Secrets of Remodeling for Fast Home Sales | Expert Advice with Rob Baker

Rob (00:00)

Honestly, it’s cleaning is a big one, obviously. Flooring, they’re always, I don’t know why, but every time somebody goes to sell the house, it’s that old snap together wood planking stuff that’s 25 years. It’s all bowed up and popped up from water being on it or an animal destroying it. And it’s literally $3.25 a square foot to replace all that. So it’s like, why wouldn’t you do that?

Kristen Knapp (00:18)

Mm-hmm.

Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m Kristen and I’m here with Rob Baker, the founder of Baker Contracting Incorporated. Thank you for being here, Rob.

Rob (02:08)

Thank you for having me.

Kristen Knapp (02:09)

Yeah, we’re going to get all into the remodeling process. So let’s start at the beginning. How did you get into this industry?

Rob (02:15)

Well, I’m from Brazil and in Brazil, we built hospitals and churches. My dad started that. We built them all over Colombia, Brazil, Peru. And then eventually the economy tanked down there and we basically fled to America for a better life. We had some family members up here who sponsored us and we came up here and my uncle was really big in construction. He’s one of those old school guys. He had a flannel.

all the time, had a big old truck and I would follow him and my dad to work. I had the only good back is what they said. So I was lifting stuff, doing demo, things like that. Really enjoyed it. Always, always loved doing stuff with your hand, my hands, because you can actually see what you accomplished. ⁓ After high school, I went into the army and then after that, I went back to college, completed college, started a different business, but then

Kristen Knapp (02:59)

Mm-hmm.

Rob (03:08)

My heart was always in construction. And fortunately, when I finally got back into it about five, six years ago, COVID hit and everything hit. So the prices went up. So you actually could make a living off of it. Before this, you’re making eight to $10 an hour. You’re a handyman. You know, everybody thought you were scum of the earth. But now, I mean, you’re, you’re, you know, you’re a lifesaver. You’re all these things, you know, you go over to somebody’s house.

Kristen Knapp (03:20)

Mm-hmm.

Thank

Rob (03:35)

that has no idea how to shut off their water, no idea why their roof is leaking, and you can get up there and fix this stuff. And it’s just, it’s a lot more fulfilling now than it used to be. It used to be just, you’re just painting stuff and just general labor, and you had no real skills. Now with technology, you have all these different skills, a lot of different outlets that will help you with your business to grow and to actually make a living off of it.

Kristen Knapp (03:40)

Great.

Rob (04:01)

and have employees and have them make a living off of it as well. So it’s really nice.

Kristen Knapp (04:06)

Amazing.

Yeah, I mean, I can imagine sometimes you are the hero where you can really solve the problem, but sometimes you have to be the bad guy where I’m sure people didn’t think they needed to fix something before they needed to sell it or something like that.

Rob (04:21)

yeah, yeah, we have a lot of those

to where, you know, it’s just as good. So we, we do what we call is an inspection only type of estimate. So one estimate you go in, you need new floors, painted walls, new lights, stuff like that. And you’ll sell the house and you make a lot of money off of it. But if they’re not really believing in what you’re doing, you’ll just have the inspection only. Well, you know, you got to leak your roof. So we got to put some shingles on that. We got to fix it.

Your sump pump isn’t working, that’s going to get caught during inspection and screw up the whole deal. So let’s just fix that bare minimum kind of stuff. there is that yin and yang sometimes. But most of the customers have been pretty accepting. The realtors have been a godsend. The realtors, I mean, talk them into it and tell them, you know, hey, if you fix this stuff, sure, you’re paying $20,000 for this project.

but I can sell this house for 80, $90,000 more and we can sell it in two, three days versus, you know, 120 days, 160 days. So that’s really nice. And I think the longest house we’ve had out of 57 from last year took two days to sell. So, I mean, they’re just like, like as quick as possible. So that’s been really nice. Yeah. Yeah. We don’t try to keep them on the market. The longer they’re on the market,

Kristen Knapp (06:16)

Wow.

Wow, that was the whole cast. Wow.

Rob (06:27)

there’s more of a uncertainty. Why doesn’t anybody want this? It looks like a good house. The price is right, but why is nobody buying it? So they start coming up with these doubts. So.

Kristen Knapp (06:37)

Right.

It’s very interesting to me, the pre-sale inspections where you go through the house and you’re able to basically add more value to the house when they do the renovations. You’re experts at that,

Rob (06:43)

remodeled.

Yeah, we have a really good realtor right now that she does the majority of them. She’s really big in Iowa and she’ll suggest us to the customer. We’ll meet up, you know, while she’s doing all her paperwork and she finishes that up and we’ll go through the house. I mean, having the homeowner there is great because they know everything wrong with the house that they haven’t fixed in the 20 years they’ve been living there. You know, this tile’s cracked. This thing’s been leaking for 18 years. This gutter.

Kristen Knapp (07:12)

great.

Rob (07:21)

It’s leaning over, you know, yeah, we should probably fix it, you know. So then you have that support of the realtor that, hey, if we can do this, you know, he can get this done within a couple of weeks. We can go on the market. We can take some really good pictures. We think we can make 80, 90 thousand more dollars for this house. We can be really high in this neighborhood of cops. So that’s really helpful. you know, it basically how we do it is anything over five thousand. It’s.

It comes out of proceeds, so there’s no money upfront or anything, so there’s no risk there. And then if the house doesn’t sell, they have 12 months to pay. No interest or anything. And what’s nice about that is these are a lot of times are things that needed to be fixed anyways. The ceiling fan was broken. This light doesn’t look right. None of the smoke detectors work. So it’s very simple things that really help out. We’re not doing…

Kristen Knapp (08:03)

Mm-hmm.

Rob (08:12)

you know, additional bathroom or an additional that, you know, you had three cats that eat all over the place. We need to put in new carpet. We need to get rid of this smell, you know, that kind of thing. So nothing too complicated. You know, we’re not destroying anything. It’s just stuff that’s just common sense, which is nice. So.

Kristen Knapp (08:23)

Ready?

Yeah, what are some things that you see over and over again? Like what are some very simple changes somebody can make to increase the value of their home?

Rob (08:39)

Honestly, it’s cleaning is a big one, obviously. Flooring, they’re always, I don’t know why, but every time somebody goes to sell the house, it’s that old snap together wood planking stuff that’s 25 years. It’s all bowed up and popped up from water being on it or an animal destroying it. And it’s literally $3.25 a square foot to replace all that. So it’s like, why wouldn’t you do that?

Kristen Knapp (08:57)

Mm-hmm.

right.

Rob (09:04)

The other

ones that paint, for some reason, I don’t know if it was because of COVID or people got bored, they’d paint every room a different color, the basement a different color, the kitchen a different color. It just makes your house look smaller. So we put a fresh coat on that. That gets rid of a lot of the smells too, a lot of the marks, a lot of the texture issues as we fix those prior. Then after that, it’s usually lights. So all the bulbs are…

Kristen Knapp (09:29)

Yeah.

Rob (10:05)

soft yellow ugly looking ones. The chandeliers are all gold. The doorknobs are gold. The hinges are gold. So we tried to give that a little update. What’s going to help that out. That’s very minimum. I mean, hinges are $4. They’re very cheap. Three hinges for $4. You unscrew them. You screw them back in. Anybody can do this stuff. Just stuff like that. A deck. Power wash a deck. Restain the deck. Very simple.

Kristen Knapp (10:22)

Great.

Mm-hmm.

Rob (10:30)

just makes the world a different. It really does.

Kristen Knapp (10:33)

Yeah, it is interesting to me because you mentioned all the things that I agree with that really do make a big difference. You have a fresh coat of white paint, you have some nice lights. That’s even for renters, like a great way just to make your place feel a little more well done.

Rob (10:44)

yeah.

Yeah, yeah, and it’s a lot easier. They already moved out. They’re onto their next house. So now they have two mortgages. So this is their race in time to get to that next mortgage. So they need this household within 30 days, 45 days. So these ideas are very helpful for them to get rid of this house almost immediately. So we’ve had great success.

Kristen Knapp (11:08)

Right. And what are…

Yeah, that’s amazing. And what would you say, like, what are some trends that you’re seeing? What are some trends that people are really liking in terms of just, you know, layout and all of that?

Rob (11:20)

Well, around here, the trends are more the difficulty to get certain people. So flooring guys aren’t too hard to get. Electricians are a lot more difficult. Plumbing is a lot more difficult to do. So they’re not changing a lot in the bathroom. They’re not changing a lot in the kitchen. I haven’t, surprisingly, I haven’t heard a lot of complaints about the open concept. Because to me, that was always very noisy. You had the kids in the living room. You had the kitchen going.

It’s just so much noise in there. So trend-wise, it really hasn’t changed that much. Everybody likes the brushed nickel, the nicer updated stuff. They kind of got into grays. Now they’re going into darker colors. So I don’t think there really is a firm trend happening now. Even the lights and stuff that were matte black, not a lot of people are buying those. So they’re kind of in limbo trying to figure out what’s the next thing. What’s the cool new thing that I need to put in my house.

Kristen Knapp (11:52)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Rob (12:10)

So, but definitely out of gold. Everybody’s out of gold, which is nice.

Kristen Knapp (12:14)

⁓ gold. You

heard it first. Gold’s out. I would love to go back to when you started this company, like how you actually built it from the ground up. What was like the mindset going into it when you first decided to go off on your own?

Rob (12:18)

Yeah, yeah, that’s definitely true.

Well, I did work with my dad, my uncle and my brother. We were all painters. We started out as painters and me and my brother worked for my dad and it just wasn’t going anywhere. We weren’t making money. My brother-in-law was a painter. My other brother-in-law was a painter. All our friends were painters. So you start looking around and going, okay, somebody has to do something different. We’ve always been good at maintenance, fixing things, hot water heaters, furnaces, stuff like that.

⁓ but residential didn’t pay as much. So I started getting into the commercial setting, mowing lawns at apartment complexes, the hotels, just different things like that. then we started doing pools. We started doing the rooms, updating the rooms and stuff like that. So in the commercial side, I saw more money, more success. So I kind of went into that all by myself. I asked everybody in the family, Hey, come join me. You know, we’re making really good money. We’re able to charge.

you know, $65, $85 an hour on this side, but nobody wanted to do that. They kind of wanted to stick to painting, something they knew. It was scary to hire new people. It scary to buy new equipment. You know, it was a big leap. So I kind of had to do it all on my own, which really sucked. fortunately, after hiring people and firing them and hiring them and, you know, you finally get a groove. You finally get people that stay. So that was really nice eventually.

Kristen Knapp (13:42)

Yeah.

Rob (13:52)

So I would say it took about two years of troubleshooting before we finally got it going pretty smooth.

Kristen Knapp (13:59)

How did you push past that fear? I mean, two years is nothing, but when you’re in it, feels like a long time. How did you kind of push past those, that beginning phase before you were really up and running?

Rob (14:52)

⁓ man, you just do. I’m hard headed, I guess. I don’t know. knew eventually because I started seeing a trend to where people would do new construction. They’d build these giant, massive apartment complexes and hotels. But the workers would come in from Texas or Arizona to build these and then they would just leave. And I’m sitting here going, so who’s going to maintain this? Who’s going to mow it?

Kristen Knapp (14:55)

Yeah.

Rob (15:17)

Who’s going to clean the building? Who’s going to do all the work on the day to day? And there wasn’t anybody around for this. So I started thinking, this is going to be a big, huge vacuum because everybody’s over here painting, putting in cabinets and new construction and new houses, but nobody’s actually maintaining these properties that are now two, three, four, five years old, that are falling apart almost immediately because the companies that put them in, they just threw them together and left.

Kristen Knapp (15:39)

Mm-hmm.

Rob (15:45)

They didn’t care. You know, they’re out of a different state that nobody’s going to chase after them for anything. So that kind of gave me a little bit of confidence to where I was going down the right path. So that did help eventually, but.

Kristen Knapp (15:58)

Yeah, you need those the small wins that really help you keep going Do you remember what your first like turning point was where you’re like, okay This is actually going to work and this is you know, this is working

Rob (16:04)

Yeah, yeah, that’s true.

When the owners and the general managers who I thought were like way up here way above me, you know They’re making all this money. They’re running these giant corporations when they started calling my personal cell for help for advice You know, can you come here and look at this? Can you come here and tell me what’s going on? Why is this happening? We’ve had three different companies over here. None of them know what to do So that kind of helped

Kristen Knapp (16:28)

Yeah.

Rob (16:40)

when you start seeing that they’re wanting to build this personal relationship with you. So you must be doing something right. You must be friendly enough. You must be smart enough to have them react that way. So I think that helped out a lot too.

Kristen Knapp (16:56)

Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. When the people you idolize, you realize they’re just like you. Like you’re all in the same boat, for sure. ⁓

Rob (17:04)

Oh yeah, so it’s hilarious

now to where if you’re going over to their property, you’ll you’ll text them real quick. Hey, you want me to pick you up some Starbucks? I’m on my way over. Hey, have you guys eaten lunch? Are you even visit them on a Saturday or Sunday? You know, how are you guys doing? Everything running okay? And then a lot of times they have stuff for you. Oh, yeah, we totally forgot, you know, oh, we forgot about this. Can you go give me a bit on this project or this? I just I didn’t even think about it. I was going to email you, but I totally forgot, you know.

Kristen Knapp (17:11)

Yeah.

Rob (17:32)

So that’s kind of nice. You build this repertoire where you have a lot of back and forth with them, which is really nice.

Kristen Knapp (17:38)

I imagine your network is very valuable in this line of work.

Rob (17:41)

⁓ yeah, yeah. Everybody makes fun of me. I answer my phone no matter what, no matter where I’m at. I think movie theaters and the shower are the two places I don’t answer my phone. Otherwise, I answer my phone 1130 at night, one in the morning, two in the afternoon. It does not matter. I’ll answer my phone. And our town’s small enough to where I can get there within 15, 20 minutes. So if we forgot to scrape off a driveway at one of the

Kristen Knapp (17:47)

Yes.

Wow.

Rob (18:09)

condos or something like that. yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ll be there five minutes. Don’t even worry about it. We’ll be there right away. But it is nice to feel wanted, to feel needed like that. Even though they’re your customers and they’re paying you, you’re still a valuable asset for them, which is nice.

Kristen Knapp (18:25)

Right, I mean just because they’re paying you, mean especially because they’re paying you, they believe in you and they trust you. Yeah.

Rob (18:30)

Yeah. I always tell everybody it’s not about

the money. It’s about the project. When you accomplish this project, you go and there’s a problem. You go to this house. We just had the last pre-cell remodel we did. This lady had it mowed her acreage, nine acres in two and a half years. And she just didn’t know what to do. So I go over to the Bobcat dealer. I’m talking to him. I’m texting the other guy. What should we do? What kind of equipment do we need?

Kristen Knapp (18:35)

Yeah.

Rob (18:56)

I’m sending the pictures, look at all this stuff, and we’re all just racking our brains coming up with ideas on how to solve this problem. So yeah, it’s really fun. It’s not about the money, it’s about having that problem solving and filling a need in yourself to where I want to be an intricate part of this city and of this community.

Kristen Knapp (19:16)

I bet a huge part of your job is dealing with the unexpected and getting comfortable in the uncomfortable. How do you handle things like that when maybe there’s a whole other part of the project you didn’t account for or something changed or whatever it might be?

Rob (19:32)

You always try to be

open and honest about it. ⁓ There’s a lot of times where other subs will drop out or something will happen and that kind of gives everybody a bad name. So that’s really hard. You have to differentiate yourself from those guys. And sure, you know, this is unexpected and your schedule open date is this. So how about we help you guys out and we’ll finish this together since you can’t get a hold of this person. But a lot of it, I mean, you just, go there with the owner.

this is what’s going on, you’re completely honest with them, this is how we could fix it, this is how much it’s gonna cost. You know, once we do this, you can generate more money because now you can sell these hotel rooms, you can sell this apartment that caught on fire, you know, just stuff like that. You gotta look at it, they need to make money, you need to make money, that’s how it goes in construction, so.

Kristen Knapp (20:19)

Absolutely. So to kind of wrap this all up, what’s a piece of advice that you wish you learned earlier in your career?

Rob (20:26)

boy. I didn’t learn it as much because I’ve always been like this. I’ve had homeowners, they would come in and they’re stressed out because you’re working in their house and everything’s in disarray and the kids are driving them nuts. And they’ll sit there and yell at you for five minutes and then they’ll cry and then they’ll hug you and they’ll go, you’re the only person helping me out. So I’ve always been able to kind of just shrug that off.

Kristen Knapp (20:44)

Yeah

Rob (20:50)

to where it doesn’t stress me out, it doesn’t really hurt me as a person or my personality. I’ve always been pretty good about that. I think that’s my best advice to anybody is just don’t take it to heart. These guys are stressed out. They’ve called 20, 30 other people, those people, especially during COVID. I mean, we would have housewives crying. I called six different companies. My toilet’s overflowing. I can’t find anybody.

Kristen Knapp (21:05)

Yeah. ⁓

Rob (21:18)

And it’s like, well, we normally don’t do this, but I’ll be over there in five minutes. Let me help you out. You know, so you have to have that like, you know, just shrug it off your shoulder at the end of the day. It’s not a big deal. They’re stressed out. They’re, they’re, you know, having a hard time and you’re here to help them. And once that, that help arrives and you fix the problem, you feel like a million bucks. It’s the greatest feeling in the world. So.

Kristen Knapp (21:22)

Right.

No, that’s great advice actually. mean, it’s true. You’re dealing with people who are so stressed out and most of their equity, there’s something at play with their equity. So, I mean, that’s very, very good advice. And so tell everyone where to find you.

Rob (21:55)

You can find us at Bakercontracting.us. We’re out of the Midwest. We’re in central Iowa. We travel usually about two, three hours all over Iowa. We do insurance jobs, commercial, residential stuff. We’re just problem solvers. If you’re having a hard time with another builder or another contractor, give us a call. It’s pretty straightforward. We’ll go out, look at the project, tell you what we can do to help you out.

Kristen Knapp (22:19)

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for being here, Rob.

Rob (22:21)

No problem. Thank you for having me.

Kristen Knapp (22:23)

Thank you. Awesome. Well, everybody, thank you for listening and we will see you back next time. Bye.

Rob (22:28)

Bye.