What Professionals Wish You Knew

What the Professionals Who Repair Your Properties Wish You Knew

So that they can help you limit damage, protect your asset and keep residents in their units.

Interviewed and edited by MORGAN TAYLOR, HAA Staff

A number of Houston-area apartments were without water for days following the winter freeze. Some went weeks without water.

When one apartment in particular made headline news, the Houston Apartment Association stepped in. What did we do? We called a long-time HAA supplier partner. HAA is a resource and a community partner to Houston-area apartments. Calling in a favor from a supplier partner isn’t something we typically do for our members, but we were happy to be able to help.

Was the damage caused by Winter Storm Uri inevitable? Yes. Was it preventable? Also, yes. More importantly, there are ways apartment owners, operators and onsite teams can help the people who service your apartments so that they can work more efficiently.

ABODE talked to a number of supplier partners to understand what they experienced in the aftermath of Winter Storm Uri, why they couldn’t move as fast as their clients wanted and how we can better prepare in the future.

We talked to AAA Plumbers’ Vice President Mark Park, the Owner of EPIC Air Conditioning David Vasquez, Camp Construction Services’ President Jeff Blevins and the President of American Fire Systems David Stone. Here is what they had to say:

The February freeze caused a lot of issues to our Houston-area apartments. This situation was both inevitable and mostly preventable. Would you agree?

Mark Park: Yes, to an extent. I believe what exacerbated the whole situation was the loss of power. A lot of these properties that have circulating pumps weren’t able to move any water, which would have helped. They didn’t have any ambient heat, especially in singlefamily homes. Most of that damage would not have happened if they had power.

Jeff Blevins: Well, we aren’t prepared for freezes. There are some things we could have done to prepare a little bit better, but yes, I agree.

David Vasquez: Yes, I do. A lot of the plumbing we’ve seen, when we are working on HVAC damage, wasn’t insulated. You could tell it had been repaired 20 to 30 years ago. We need to stop calling things unprecedented in Houston, because it’s going to happen, as it has time and time again. We have seven million people in Houston. We have 660,000 units, and 95% of them are electric – the heaters, the driers, the ranges, everything. It’s like when the lights flicker when you dry your hair. Well, the heaters in these apartments, it’s like 10 hair dryers put together. Every time ERCOT flipped a switch for a particular section, the drain multifamily caused on the grid was astronomical compared to single-family, because single-family mostly uses natural gas. A heat pump is 50% more efficient than using the equivalent of using 10 hair dryers at the same time.

David Stone: Yes. With the circumstances, it was inevitable just because of the severity of what happened, but preventable for the most part. Had we maintained power at all of our properties, we would not have had dropping temperatures within the buildings. We could have drained these systems down and tried to remove as much as the water as possible. Now, you have to go to a property owner and say “Mr. Property Owner, I am going to drain and remove all of the water in your fire system, and you’re going to have a mandatory fire watch. And, by the way, this is just in case something happens.” That’s hard to convince them and the fire marshal that it’s a good thing to do. In hindsight, that would have been the smartest thing we could have done in the entire state of Texas.

What are the top things you wish apartment operators knew?

Park: If you’re a good company and you’re a credible company, you have good resources.

It was that Friday when the Houston Mayor’s Office contacted HAA and Andy (Teas, HAA’s vice president of public affairs) called us (about the apartment on the news needing assistance). Andy Teas never calls, so when he does, it’s important.

They (the apartment) called Cesar (Lima, co-founder and vice president of AAA Plumbers) in San Antonio. We wanted to help, but we could only help so many people at a time. The only reason we dropped everything to go out there and put our longterm clients on hold was because of our relationship with HAA. That’s why they were able to get things repaired, because of the relationship that we have with the Houston Apartment Association.

That is what people need to take away from this story – not what they could have done right or wrong. Things are going to happen. Who are you going to rely on? If you are new to the Houston market, and I believe this company was, the first thing you need to do is join the Houston Apartment Association, network with supplier partners and build a network.

Blevins: With contractors, our number one job is to limit the damage as much as possible. The number one would be knowing where the water shutoff is. If apartment teams knew where the water shut off is that would be the number one thing to limit the damage. Keep in mind, this was an unusual storm. We do tons of fires and floods, but we’ve never done a freeze storm, anywhere. Once the water was turned off and the water stopped leaking, this was a whole lot different (compared to floods) in that it took a lot longer to find where the water started and where it stopped. It required patience on the owner and management for us to do that. Everybody’s resources are capped out. We probably had close to 400 calls on properties with busted pipes. We had properties with anywhere from one to 65 pipe breaks on one property. I heard plumbers were getting 14,000 calls a day.

Start with knowing what your insurance coverage is, who you’re going to call, where the water shutoff is, having quick access to keys and how you’re going to manage residents. Preparing the residents before a hurricane or a freeze like this, saying something like, “Your unit could take on water. You may be displaced for a short period of time, sometimes a longer period of time. Please be ready to allow access to people who need to get in your unit to limit the damage due to a storm.” Something like that alerting them. We went up to a property where water was pouring out of a window. The resident wouldn’t let us in, and we couldn’t get keys to the unit. I’m shocked by how many times we go to properties where we can’t get into the units. That’s the most frustrating part.

Vasquez: We’ve had freezes before, but we didn’t lose power like we did this time. They need to insulate the plumbing lines and not rely on radiant heat from the apartment units going into the crawlspaces. It speaks to how badly insulated our apartments are.

There’s a lot of value-add going on right now. When you take the siding off, you should be conscious of what year the insulation is – 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s energy codes. We have more strict energy codes now. You take that siding off, what you’re going back with is double the thickness, so it actually would have protected the apartments so much more if they had been replaced. They’re cutting corners. They’re taking the siding off, putting it back up and not touching the insulation.

If you aren’t reinsulating, you aren’t helping anybody. That’s something people need to look out for when they’re doing these renovations, they need to be changing out every piece of insulation on the exterior.

Stone: Prepping for it, we could have done a better job as a community across the state to inspect the systems better prior to. We could have made sure that any low-point drains were drained, that any unnecessary water that was not necessary on the system was actually drained from the system. In addition to that, while they’re doing their inspections, the contractor should be testing anti-freeze levels. We had systems that were anti-freeze systems over in Austin, but whoever did the inspections had not tested the anti-freeze, and they were all wet. Now it’s going to cost them even more to go in and put the anti-freeze in. We could better educate property management on their systems and how they work.

What happens when builders cut corners in construction that end up causing huge headaches later?

Park: I was part of the HAA task force following the freeze. This came up in the context of the state allowing out-of-state plumbers to come in. I thought it was great, if they’re real plumbing companies. The problem is, how do you know who are licensed plumbers versus handymen when they are coming out of state? The state had a process where if you brought your license from another state, they gave you a provisional 90-day license.

My recommendation was to get their license number, find out who the owner is, especially if they’re out of state, who their insurance company is. Most trade work has to be done to code, whether a permit is required or not. You don’t get to do work one way just because it isn’t getting inspected. You have to do it to code every time. And if you don’t, it’s your responsibility to fix it and make it right, plus any damages.

An example of that is if I install a pipe faulty. Meaning, it’s not to code. If I used unapproved material, it breaks apart and floods the unit, I’m not only responsible for fixing that line, but I’m also responsible for all the damage I caused. Typically, somebody from out of town is not going to pay for all of that. You have to make sure you know who you’re working with and not just some flyby-the-night handyman, who, if there’s an issue, would disappear.

Blevins: On something like this, the process should be, you go in, you assess the damage, you do a process called moisture mapping, which tells you where all the damage has occurred. After you do the moisture mapping, you test it with a moisture meter that tells you it indeed needs to come out. It’s a process. Once you get all the wet stuff out, you have to dry it properly. Then after that, you have to follow even more steps. There’s no benefit to doing it in a rush. It’s a process and it’s going to be an inconvenience to the residents. Any contractors who cut corners will create potential problems for the management company and residents down the road.

Vasquez: We need to be verifying that our builders and contractors are changing out the insulation whenever they are doing any kind of drywall to an exterior repair. We see that so much with exterior walls, where there’s plumbing running through them. At some point, a line had to be repaired, but when they removed the insulation and fixed the pipe, they put the drywall back up. There’s nothing else in there. It’s a hallow cavity. When we are going back with our repairs, we need to be insulating properly, insulating the walls and the lines. All water lines should have insulation.

Stone: As far as construction, there are different types of sprinkler systems and sprinkler heads. There are options that are more expensive, but when you are working on the construction budget, sometimes that is very hard to sell because the lower-end contractor is not going to install those materials.

Now, if I can get in front of a regional vice president or a regional manager to give me some feedback for use toward the construction side, then they may be willing to spend a little bit more, but when they’re building a $50 million project, 2% is a big deal.

What has been preventing you from doing the work you need to do to repair properties?

Park: Labor. There just aren’t enough people. A lot of people that make the resin for PVC (pipes), some of these factories around Texas and even up north were damaged from the freeze. We’re only getting about 60% of what we ordered. And they’re shifting to make ¾ to 1 to 2-inch regular PVCs because that is what is in demand. We aren’t buying thousands of feet of pipe at a time because we are not doing big new construction projects. If you need to order 10,000 or 15,000 feet of pipe, there’s a good chance you probably won’t get all of that at one time. Service plumbers, like us, are pretty much able to get what we need daily. The stuff we are not able to get, we’ve been waiting on since the pandemic started, but that’s just due to factories not opening, working in split shifts and things like that.

Blevins: We’ve been really fortunate that the groups and management companies we’ve worked with have allowed us to do what we need to do to make sure their assets aren’t going to have challenges down the road. The biggest roadblock for us has been with certain parts of the city. Some of the requirements are actually slowing down the build back process. We’re having to pull a permit on every single sheetrock repair in some areas, where that was never required before.

Vasquez: Right now, insurance companies are being more stringent. And it’s understandable. We do have to replace a lot of equipment in apartment units and a lot of residents just aren’t ready for us to be inside their units. We have repairs to make, but they can’t get access inside units because people are still scared of COVID-19.

Stone: Manpower. The state of Texas has a shortage of manpower for all the construction we have going on. Houston is not as busy right now as it has been in the past but it’s still consistently busy. We had the bigger management companies here locally that have multiple properties calling us on Tuesday and Wednesday, as soon as all of this stuff started happening, but we don’t have guys that are just sitting around waiting on something to do. The week before the freeze they were working on new construction jobs, etc. We have a small crew that does true service work, like this. The week of the freeze and the next two to three weeks after it, we had to pull everybody off all those other jobs in order to man all of this. The fire protection industry is regulated a little bit more with licensing, so it’s a little harder for us to find the manpower. It really is an industry-wide problem, it’s not just fire protection.

This group of supplier partners were interviewed between March 23 and March 30. These interviews were edited for length and simplicity.