Episode #9 Empowering Through Knowledge
Charlie
Welcome to the Trade Secrets Inspections podcast, because “You need to know!”. Here's your host, Rick.
Hey, welcome back to the Trade Secrets Inspections podcast. I'm back Charlie McDermott here with Rick. Rick, how you doing?
Rick
I'm doing well, Charlie, it's very good to be with you, again, always enjoyed doing these podcasts with you.
Charlie
Now I, I'm the one that really benefits and our listeners again, I always, gosh, with your knowledge and your research and your continual passion to learn more and more and stay up to date with all the codes. So I know today, you're going to get into another important topic. So once again, I'm going to turn the microphone over to you what do you have in store for us today? Right?
Rick
Today, what I want to share with people is about how to empower yourself and finding out some information that's publicly available. I'm often asked a question about contractors and how to find someone, or how to to discover what's going on with somebody, or better yet to file a complaint, you know, and what can people do, if they're in a situation where, you know, they're not happy with how things are going? So we're just gonna dive into what's available in the wonderful world of online searching, which is, you know, a wonderful tool we now have available to us, it makes things much easier, but
Charlie
it can also be overwhelming, right?
Rick
Yeah, right, you can also definitely lose yourself. Overwhelmed in that, you know, so just to start off with in the state of Florida, if you just search Florida public records, there's, there's a state of florida.com public records page that you can go to, and it has everything under the sun in public records that you would want to ever find. So if you're ever just looking for a starting point, I would always suggest to just start with Florida public records, and go through the list there and see if there's something that looks for the you know, the topic of what you're trying to find. What I want to focus on today is mostly about contractors and how to, to reference what's going on with a contractor or their licensing. This is something that most people may not know about.
There's a department in Florida...
...that deals with the licensing of contractors and other professionals, it's generally referred to as DBPR, or the Department of Business and Professional Regulations. So that is a very good place to go to if you go to Florida DBPR. Or it's actually http://www.myfloridalicense.com/dbpr/, is what the website is. But if you do Florida DBPR in the search, it'll take you to my Florida license, comm essentially. And on that page, you can search for contractors, you can search for them by the contractor type, by their personal name, by you know, where the city or their license number. And it's a powerful tool, because you can look up and see you know, just exactly what's going on. So just for an example, I'll search myself. So just as a general info, I go in and I do a name search, and I'm just going to put my last name in there.
Charlie
And is this something that you would recommend before you hire someone?
Rick
Yeah, it is a good way to get an idea of who you're going to hire. You know, a lot of people do like some shopping around and like to do some research on stuff if they're not getting a good referral from someone. So you know, it's just a tool that's out there. And if you have as a name, you can start there. I just put in my last name, and you know, there's several Kooyman’s in the area and different things, but I come up under Home Inspector and you can click on my name and it'll tell you all about, you know, where my business is what our addresses, you know, what my license status is. And at the bottom of the page is this wonderful tool where it says View related license information and view license complaints.
Charlie
Hmm.
Rick
Which is also which is which is a question I get asked commonly for people that are you know, they contact me oftentimes because something's not going right. And they want to know what kind of recourse they have or you know, where they can be be heard essentially. And you can do this you can go to, you know, the Department of Business and Public Relations and file a complaint on a contractor and and have the the enforcement agents look into what's going on with that contractor. And it also stays on their record so that if someone wants to go in search, they'll find out about it.
This kind of practice is also true for properties.
You know, when we're looking at buying a house, oftentimes, what's going on with that property as far as the neighbors is an important thing to look up. There are code complaints that you can look up, if you do a public record search for permits by your county, depending on which county you're in. So here in Collier County, you just go to the https://www.colliercountyfl.gov/ site, and there's options for doing property search, code enforcement's Contractor Licensing search again, if you're buying a property, this is a good place to go to see the history of the property and what what the previous owners have, who they have been, what they've done with the property, what the tax department has done with the property. And also, you know, again, what kind of complaints have the neighbors been making about, you know, what's been going on at that property? It's kind of entertaining, actually. Because when you look him up, they put him in there verbatim to the complaint. So you can call code enforcement and make a complaint over the phone, or you can do it online. But when you when you look them up, if you look up a specific property address, and you see code enforcement, and you look up the stuff in there, it will say exactly what the person said, when they were making the complaint. So it's, it's comical. Often.
Charlie
I had no idea!
Rick
Yeah. Yeah, that's it. So I wanted to bring this up as a topic today, because these, these tools are out here for us to you know, make use of in this new online world we live in, but you know, we often don't know, they’re there.
Permit tracking is also a big thing, you know, to make sure that when you're buying a property, open permits can be an issue when you transfer a property. Because if you take ownership of a property that has an open permit on it, now you own that problem. So you probably want to address that before you buy it to make sure that you're not responsible for someone else's trouble.
Charlie
Wow.
Rick
Wow. Right.
Charlie
Right, that would be an unpleasant surprise.
Rick
Yeah, wow. I particularly like the DBPR contractor stuff, because you know, I can I can, you can see what their training histories are, you know, like, you can look up my, my ces or continuing education requirements and see how active your contractor is, in staying current on you know, updated stuff. It will show you exactly what their activities are in accordance with their license, you know, pretty well to date. So it's a good tool to make use of, yeah.
Charlie
Love it.
Rick
Yeah, short and simple this this month, but, you know, it says it's a good place to start. Yeah,
Charlie
yeah. Short and simple. But you know, when you get into it, you could you could spend the day just just looking at it.
Rick
You'll get lost in it.
Charlie
Wow, if only houses could talk, oh, they can just go there
Rick
how about that.
Charlie
Well, terrific. All right. Once again, another eye opening episode. Really appreciate you spending time with us. Now go out there and help those homeowners or homeowners-to-be by the right home with a peace of mind knowing they made the right choice.
Rick
Yep. Yeah. Just the the two words to keep you know, state of Florida public records, and Department of Business and professional relations. DBPR those, those are very powerful places to go to look for records. Terrific.
Charlie
Rick, well, we’ll end here and get you back in here in the near future for your next episode.
Rick
Yeah, absolutely. Look forward to it. It's a pleasure talking to you again, Charlie. I'll do it again soon.
Charlie
Thanks for listening to the Trade Secrets Inspections podcast. To learn more about Trade Secrets Inspections, go to www.TradeSecretsInspections.com or call 239-537-1186.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai