Turning Shipping Containers into pools, sheds and homes

Transcript

Today, we're going to have a very special interview with Brian Ross of innovation fabrication right here in Winnipeg about turning shipping containers into pools and even tiny homes. Also, we're going to talk with Mike Schroeder of mortgage architects about what to do or what not to do after you've been pre-approved. All this on this very special Halloween episode of Winnipeg real estate podcast. Welcome to the October twenty ninth episode of Winnipeg real estate podcast on Bo Kauffmann of Remax performance REALTOR®.

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And we're going to do something a little different today. We're going to start the episode with an in-depth interview with a very interesting gentleman by the name of Brian Ross of Innovation Fabrication. Now, Brian is actually a trained chef. He's helped and run kitchens and functions for noted people such as the TrueNorth Foundation in the center. And a couple of years ago, he came up with a really neat idea, and that is to turn shipping containers into swimming pools.

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And it's not as easy as you think. You can just take a shipping container and fill a full of water because the pressure actually somebody in B.C. is doing or was doing that. And they're finding that the pressure of the water is blowing out the shipping container. So it's not quite as easy as what it sounds like. And there's a bit more work involved. And he says that business has really exploded. He's getting calls and orders from all over North America and that is now expanding into other options as well.

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So I'm going to call Brian right now and we'll have a little chat with him. Hello, good morning. Hey, Brian, how are you doing? It's Bo Kauffmann calling awesome. Very busy, but good, good, excellent.

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Well, I was just telling everybody about this most unique business that I've ever come across. And it's right here in Winnipeg. And it's Brian Ross of innovation fabrication. And the first time I met you was actually like a company. One of your one of your things that you do is in ground and above ground pools under the name of box pools. Tell us about that.

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Correct. So as we're a metal fabricator, first we make things all things out of steel, but very similar to like a branding of any other product. But spools is our version of a swimming pool modified from a shipping container or from fresh steel. But we custom make hot tubs, swimming pools above and the ground altogether as one unit plug and play kind of deliver to you.

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So they're prebuilt on site and then delivered. And I remember you saying one of the advantages is that if you have a backyard that's hard to access, you can lift this this thing with like a crane. Correct.

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You can crane it over if you have access into your backyard, like a that truck could drive into your yard and put it down that way. And if you have a house and you ever decided, well, this isn't my forever home and I want to move, you can literally take your pole with you right on.

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One of the things that the first ones I saw had a window in the side of it.

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What are some other other unique additions that you can put on the pool besides all different kinds of lighting packages that we do, 15 different colors of pool liners we can add and swim spots where it allows you to do resistance swimming. We can do infinity edge on the pool where it looks like it's pouring over the edge. We can incorporate hot tubs, we can incorporate solids, we can incorporate everything into the container to make it all in one.

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Yeah, I remember you telling me that you can even have a remote control where you can turn your swimming pool into a hot tub while you look after you leave work. You can just do something on your phone and turn it into a hot tub. Correct.

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There's there's some equipment that we use that allows you to actually control the pool or any of our projects. You can control them via your cell phone or iOS device, or you can use your laptop and then just turn up your heat from wherever you are.

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What's what's the demand been like from these? I understand you getting calls from the states and stuff.

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So prior to covid beginning, we were probably about five to 15 calls per week and about twenty five emails a week, just as a kind of a newer company, people trying to find out who we were. And the day that covid hit, we went to five hundred emails a week and a thousand phone calls and letters and stuff that's actually been growing.

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And any celebrities ever call you on this? We've had I don't know if I'm allowed to use his name, but he was in a movie called Basic Instinct and a bunch of other huge Hollywood blockbusters. But I got a call from wanting to put a gigantic 80 foot pool lap swimming for his very also famous wife that she would like to swim in the pool. So we we get calls from actually quite a few people. We know who they are, but in some cases, they ask us not to mention that to them.

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But we get calls from all kinds of people.

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That's awesome. Pools is one thing, but you you can make these shipping containers into just about anything, right?

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Correct. When and there are some people that want the actual look of the congregation. They want the look that it looks like a shipping container. Other people are OK with the fact that we can just build that out of fresh steel. So it just wouldn't be a shipping container at that point, but it would still have the same dimensions. So in doing something like that, we can build tiny houses, we can build those kitchens, we can do garages out back.

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We can pretty much do anything you can do out of wood. But instead of you having to build it on your own property, it basically shows up, delivered, ready to go for you, all wired up and everything.

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What's the most unique thing that you've ever done? The most unique thing that we that we are doing that we haven't done yet, it's it's the client's already we already got the process going, but the building process in February. But we're building a 16 foot by forty four foot hot tub slash sauna slash swimming pool for a client in Minneapolis that will be traveling as a single unit. So it'll have a police escort on the way there. Police are a pilot vehicle in front and back on the way down, and that will be a humongous undertaking for us.

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Well. I also understand you're recently entering into the medical field. Yes, so we've been approached by US and Canadian medical services asking us about can we build temporary shelters? Can we build temporary rooming or housing for people, also for hospitals as well, to the portability of the hospital where they can just drop it in? It's already self-contained with water and power and that can be moved. Mobile has become a very big interest point to a lot of different organizations in the health industry ever since covid started.

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So it's been it's been very busy on that front as well.

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Tell me a little bit about you had this unique medical lab down in the States call you.

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So we got called back just literally as covid was starting. We got called upon from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Maryland. If we could build them a research tank, that they were going to be doing some underwater research in their own lab using actual ocean water, but needed us to build them a research tank similar to the swimming pool, but with a couple of very unique differences that they wanted. And we were the only ones that were actually willing to build this for them.

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And so they reached out to us, you little Winnipeg. And we we built that and ship that off to them in June. And now they're looking at doing a few more for research.

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How big is like you just moved facilities to McGilvray somewhere, right? Correct. So, yeah, we're on Sabrina way now. We're right outside. We're right off of Wilkes', just on the the west side of the perimeter. And Headingley, our new brand new beautiful shop, great neighbors, great location makes a lot more sense for us. So it gives us a lot more flexibility to build bigger projects now.

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But she capacity's like, do you have one or two going at a time or how many do you have going?

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No, we would have four projects going at a time. Then as soon as those four projects are going on for projects are coming in. So we have the ability every month and a half to do eight eight hour separate bills or different projects depending on the complexity.

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Right. OK, well, awesome. And where can people like what's your website now? Where can people find you?

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So we actually have two websites. So Innovation Fabrications website is I f container dot com for specifically just for the swimming pools and hot tubs and that it's box with to excess. So be x x p o l dot com. And that'll give you kind of specific if you're looking for a house or a pool, there's two separate sites so you can look at both.

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Awesome. That's been, it's been a lot of fun. And I promise I'm going to come out there and take a look at your shop because I was at your last one, which was in the same bonifas area. Correct. But you've had to increase. How big is your shop now? What's the square footage?

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So we went to forty five hundred square feet, so we went from sixteen hundred to forty five. It's kind of baby steps, but we have the two shops now. But from the way the business is kind of ramping up, it might be that our third shop is at ten thousand square foot or you still have the same bonifas one as well, right.

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Yeah. Oh well this is really blowing up on you.

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Oh, it's this is literally going it was I don't want to say an overnight success. It was quite a while of kind of putting the word out. But when the word got out, coronavirus just started making people think of if we have to be isolated out of what's the best way to do that.

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You know, I'm finding that I think like our friends there in the home, rental and painting and business that are in our group are kind of finding the same thing as people can travel. So instead of spending ten thousand for two weeks in Mexico, they take that money and put it into their home. And I'm finding that quite a bit. Yeah.

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Now people are asking us to build a ten foot portable offices that they can put in their backyard, because if you have to work from home now all the time, instead of having to find a room inside your house and keep dogs quiet and it gets quiet, they would have their own insulated little standalone office so back that they could actually work out as well, too. That's become a big thing. Have you done one of those? That's coming up.

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Actually, that'll be coming up in January for our client in Texas.

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What kind of cost is there? What kind of cost on that? On a small little office? It wouldn't be much. It would be probably around twenty to twenty five thousand, depending on how fancy wanted it. That would be kind of a basic an insulated office. But if you wanted it to have full power and things like that, your own washroom in there, you know, obviously we would have to close that project out. But a lot of people are looking for basic and then they go to the complete end of the spectrum and they want it to have skylights in them glass walls.

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They want to go all out. So now that people have kind of come to terms with the fact that you need to work from home, they're trying to make their office space look as fancy as it can so they can keep up with the Joneses going to Texas.

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I imagine that air conditioning will be included. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I can just see sitting in a metal box at one hundred twenty degree day.

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Yeah, that's a must. OK, well. Brian, thank you very much. It's been very entertaining. Like I said, I promise I'm going to come out and see you when I when I can in the next week or so. Awesome. My pleasure. OK, take it. Right. Thank you. Bye bye. Bye bye. Well, I do hope you enjoyed listening to that as much as I enjoyed finding out this new information. I did go to see Brian and his shop a few days after we did this recording.

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And it it's really unique to see what's going on there. And I do wish them a lot of luck in the in the very near future.

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All right, so now we're going to phone my my buddy mortgage, Mike Mike Schroeder of Mortgage Architects. And today's topic is going to be about what to do or what not to do after you've been pre-approved. There are a couple of things that you should definitely not do which could harm your credit rating between the time that you are pre-approved and make the purchase of your first next or your dream home.

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Good afternoon. Hey, Mike, it's Bo Kauffmann. How are you doing today? Good. How are you, buddy? Doing very well. So today we want to talk about what to do and what not to do after you've been pre-approved. It's that time period between you've seen Mike, you've got your preapproval. You're going to start working with Bhogle to find your house. And it may take four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks to find a house.

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What don't you do in that time period? Sure.

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So there's a couple of things that come to mind. The first is changing jobs that can significantly affect how much house you'll be approved for, OK? The second one, make sure, of course, you don't touch your down payment funds. So sometimes people will have their down payment in risky stocks and you run the risk that the stock market dropping in value. So make sure that you take your money out of, say, that's a risky investment and put it into a cash or cash equivalents.

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OK, and the last one, the one that a lot of people forget about is cosigning a loan for someone else. So, for example, if you co-sign alone for a car payment for your daughter and she misses a payment that actually counts negatively on your credit, even though it's not your vehicle that might stop you from buying the house that you want to write.

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Well, that's right. I had not thought about that one. I've heard of other ones where people go out and buy furniture on layaway and that can affect their credit rating, correct? Correct.

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And so do you like that, especially just especially after you've been approved for? How's that? Approval can always be relooked at by the lender. Also, your credit tips, they may choose to not give you the money to buy the house. Is that a common thing?

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Because I've heard this before, that some banks. So let's say you approve them. February 1st, we buy a house position is April 1st that a week before they take possession, the lender will do another credit check. Is that a common thing? I'd say it's common.

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About half the lenders. So some do, some don't. And so it should definitely be concerned about. And that's why I'll tell people, doesn't matter if it's a week before possession or month for possession. Don't make any changes to your income or to your credit until after you take possession of that house that just protects you.

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OK, so applying for a credit card or or buying furniture on layaway, do it after you have the keys to your house and after you're in.

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That's right. That way you are fully protected.

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OK, awesome. Great advice. Thank you very much, Mike. And we'll look forward to talking to you next time. Sounds good. Have a great day. OK, bye bye.

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All right, I'm going to wrap up with some final thoughts. We've all heard how tight Winnipeg real estate market is right now, and this is due to the lack of available and listed houses. So, for example, last year at this time, we had over 6500 available houses for sale. While this morning we are approximately 40 percent below that. On the other hand, condos are not facing this shortage. So last year we had six hundred and forty compared to six hundred and ten this morning.

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So it's only about a five percent drop off next week. That's on November 5th. We're going to take a look at the housing stats for the previous month. So for all the sales in October. But I think it's we all know what's going to what it's going to say is prices and bidding wars and houses have continued. However, I'm going to put out there that buying a condo for your first home or if you're downsizing, buying a condo might be a good option for you.

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Now, there are some advantages and also some disadvantages to owning a condo. And we're going to delve into both of those. That's all next week on November 7th. Talk to you then. Bye bye. Darcis Animal Rescue Center in Winnipeg is a charitable organization which helps save and protect our four legged friends.

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Since it started 15 years ago, Ghazi's has saved and found new homes for over 10000 cats and dogs in the house to be darsey those pets. Bo Kauffmann of remarks performance REALTOR® is a proud supporter of Darcis Animal Rescue and now makes a special offer buy or sell your house or condo in Winnipeg who's involved with your agent? And he'll donate 250 dollars towards dances. Ask if you mention something. All Bo Kauffmann helped his saddle buy your next home in Winnipeg Bo, no realistic.

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You've been listening to Bo Kauffmann of Remax performance REALTOR® are you thinking of buying or selling a house or a condo in Winnipeg combo at two zero four three three three two two zero to remember Bo Knows Real Estate?