If you’re not sure what a PE is, then please read the previous article before this one.
I love real estate and being an entrepreneur. So much so that I decided to focus full-time on our real estate companies. We had 5 active businesses all working together in real estate by that time. They are a real estate brokerage, investment property portfolio owner, property manager, house flipping, and software(about real estate investing) companies. We were busy.
Everything was going well, so I decided take the leap to free up some of my time. I dropped the job that didn’t involve real estate, but did require an unwavering 40 hours per week as an employee. The job as an engineer for the labs. I had worked there for almost 15 years and I did enjoy it. I really still miss the job and the wonderful people at the labs. I still communicate with several of them weekly. Some of them helped me in a big way to become a PE, as you will read later.
I went from a top-notch engineering firm of the highest regard, to barely ever doing any real engineering work in one day. I did still write, maintain, and sell the software that made our companies work, but real estate doesn’t change at a rate that constantly needs innovation. Once you have the code that automates the marketing, market modeling and prediction, construction sequencing, and websites (4 including this one), there isn’t much more engineering work to do. I missed working on ever-evolving, math-intensive, automated image/video processing systems at the forefront of technology. I am an engineer at my core. Engineering makes me happy.
After learning what a PE actually is (a real estate engineer), I became increasingly bothered by the fact that I wasn’t one. I looked into the process to become licensed. It seemed daunting. I had two small children and businesses running. I didn’t really have the time required to dedicate to it. Or so I told myself. It just ate at me for several more years. In those years I hired more PEs, managed more of our own construction projects, and even worked briefly with an architecture firm and a construction company as a project manager. All of those require you to read construction plans created by PEs. All the while becoming more distant from my engineering education and background.
Then, on June 24, 2021, the Champlain Towers South, a 12-story beachfront condominium in the Miami suburb of Surfside, Florida, partially collapsed, causing the deaths of 98 people. That was a terrible tragedy that made national news and captured headlines for several months. As a result, the state of Florida enacted several new laws. I won’t go into all of the new and changed laws in this article. The most important one mandated that an inspection be completed by a PE or architect on all commercial buildings when they become 30 years old, and then again every 10 years afterwards for the lives of the buildings. This included our buildings too.
The problem with the new inspection law was that all buildings older than 30 years came due for inspection all at once. There were far more buildings due for inspection in South Florida then there were PEs to do the inspections. Suddenly, the PEs were swamped with more work than they could handle. We had to wait for months for our inspections. We also paid a very high price for 4 hours of a PEs time.
I’m not upset that the price skyrocketed for these inspections. The changing market had driven demand so high that the supply for the service was woefully unprepared. The exact situation you look for as a good businessman. Most people couldn’t become professional engineers quickly to meet this new demand, but I could. The time to act had arrived and knocked on my door with a loud bang. I had to get off my duff immediately and become a PE.