The baseline at turnover

So I get this question often. Why should we, once ownership is transferred, get an engineer to come out and look at the building as it was built? Especially if it's new, but it's actually really important if it's a new building because it hasn't had time to tell you if things have gone wrong or construction wasn't done correctly. So often how a building was engineered and the plan set that's been given is altered on the field. not just often, 90% of the time. And those alterations happen in what we call RFIs. That's just essentially paperwork or a memo that gets attached to those building plans. So the building plans that you have might not actually reflect, most likely don't actually reflect what was actually built. And what an engineer can do is with their eye, they know what standard IRC, which is International Residential Code Construction, and that is the way, I mean, the contractors like to build things quickly and efficiently. And if somebody's not around to answer a question, they're going to do it like they know it should be done most of the time. When the building is new, you can still look at the sheathing and you can see whether or not that spacing was done correctly, right? So a three-year-old building can look perfect but still have been built wrong or maybe just built how in the box cutter style as opposed to the engineered aspect. So the report is the baseline. And once you have that, then you'll know if a windstorm comes or an earthquake comes, should that building have held up? Was it a construction issue? And you don't really know that if you have, if you don't have an as-built, which means how the building was actually built. An engineer can provide that for you. So do this. Before you turn over the building, get those structural drawings, get the as-built and an inspection card from the developer and have the engineer walk through those crawl spaces and attics. They'll know what is kind of the, like the bottleneck, like what is the most important thing to look for. And it may cost you, you know, $1,000 and then you have record. For the board, a new board that skips this study, they have agreed to argue about the building later with no evidence basically. The manager who gets the drawings in hand before the developer leaves has done the single most valuable thing on that turnover list by having that recorded. If you own the building, if you bought it from the developer, the same walk applies in your first year. While the warranty clock is still running, get that engineer to look over those details, the hurricane ties, the nail spacing and make sure that the plans reflect what was done. If it's your own house, same thing. Things are often hidden, but an engineer, I mean, I've crawled through a thousand crawl spaces and attics. That's what we're used to doing. We can get up in there and we can tell you what's in there, what your hanger tie actually is and whether or not it was built to the plans or if you had those RFIs, those requests to change things.