In the real estate and construction businesses out there, the majority of the services that The Lawson Group provides have to do with the management of hazardous materials.
Transcription:
In the real estate and construction businesses out there, the majority of the services that we provide for them have to do with the management of hazardous materials.
Whenever they have to do either construction, demolition, or retrofitting of a building that impacts asbestos-containing materials they really should engage or involve us at the front end of the process so we can go into a facility where they're going to do their construction work and determine what is present for asbestos, what kind of condition it's in, and whether it needs to be removed or abated because it'll be impacted by the work that they do.
We have many construction companies and real estate firms that will call us and engage us when they're looking to buy a property, rehab a property or sell a property, and before you even start to think about doing construction work as the time to do that.
I can't tell you over the years how many times we've gotten a call from somebody that's in the middle of a renovation project where they say, "Hey, we just opened up a wall. Somebody told us that the pipes are covered with asbestos insulation and we've got five or 10 or 20 or 30 workmen standing around waiting now because nobody will go into the building and touch it until we find out if it's asbestos."
An even worse situation than that. They'll call and say, "We just pulled down a ceiling. And now we think the ceiling that we just pulled down is asbestos, and it may have contaminated the entire building," and we've done that as well. We do go in and they have contaminated the entire building. The project gets put on hold for weeks. While they're decontaminated in the building, they suffer unbelievable costs to go in and do that that was never even anticipated in the budget for the construction project.
The best time to even look at that stuff is before these construction and real estate management companies even start to think about doing this stuff.
