How to Spot Expensive House Problems Before You Buy | The DASHcast Podcast with Zac ft. Charles Micheal

Episode originally aired: July 21, 2026

In this episode of the DASHcast Podcast, the DASH Carolina team dives into Most buyers walk into a home and focus on the finishes. Experienced agents look for something very different. In this episode of The DASHcast Podcast, Zac sits down with DASH agent Charles Michael Wil…

Whether you’re a real estate agent looking to sharpen your skills or a buyer or seller trying to understand how the pros think, DASHcast delivers the real conversations that make a difference. New episodes drop weekly — subscribe on YouTube or find us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Episode Overview

Most buyers walk into a home and focus on the finishes. Experienced agents look for something very different. In this episode of The DASHcast Podcast, Zac sits down with DASH agent Charles Michael Willis to discuss the biggest issues buyers should look for before making an offer. From crawlspace moisture and siding concerns to grading, roofing, and structural red flags, this conversation breaks down how buyers can protect themselves from expensive surprises after closing.Whether you're a first-time buyer, a seasoned homeowner, or a real estate agent looking to improve your home-touring skills, this episode is packed with practical advice that could save you thousands.

Full Episode Transcript

The following is a lightly edited transcript of this DASHcast episode. Some portions may be condensed for readability.

Foreign. If you like your standards high and your growth even faster, pull up a chair, because. This is the dashcast podcast, and on today’s episode, we have Charles Michael Willis joining us. Pleasure to be here, Zach. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about yourself. So I started in real estate in about 2019, got full bore about 2022, worked with another firm, and then found my home at DASH and have been in love with it ever since.

Nice man. Yeah. We don’t call you Charles Michael at the office. We call you Chuck Mike. You call me Chuck Mike because that’s, you know, really fun. We always try and give people nicknames, but. Absolutely, yeah. So tell me, so you were in real estate for last few years? Yeah. Correct. And then what’d you do before that? So before that, I was a regional operations manager for a local. Well, not local. It was one of the

largest on the Eastern Seaboard. Parking company, valet company, that sort of stuff, as you know. Yeah, yeah. In a past life, him and ICU worked together, but we didn’t know about it. Yeah, absolutely. So it was. Yeah, so I. I did that for a long time. Got a lot of experience in hospitality. Also was an executive assistant manager, or, sorry, an executive assistant for a commercial real estate firm here. So got to really learn the in

and outs of some of the. The development side of things on the construction side. Yeah. I was about to say you had somewhat of a construction background, too. Absolutely. So dabbled in high school with construction classes, spent summers on, you know, the roost roofing and doing concrete laying from the foundations, all that fun stuff. So really a truly developed understanding from the ground up of how a house is developed or made. Sweet man. So, I mean,

obviously, because you have that background, you have a lot of knowledge about just the house in general and specifically, Dash, like, we really try and talk people out of houses by that. We try and point out things that might cost them money in the future. And I feel like you’ve really dialed really into that because you have such a good track record of success with knowing so much about houses. Yeah, absolutely. So that is my motto.

It’s in my bio. If you look, you know, I absolutely will try to talk you out of the house. I feel like it is not my job to let you know, hey, I love these beautiful walls. I love this beautiful floor. I’ll tell you what the material is, but it’s not really up to. To decide what I like and what I don’t like. You’ll tell me when we’re looking, what I really want to do is to

let you know, hey, this is structurally what I see going on right now. I’m not an expert, I’m not an inspector, but I do have a background enough to see that this crack may cause an issue. We need to get it looked at or, hey, there’s higher humidity in the crawl space. Just something that you’re probably not going to be well aware of the first time that you’re buying a house. Or even if you are seasoned,

you might not know, hey, 36% in the crawl space is going to have some issues in the future. So really making sure sure that buyers are aware of that. And when I finally can’t tell them, hey, this is all the stuff that’s wrong with your house. You have to be comfortable with it moving forward. And are you comfortable? And they tell me, yes, we’re willing to accept all this, that’s when I’ll write the offer for them.

But not until me, until they’ve told me, hey, you know, I’m in love with this house and I’m okay with everything that comes with it. Right. Because homes are sold as is how is where is in our state. Right. So caveat emptor. Yeah, exactly. Buyer beware. So in the event that you buy a house and it turns out it’s put together with duct tape, I mean, that becomes your problem, right? Too late at that point. Yeah,

absolutely. So you went through a couple of things there, like structural stuff, humidity in the crawl space. Like, tell us some things that you typically look out for when you’re showing a house. Yeah, absolutely. So I like to start on the outside to begin with. I mean, a lot of times we’re greeting clients at the front door. And what better way to start the interaction with saying, hey, look at this siding that we have in North

Carolina, especially Carrie Raleigh, you know that 70s 80s track? You’ll run into the one word that we dislike the most, and that’s Masonite. Most buyers aren’t familiar with what Masonite is, and it’s not a problem until it is. And how does it become a problem? Well, maintenance. And that’s most of the things that I try to educate buyers on is saying if you go and paint this and you take care of this product, it may last

longer than what the shelf recommended for it or you know, that you see your neighbors have already replaced it, whatever it may be. But keep in mind that this is going to be an issue. Masonite specifically, you’re familiar with it just as I am. I like to call it glorified. Cardboard. Once you start practically missing some of those maintenance windows, of having it painted, having it sealed, having it caulked, you’re allowing moisture intrusion to go into

that Masonite and it starts crumbling away. That begins to be a very expensive problem for buyers very quickly. And I want to also reiterate that we don’t know what’s behind that wall. And no matter how much discovery we do of walking up and saying, hey, this is soft, we still don’t have trade vision to be able to see behind it. So even then, there may still be issues and the buyer needs to be aware of that

before moving forward. So it’s all about educating at the end of the day. Right. So, like, what are some tips that you could give other agents or even clients when you come up to a house that has Masonite, for instance, because Masonite, it’s the brand name of the press board that they use. Exactly. And so, like, what are some tips that you generally will show a client or an agent that might be watching you come up

to a house has press board on it? What are some things that you can tell if it’s good or not? Yeah. So when you’re looking at Masonite, it will have this funny little interaction when it does start getting a lot of moisture in it to where the board will start to wave. If you’re looking down it, that’ll be a very clear indicator of, hey, we are starting to have some moisture intrusion. And also if it’s soft,

if you go up to it and you press onto it, a lot of homeowners, what they’ll do is they’ll paint over it, it’ll still be soft, you’ll still see that indentation in there. So just being aware that, hey, you know, most of the properties sub, what, early 90s in Cary in Raleigh, they’re going to have that Masonite, typically. And then just being aware that it really is a maintenance key to it. And if you keep painting

it, keep it well maintained, then there’s still plenty of Masonite out there that’s fine today. But really walking up to it, you know, the press test is probably the easiest gives way, you know that it’s well into that point. Yeah. And the good thing about it is that kind of like with anything in life, if you take care of it and you do the proper maintenance, it’s going to last a long time. Like, there’s a guy

that had a Volvo, I think that he did all the proper oil changes every time you’re supposed to, and he’s got like 2 million plus miles on it. You know, like if you maintenance something the right way and take care of it’s going to last a long time. So with Masonite, like you said, right, like taking care of it, putting the right primer on it, paint, not primer, but, you know, painting it. Yeah, yeah, but, but

taking care of it. And the good thing is that stuff is kind, kind of relatively inexpensive back in the day to put on a house. So if you do need to replace it, it’s not a huge deal to do that, right? No, it’s not a huge deal. And I mean, the common fix that you’ll see now is, you know, the same kind of press board, but is concrete cement or concrete fiber board. You’ll find hardy plank

different things to replace that with. You don’t have to be necessarily worried that I’ve got Masonite on the side of my house. You just need to be aware of what the repercussions down the road are or what this looks like for me to replace it. And most people are going to tell you the, hey, just replace a little bit at a time. What I tell you is vinyl is going to be the cheapest and easiest option

for you to put up there. You know, a $50,000 replacement might actually be 12,000 if you do it vinyl and you don’t piece it together. So sometimes just having that education, aware, being aware of, you know, your property as you should be, will save you a lot of headache in the long run. The funny part about that, specifically with Masonite, like you were saying though, is that if the way we explain it to buyers too, is

important because if we terrify a buyer, right, they’ll never buy a house with Masonite. But you know, I tell buyers all the time, I’ve got Masonite on my house. It’s got the issues I’ve just told you about here and there. If you just take care of it, you know, just something to be on your radar in the future to budget for. If, if we love this house, if it’s next to grandma and we’re going to do

whatever it takes to buy this house, that’s something we just have to think about, right? Just so we can move forward. Because at the end of the day, if we talk everyone out of houses the way, you know, to, to a perfect T, the normal. Ever buy a house? Because every house has issues. Absolutely. Which is good. So we always try and like do positive sandwiches around it, make sure that we are talking about the pros

and cons of it. Right. That’s at the end of the day, you’re conduit information. Like you’re just, I mean you’re just spitting out information right now, which is great. Yeah, yeah. So with moisture in the crawl space, what are some things? So crawl space, I mean, before I came to dash, I mean, I look at them because I was genuinely curious how it looked down there. Yeah, right. Yeah. What are some things that you do when

you got a client? There’s a crawl space. What is a crawl space? Difference between that and a slab? Like, can you share that info with us? Yeah, I believe like you mentioned, like most agents are kind of not going down into the crawl space. Dirty is dirty. Spiders. Yeah. You wear a suit and then come out, you know, covered in cobwebs and stuff. But I do, I mean, I think you do as well. But with that

said, the foundation and that’s where it starts. I mean, that’s where you’re going to start having issues. That’s where you’re going to start having things that show up. It’s the foundation of your home. The same that you mentioned, the slab. Slab is just one piece of concrete that lays across the ground. You build the home on top of it. There’s not a lot that can happen in between the house and that. But with a crawl space,

you have, you know, sometimes a 6 inch space, sometimes 2 to 3ft, sometimes 6 foot that you can walk through completely fine. But with that said, there’s a lot of issues that come up in those where you can see it that if you didn’t enter that crawl space in the first place, you’re not going to know about it. Some things going outside of general knowledge of expertise. But like a helical pier. Yeah, like something that supports

the house completely, you know, holds up the girders, make sure that, you know, nothing’s sagging, anything like that. But we can go into the crawl space and sometimes see issues. If you see a crack, especially like some stair stepping cracks down the side of the mortar or something like that, we know that there might be an issue with the helical pier or if, you know, the piers are laying sideways, you know, there could be a structural

issue and it’s just something important to tell the client. Same thing which you mentioned. Moisture going in the crawl space, seeing hanging insulation. That tends to be a key to me that we have higher, you know, moisture levels in that crawl space. And here’s the reality. You know it just as well as I do. In North Carolina, we’re almost 100% humidity. Some days swimming through, trying to get anywhere. So that same thing is going to happen

to your crawl space. It’s going to raise there. And naturally in the area we tend to see 36, 50% humidity crawl space as being normal. If it doesn’t have a vapor barrier, if it doesn’t have encapsulation, all that fun stuff that it, if you’re not pulling that crawl space open and you’re not peeking in there to see you’re not really doing a justice to your client by saying, hey, you know, I’m aware of these things, but

you shouldn’t be. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day we’re a due diligence state, right? Yeah. If, if we don’t look in the crawl space and then our client puts an offer forward, you know, sometimes, you know, from half a percent to two and a half percent of the purchase price. If it’s multi offer situation, maybe even more due diligence, then boom. You know, my client’s money is at stake and I didn’t even look

in the crawl space for them or the attic or anything like that. Right. So we do our clients a disservice if we don’t do that. So it’s okay to get cobwebs on the, on your suit. It’s okay. I had a client years ago that I was showing him a house and I was wearing a three piece and I ducked down and get the crawl space. He grabbed me and said, do not go in there with that

suit. And I was like, dude, this is more important for you for me to go in here than it is about me wiping my suit off when I get out. Right. So it’s super important to show our clients we care about them, that when I show houses, I try and make sure like, hey, client, your money is almost like it’s mine. I’m going to do my best to make sure that if I was helping you buy

this house or I was buying this house, I do the exact same thing for me. Right. I want to make sure that you’re protected. Yeah. So I kind of do that same thing. I mirror that anxiety. I’m on the emotional rollercoaster with you, you know, just as well I do. I’ll call you and say, hey, you know, I had this situation going on, but I, I feel like when you start to get detached or say, hey,

well, I’m not going to go in this crawl space because I don’t want to mess up my suit. That’s where you’re not really justifying. You’re not really being that justice advocate for your client, saying, hey, you know, I’m going to make sure I know everything about this property before you do want to move forward on it. Yeah, Cabinet emptor. I mean, that’s what it brings back to. I think every buyer should know that this is a

seller protective state. Yep. You know, buyer beware. Buyer beware that the property is as is at time of showing, meaning what you see is what you get. So if you have somebody that’s just pulling you through and saying, hey, look at this beautiful ceiling, look at this beautiful carpet, whatever it may be, and then you’re missing the stair step cracking, you know, in the, in the living room, you know, door frame or whatever it is. And

that same stair step cracking is showing upstairs. But you didn’t mention it once. I just don’t see how you’re doing a justification. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, at the end of the day, it’s super important for our clients to know that about the house because. And we try and coach our agents to know a home like an inspector. Right. Like, I’m not perfect, I’m going to miss things. But if I can point out the majority of

stuff that’s going to be on that inspection report, when the time comes, they’re going to be like, wow, I got a great agent that’s really looking out for me, you know, for the biggest purchase of my life. Oh, yeah, right. So super important to know a house like an inspector. So what are some other things that you’ve noticed? Because, I mean, I’ll be honest, I’ve had, I’ve had clients that you’ve done co agent showings for me

before. Like if I was out of town, you showed a house for me or I got a sign call, gave them to you, and just, you know, you do stellar job of showing a house and pointing things out and trying to show your value proposition. Because these days agents, I mean, some people think that we, they don’t need an agent to buy a house, which is, you know, I mean, at the end of the day, they

probably could do stuff without us, but they might miss things, they might do things wrong, they might make a huge mistake and lose a ton of money. Maybe it’s a good idea to have an agent. Right. That knows what they’re talking about and is in their corner fighting for them. Yeah, I’m a huge advocate for that as well. I’ll tell anybody that, you know, says, hey, I don’t feel like I need to Use an agent. Well,

perfect. You don’t have to. Here’s why you maybe should. Florida, New Jersey, some other state, absolutely don’t use an agent. But because North Carolina’s caveat emptor, because it’s buyer beware, that’s where you really need to start, you know, listening to someone when they’re telling you, when they’re the expert, when you hire them to represent you, you really should be saying, hey, what am I getting myself into? Exactly. Because there’s no way out of it. Due diligence

in North Carolina is, you know, is. You put it on. And if we can’t prove without a reasonable factor of the doubt that the seller told us something wrong, you’re not getting it back. Right. And if you’re not advocating for your client and tell them that day one, and maybe scaring them just a little bit to the point to where we are looking at the houses and they say, hey, you know, I’m okay with all this

stuff. That’s what I say. We move forward. And that’s why I tend to, you know, phrase it like that, is I’m not willing to write you the offer until you tell me, hey, I’m absolutely in love this house. I know everything that’s going on. Yeah, it’s super important. Super important. I think one thing that’s that we can help our clients to do before moving forward is being able to look at the house as much as we

can. Five things. What are the five big things? If you had to walk up to a house with a client that you would say, we need to make sure that we look at these five things in order to feel comfortable about moving forward. Five things are going to cost us the most money in the future if we need to address them. Yeah. Downslope towards the house. Okay. So, like, grading. Grading. Okay. You know, if you are

on a negative incline, what does that look like in the crawl space? What kind of issues are you running into? Has it caused some foundational issues because you’re just slowly being pulled down? I think grading is an important thing to look at. Siding when you’re approaching the house. Just some of those things that I’m generally taking in. Siding, crawl space, you know, humidity. Again, any of those issues that we see up here leaning, any cracks, anything

like that. And then roof. And when we’re looking outside, you know, sometimes you can see, hey, there’s decking that is bent and it’s causing the roof to bow or buckle or whatever it may be. Or that ridge cap. Boy, that sure doesn’t look right. Maybe I should get an expert out here to have it look at it for you. And then the fifth thing, probably any of the plumbing in the house, I mean, water is going

to be your biggest issue. I think that’s what you keep hearing as a repetitive thing. And this is, you know, moisture retention of any sort, humidity, Masonite, any of that stuff is. Is all moisture related. So looking at the pipes, just make sure walking through, you know, hey, is this Polybutylene, is this PVC, is this cast iron, and I still got 20 years out of it, or is it cast iron and it’s reaching the end of

his life, 80 to 100 years? I mean, there’s. There’s stuff that go along with that that I think that would be very important for you to walk through and at least flush the toilets or turn on the shower. Yeah, absolutely. So grading siding, crawl space, moisture, water issues, and the roofer, kind of like big five things, I would add, like your systems, like H vac, things like that. Right. Because those could be those. You know, your

heat goes out, boom. Now I got to pay for either eight to $10,000 gas pack, something like that. Right? Yeah, those are definitely huge potential issues that might cost money in the future. Right. So what do you have, like, a crazy story you want to share at all about maybe a client that maybe it’s just something you ran into at a house that, you know, you guys went under contract, you pointed it out, and it just

turned out to be a crazy thing? Yeah, I think it was actually one of the shadowing experiences with Dash. Okay. And I came on thinking, you know, that I already knew everything. It was well to go. But in reality, you know, there was still quite a bit that I took on from some of these senior agents. And Jennifer, Bad Jen, as we call her, I went on a shadowing with her for a showing and. Or actually

it was the final walk. And this is why I’m always an advocate of. We do the final walk the morning of the closing, not the night before, not the week before, the morning of. And if you’re not available, I’ll go out there and do it. Because we went out there and I heard, like, a rainforest behind the door. And I thought, surely this can’t be, you know, something that’s going on with the house that they’ve got

to the point where they’re getting ready to close Badge, open the door, and there’s just water coming down from the ceiling, coming out of the light fixtures, coming out of everywhere. I Mean, it is so bad that when we talk about the slab, it is running out from the slab underneath the house outside to where you can see it coming out. My goodness. So, yeah, I think that was the biggest horror story shock that I’ve seen.

And I’m. It didn’t happen to me, but I know that the resolution was that, you know, buyer essentially got DD back, was chose to move forward with another property. That property was fixed by the seller. But, I mean, that’s tough. Yeah, it was a. And it’s especially tough for the agent knowing that they’ve got across the finish line and then coming in the day of and then realizing, hey, we’ve got this huge issue. But to her

defense, I mean, has she done that the night before? We would have never known. Yeah, it’s very true. I mean, you have to do a final walkthrough before you close on the house. And you got to do it before closing. Ideally, like you said, right before you go to closing. Closing at 10. We’re doing the final walk through at 9. Yeah. Even if we get a closing right at 10. O3, you know, because if we happen

to find an issue that wasn’t there before, the contract says that the house has to be in the same condition as it was when you went under contract. So we get there, test the ac, AC is broken. That’s got to get fixed before you can close. Absolutely right. And so if the seller says no, then, okay, well, we’re gonna have to back out and have to give us our due diligence back. Granted, you know, they don’t

necessarily have to give the due diligence back. That could get tied up in other issues, you know, other court kind of things. But at the end of the day, you want to make sure that you’re protecting your client. Right. When we hire someone to work for us, we want to make sure we get the best of the best. Yeah. Right. And so when someone’s going to buy a house, that’s going to be the biggest purchase of

their life, you should have the right team in place. Right. That can help you make sure I’m going to be looking out for you. Yeah. And I know you’ve used this example before. Maybe we’ve heard it as well through other folks at the firm. But, you know, when we represent a client, we’re putting on, you know, I’m team. Team Chuck Mike. Right. Or I’m in your corner. I’m like your boxing coach. You know, Actually, you’re my

boxing coach. You’re the CEO of your company, and I’m your real estate department. I’m going to go out there and fight for you in every way I can make sure that your asset is protected. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it’s very important to have an advocate again in North Carolina. I can’t speak for other states. Yeah. I mean, I can certainly see the appeal to not using the agent in any other state, but when you

really are in a seller protected state, Having a buyer representative is super important because you’re not going to know about a lot of these issues. And then better yet, what are you going to do when they do come up? We have lists of vendors that we can use call at any point in time to get, you know, another eye on it, or at least two to try to find out, hey, is this even worth moving forward?

Maybe our best case is to walk away from the due diligence. Right. But I just want to make sure that they are fully well aware of this before committing to anything. Yeah. What, you know, 450,000 is about starter home and carry right now. Yeah. It’s a lot of money, you know, and if we’re gonna give 4K in due diligence at 1% for that, or, you know, if it’s at $400,000, then that’s a lot of money that

you got to walk away from. Right. Like, it’s hard to walk away for 500, let alone 4,000. Oh, yeah. I mean, and so we got to be willing to be comfortable with that before we even put an offer in. Right. Because if this house, something falls out, you know, we’ve pointed out everything we possibly can, giving you the pros and cons of, you know, everything that we’ve seen in the house. Siding, crawl space, roof, all these

different things. If we’re comfortable moving forward, if, God forbid, we do have to back out, Are you okay with walking away with that? Yeah. And not having that, you know, so. And then not thinking about it. If the client says, hey, I do want speaking to the agents here. I think it’s important to understand Once they say, hey, I’m comfortable walking away from this, don’t let it eat you up anymore. I mean, you’ve given them the

advice. You give them the information to do that. Just know that, you know, sometimes that 1 to 2% is a lot different to us than it is to somebody else, and it’s okay. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Chuck, Mike, I’m so glad that you came on the show with us today and talked about how we, like, talk people out of houses and yeah if you want to work with Chuck Mike reach out to him. He’s got a

bio on our website and he’s a great agent. He’s actually on my team and so happy to interview him today so but we’re thankful to have you guys watching us on the Dashcast Podcast and YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, all those different places. Make sure you give us a like comment, share, subscribe all those fun things and if you’re on YouTube I know specifically hit that bell notification because I don’t know why but YouTube really likes once

you hit that bell notification to say oh I never want to see one of their videos again you got to go on there and say give me alerts for these so make sure that you do that so that you don’t miss a single episode from us. So this is the dashcast podcast. I’m Zach your host and this is Chuck Mike and we’re glad to have you.