Yes. And we talked about that. of it being like, hey, these practices are more expensive, but hey, if you start to get more builders, and you have more quantity, then the prices are going to start to come down because it's going to increase competition, right? And you know, some of the

54:38 ideas is like, how do you help? help expedite that. Hey, maybe you start creating co-ops of people purchasing together to get better pricing on materials that they do want to implement. Get those like-minded builders, architects, engineers to try to help bring that cost down to help it be more palatable for the consumer. Shout out to Milo Installation as well with US-based Sorghum. I saw that, yeah. Interesting. Yeah, someone else after you sent that to me, sent it to me as well. I was like, okay, interesting. You know, it looks like, you know, those, what do you call them? Those like packing peanuts. So, you know, I would love to see how it goes with that too, man. I think that could be a great, you know, stop gap for us, you know, hey. I don't

55:26 know how you do it in the walls and all that, but hey, in the attic, much better than the stuff I put up in there. So I'd rather have that and some of the stuff, no dust, air quality. That was pretty cool. So we'd love to learn more about Milo for sure. Yeah, and at least from the Passifal standpoint, I'll go back to the Matt Rising, your quote of, build it tight, ventilate. Right. Yeah. Or ventilate correctly. I think any any building style can be figured out, especially in an environment like Austin, as long as you're taking into account the HVAC, specifically the ventilation, especially because, you know, I think in general, it's overlooked on the building aspects, especially with the new construction. You know, I think when we look at the building codes for me specifically, they had added a fresh

56:12 air section to the building code. And so what you have most contractors do is put a four inch duct on the back of a return plenum. They put this timer on it and they pass the inspection. And then when the inspector leaves, they turn that ventilator off. So it was designed one way. And now you have contractors doing something else because, you know, at the end of the day, we were really going off of the homeowner's comfort. And if they're uncomfortable in the middle of summer, because it's pulling some of that fresh air in, there's just, there's enough of a pushback from your own Contractors that are supposed to be following these guidelines and and you've really got to look at things and see how it can be redone so and ultimately I would say that comes back to education. Everything comes back

56:58 to education, right? Like when we talk about the fresh air intakes, you know, I kind of forgot who it was. Maybe it was Peter Pfeiffer. He's like a really well-known architect in Austin. It was like, yeah, you're bringing that fresh air intake, but you're also bringing all that humidity in your climate, right? So do you have dehumidifiers to deal with that? Are you properly, you know, setting up your HVAC system? You know, even if people are a little bit, you know. more science, you know, building science base. Like there's not a lot of contractors, HVAC companies, people that go, you know, deep on that knowledge or even know how to install it sometimes. Right. So at the same time, I think, you know, you're talking about Reisinger's quote. I think at the same time is. You can, you know, build it, tie

57:45 it, right, but also. We got to think about like just human nature and how we just live in a house. Most people don't even change their air filters on a normal HVAC system, right? So to give them a longer laundry list of things to do to maintain their house properly in their, you know, their air system or whatever else we're putting in there for that. Great. If they really can, they're passionate about it. Awesome. Or, you know, we got to have more HVAC companies that can, you know, do the maintenance and all that stuff. for these homeowners and if they're willing to pay for it. But I think it also comes down to like, how do we simplify our built environment in a way that, yes, you're always gonna have to do some maintenance. But no matter how you live, right, you got to be conscious of that.

58:31 If you just have, you know, maybe some humidity meters, like, look, once I'm above 60, like, I got to start thinking about what I'm doing here, right? Like, definitely don't want mold growth or how is my moisture being mitigated? Or, you know, am I leaving my doors open or whatever? Like, we just got to think about, you know, you usually have the people are doing passive house or, you know, certain earthen construction at like in the city, you know, usually have a decent amount of money, right? They're pretty educated, tech savvy, you know, they kind of nerd out, especially people who are wanting to do like passive house and stuff like that. But that's fine. That market's always been there. How do we get that to the mainstream market? The people, you know, that are buying, you know, the middle class homes or even, you know, the lower priced homes, like that's been the biggest issue, right?

59:18 So that's, I think, part of the equation that we're really trying to get it to the mainstream. You know, that's the part that makes me passionate is I just don't want to go to these, you know, small workshops or go see these like multi-million dollar passive homes or whatever that is. Like we got to figure out the equation of how do we get that, you know, in Austin, like what's a middle class home? Like five, six hundred thousand to, you know, two million. You know, that's middle class, but like that's, you know, two million ish is now like the luxury price point in Austin. Right. So if you're kind of like in the city or just around the city, you know, you're purchasing a home, you know, four or 500,000 to a million and a half or whatever. And the quality of construction

1:00:03 of those things are like mind blowing to me, like really bad. Like the difference between 400,000 and even some luxury homes is not that big, just much nicer finish out. But the guts of your home is being built the same unless like you have a really... good builder and someone who cares. And I could see from your perspective where the building code in Austin changing would start to push the envelope in these other methods, right? Because in theory, you are bringing more minds to the table to say, Hey, we got to figure out how we can hit these codes. Um, and so now they, they really have to do things differently and push the envelope in each direction, which furthers the education point. Well, dude, it's like I saw this article. I need to confirm if it's still true. But in the UK, they're banning

1:00:48 spray foam in your roof. So why are they doing that? Because they probably had so many cases of something, right? Probably mold, probably issues that they couldn't see. Yeah, the off-gassing issues. Yeah, the imperfections, right, that help with that. they are not banning, insurance companies are insuring, are deciding maybe they're not going to insure properties that have spray foam in their ceiling, right? In their attic ceiling. So it makes you think, okay, like not even from like a health perspective, just from like a cost and liability perspective, right? So how do we, you know, how do we encourage, you know, the city our residences here to really

1:01:36 start to get educated on like, hey, you know, this might be a little bit more burdensome, you know, for our builders. And look, at the end of the day, the city of Austin, at least here, it is not an easy place to build, right? Like I go to these Austin Infill Coalition meetings, it's a bunch of builders, developers, architects, real estate agents, a bunch of people who are talking about like what's going on with our city code, because one, it's hard to deal with, two, There's this like dichotomy of like we want better quality construction, but at the same time, we want to expedite the process because that's way too burdensome and costs way too much money and shouldn't be that complicated. So like, where do we find that balance of like building better quality homes, but also being able to expedite the build process. So We don't have another housing

1:02:22 crisis. Like if the market picks up again, we're probably going to dry up an inventory again. You know, we're going to double our population in the next 20, 30 years. So I'm sure we're not going to have enough housing for all that. And so those are things that like we really need to start to think about and have, you know, well intended people at the table talking about it. You nailed it on a lot of different fronts. I don't know, you know the next one I don't even know if we can stick to one subject because it is all encroaching and and it's awesome the way that you You know one have intertwined your your passions because I think it's it's awesome listening to people who are passionate about You know, it's not even a niche. I think, you know, some of the topics that you're hitting on are fairly

1:03:07 mainstream. It just you do have such a passion for it and you've really intertwined your life into it as well. Thanks. So, yeah, I'm really proud of all the things that you're doing. How do people find you, Henry Valles? Henry Valles, you know, just look me up online, you know, Henry Valles. Austin, real estate agent, realtor, broker, Instagram, Henry Vias ATX. Same thing on Facebook. You know, find me on LinkedIn, all the things. Just hit you up. Sit me up. I'm willing to talk, willing to help in any way. And yeah, man, just try to make the city a better place. Beautiful. I love it. It is a beautiful city. And yeah, there's definitely progress that can be made.

1:03:52 But you, I think, could be a city of Austin ambassador with the glowing review that you gave the city. So awesome. Thank you for being here. Thank you, man. Congrats on this, too. I love it.