Episode 3 | PropertyLens reviews Wildfire Risk Assessment in Colorado Home
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In This Episode
Hosts: Bob Frady & John Siegman
Property: 802 W Mulberry St Louisville, CO 80027
Topics: wildfire insurance propertyrisk colorado haildamage
Episode Summary
Thinking about buying a home in Colorado? Make sure you know the risks before making a decision! In this episode, Bob and John analyze a PropertyLens report on a newly rebuilt house in Louisville, CO, which was destroyed in the 2021 Marshall Fire. Despite its low wildfire risk score, the home was devastated by extreme wind-driven flames, highlighting the importance of looking beyond basic risk assessments.
They discuss key concerns such as insurance costs, which can range from $2,700 to $7,400 per year due to the previous fire, and the impact of frequent hailstorms on roofing durability. They also emphasize the importance of checking for proper insulation against winter damage, verifying radon levels, and ensuring high-quality construction in recently rebuilt homes. If you're considering a home in Colorado, this episode is packed with insights to help you make a more informed purchase.
Key Takeaways
✅ A property with a low wildfire risk score can still burn down
✅ Insurance costs can vary drastically based on past damage
✅ Hail-resistant shingles can extend your roof’s lifespan
✅ Construction quality matters—always inspect rebuilt homes
✅ Winter risks like frozen pipes should not be overlooked
Resources
🔹 Learn more about wildfire risks: FEMA.gov
🔹 Try it: Propertylens.com
🔹 Questions?Contact us: support@propertylens.com
Transcript
[00:00:00] Bob Frady: Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Property of the Week from PropertyLens. I'm Bob Frady. With me
[00:00:17] John Siegman: is John Siegman
[00:00:18] Bob Frady: Two of the three co-founders of PropertyLens. For those of you who might be joining us for the first time or don't know what PropertyLens does, we gather thousands of data elements.
[00:00:29] And combine it with thousands of rules to say here's not only the data about a property you're interested in. Here's the questions you should ask to make sure that you don't get hit by unexpected expenses before you pluck your hard earned money down. You got it right there, John? Nailed it. Looks like there's some changes to, PropertyLens San Diego office in the background there.
[00:00:55] John Siegman: There is. New license plate.
[00:00:57] Bob Frady: So you bought the license plate and just leave it in the office? You don't drive around with it?
[00:01:01] John Siegman: I don't know.
[00:01:02] There's one on the car.
[00:01:03] Bob Frady: Oh, there you go. All right.
[00:01:05] John Siegman: That's why they send you two. It's really helpful.
[00:01:09] Bob Frady: You know, my memory's going these days, I suppose.
[00:01:13] John Siegman: Notice you have completely new office.
[00:01:16] Bob Frady: A whole new world! Yes, I have made the trek from our beautiful place in Minnesota to our beautiful place in California. So, three days driving across the country. It was quite the trek. It was lovely.
[00:01:30] So anyway, here's what we do, we pick a property in the U.S., we run a report on it, and then we tell you what we find and walk through it with you to help you to understand what this PropertyLens report actually means.
[00:01:44] So today, we're going to pick a location in Colorado. John, what are some of the big risks in Colorado as a state?
[00:01:54] John Siegman: As a state, Colorado has wildfires, it has hail, straight line wind events, fracking earthquakes, and some flooding.
[00:02:06] Bob Frady: It is. There's a lot that goes on in the state. Now a lot of it depends upon where you live. If you're close to the mountains, your risks are different than if you're in the plain.
[00:02:14] So, what we'll do, and we, and we target those risks depending upon where it is. But in general, those are the big risks for Colorado. So let's take a look at a property that we've run for Colorado. On West Mulberry Street. In Louisville, Colorado. So when we look at this report, John, what's the, what's the first thing that pops out to you?
[00:02:37] John Siegman: The first thing that pops out to me is that this is a brand new house. It was destroyed in the Marshall fire back in December of 2021. And, so a lot of the things that you're going to find out about this property. Are all related to new build.
[00:02:56] Bob Frady: Correct. It's like that, listen, the Marshall fire, John and I have been doing wildfire modeling for a long time. It even caught us by surprise. You know, when you have a hundred plus mile an hour winds kind of all bets are off when it comes to wildfire.
[00:03:10] And this location actually has a relatively low wildfire risk score, yet the property was still destroyed in a wildfire, which means it can happen sort of anywhere you're near fuel. But the thing is that. What immediately jumps out is you got to make sure that this place can get insured, you know, because insurance companies usually aren't in the business of building, of insuring places that have already burned to the ground.
[00:03:37] So, that's the first thing I would ask on this location is what the heck is going on from an insurance standpoint. Now, if you ask a real estate agent, a lot of times they'll say, well, you can get insurance. Of course you can, but sometimes it's just really expensive to get insurance for that location. So, we know this property was destroyed in 2021, and then after that, what do we see?
[00:03:58] John Siegman: Well, lots of permits that were associated with the rebuild.
[00:04:02] some may still be open, some may have been totally closed, some may have been ignored. There's a lot of wind events, over the timeline. So, over a four year span. 11 wind events, straight line, 65 miles an hour or more. prior to that, the property was actually upkept very well. I mean, they put a new roof on it. They had done the things that needed to be done.
[00:04:28] but even that, when you take a look at the overheads, as to how close these properties are together, as soon as one catches a 100 mile an hour wind, they're all gonna catch.
[00:04:40] Bob Frady: The properties become fuel for each other, which is tough. Listen, it's tragic. It's a terrible thing to have to live through. And we can only imagine how difficult it is. We don't mean to pick on this house because it was in a wildfire, but this is the kind of thing that you want to know before you decide you're going to buy this house.
[00:04:58] What else have we got to see here?
[00:05:00] John Siegman: it's, you know, relatively close to the airport. It's definitely in the flight path. So you might want to. Step outside, take a, take a listen while you're there. You know, it's in a place that gets cold. so frozen pipes, make sure that everything is well insulated, all of those other types of things. And then the rest of it is pretty standard stuff.
[00:05:22] There's nothing, you know, that really screams, Hey, pay attention to me.
[00:05:27] Bob Frady: Correct. There we go. So lots and lots of information about the house. Now it's been rebuilt. Some of this data takes a while to catch up, but you'll see it when you walk in there that this house has been rebuilt. No solar panels on the property.
[00:05:40] If you did want to get them, your payback period is about almost 10 years. It costs you about 20, 000 to put a property on there. So if you're an inspector, We tell you a few different things to look for, like just check the condition of any rebuilt work. One of the things that is happening with construction in general is labor shortages.
[00:06:02] So people tend to move a little more quickly sometimes than they should. Make sure you have a thorough inspection of this property before you decide to buy it, because you just want to make sure the build quality is as good as possible, on the location. So then look for damage from winter, winter risks are big.
[00:06:20] And then what to know ahead of time from an insurance standpoint, John.
[00:06:25] John Siegman: Well, from an insurance standpoint, as you mentioned, it has been in a wildfire. So insurance costs are going to be higher because insurers don't like to write properties that burn or have burned.
[00:06:38] Hail, you know, it's got a brand new roof. First question you might want to ask is, is it, you know, heavy duty shingles? So shingles that are designed to take hail hits, or did they just put on regular shingles, regular shingles in this area, you might have a 15 year lifespan, heavy duty. I'll get you to 20. You know, property has replacement costs.
[00:07:05] It's probably exceptionally accurate seeing it was recently replaced. So make sure that it's insured for at least that amount.
[00:07:12] Bob Frady: One of our partners has done some testing to see how much this house should cost to insure and it ranges between $2,700 and $7,400 a year, probably closer towards the higher end because of the risk from the prior wildfire.
[00:07:30] when we look at the data, here's all the real estate data. Here's the market value. It's got a pretty good market value for this home, four bedrooms, four baths, and here's the ownership. So the last ownership change was in 2016, so they're in the process of rebuilding.
[00:07:47] We can see what the property tax looks like. We can see what the old pictures of the house look like because it's not on the market right now. But we do know what the old pictures look like. We can see the roof condition, and this was the last one before the roof was replaced. It looks like it was replaced about five years ago and then burned down and replaced again when the house is rebuilt.
[00:08:07] And what's interesting about this, if we fast forward just a touch, you can go back and see how things look at different times. Here's how it looked in July versus April. But then if we go back to January, we can see that the house is gone and the neighborhood's gone. And that is really a tough, tough thing.
[00:08:29] We have lots and lots of permits on here, and you can see in here, that, there's construction of a new two story plus basement, five bedroom, three and a half bath home. They're doing a good job, but one of the neat things is we tell you who actually did the work. So, John, I don't know about you, John, but when you buy a house, like, how do you tell who did the work previously?
[00:08:51] John Siegman: Oh, there's no way unless you get a bunch of receipts from the previous owner. Or you call them up and say, Hey, who did you use for this? I mean, it's very difficult.
[00:09:01] Bob Frady: Yeah. I don't know about you, but normally when, I mean, I bought a few houses, you don't communicate a lot with the prior owner. Some people do, maybe they just don't like me. I don't know. That's entirely possible. But you don't know, but now you do because you have the data inside of the PropertyLens report.
[00:09:20] And then let's go down a little bit further. We don't have inspections or owner upkeep. Here's the estimated electricity cost. It's relatively low, in this area. If you're considering solar, here's the size of the system, how long it would take with incentives, the risk assessment.
[00:09:38] It's winter, it's Colorado. So a lot of wintertime risk. We do see that there's some flood risk here. but it's not in a flood zone, it's not required, it's not a five year flood zone, so you probably could get away with not having a flood insurance policy on here. But really that's up to you as the owner. It's not required. If it was, if this was EES, then it would be required.
[00:10:02] And then finally, we'll keep scrolling through all this stuff because it takes a long time to get through here, if there's the insurance cost. If you want to get a quote on a property, you can go in and view a quote. In this case, Progressive says, all right, let's, let's see if we can get a quote for you for this house.
[00:10:19] we don't have claims on here, and it's not because there aren't claims, it's because sometimes they're not reported to us. It's a good, it's a nice neighborhood, there's good fire protection from a non wildfire standpoint. And here's the property timeline. You can see how things have changed over time. Lots of damaging wind events, and all the different permits that have been pulled, etc.
[00:10:41] And there's new roofs started going on in April of 23, and that's, There it is, there's the data, and there's the property, there's the damaging wind event, which is 85 miles an hour, the same day as the fire. So it's a wind driven fire.
[00:10:58] So John, if you were considering this house, what are the big things that you would be looking out for when buying this house?
[00:11:09] John Siegman: I would be looking out for open eaves, anything that would lead to another tragic event, since you've had one already. I would be looking for an upgraded rope from a shingle standpoint because of hail.
[00:11:28] I would be looking to see where the nearest stream was and whether or not I was downhill from it, because that's going to lead to flooding. And I would be looking at anything that would be focused on the insulation quality, things like that, particularly for any pipes in the walls, because that's going to. Be a mess if it happens. And gutter guards, price dams. We love gutter guards. Everyone should have gutter guards.
[00:11:58] Bob Frady: So, if I were looking at this, if I were going to consider buying this property and looking at it based upon this information, I would check a few things. The first thing I would check is can you get insurance, reasonably priced insurance for this property?
[00:12:12] How much is it going to cost? Because $7,000 a year is pretty expensive for homeowner's insurance for a house of that size. So you want to make sure that you don't blow your budget after you love the house by discovering that the insurance cost is really high. And we don't know whether it's high, but it looks like it might be high because there was a wildfire there before.
[00:12:33] The second thing is I do a radon check. Make sure that the property has been scored or tested for radon because it does have an elevated risk. And then finally, like you, I would do a lot of checking on the roof. I would make sure everything was installed as tightly as possible to guard against wildfire.
[00:12:50] The Marshall fire was an aberration in some ways, but it happened there once. It could happen again. So you want to make sure you've got closed soffits. You've got, you've got your eaves constructed properly that the inside of the roof has done well, and you've got great insulation again, because of the winter rest. You know, it's a brand new house, a lot to love about it. but you got to make sure that you do your checking before you put down your hard earned money.
[00:13:15] So, John, any closing thoughts on Colorado?
[00:13:19] John Siegman: It's a great place to live. Just make sure you get a PropertyLens Report on any house you're considering.
[00:13:26] Bob Frady: Well, thank you. This week's episode of PropertyLens Property of the Week. I'm Bob Frady.
[00:13:32] John Siegman: I'm John Siegman.
[00:13:33] Bob Frady: See you next week.
