Welcome everybody to Midday magazine for this Tuesday, September 10th, 2024.
Have your host James J. Mailoff here and we're having let's talk real estate time.
It's our friends, we get coal bankers, see your realtors.
We have David Farmboro with us, David, good to see you.
It's great to be with you James.
Just blown in from the windy city, spent a few days in Chicago and of course one of the
things I did there was look at all the architecture and take dozens of pictures as you can imagine.
That's sort of what we're talking about today.
Yeah, I'm really excited about this topic and I did not know you were going to start there.
I obviously am a very biased about that city, it is my city, I love that city,
but I will say I do, I've been around a bunch of America here and just in the states,
I've never been outside of the states, but I got to say that the architecture in Chicago
is stands above so many. It is really unique, it is really interesting what they were able to do there
and the rebirth of that city as well.
Some of the architecture there is from that era and everything and even some of it before
that era, it's just fascinating, I love that area and my uncle was an architect and take
me around the city looking at the Hancock and some of these buildings and just talking about the
way that they were built on that land in particular which is a whole other story.
You're absolutely right and what we decided to do James and I, we talked about this a couple of
shows ago, we wanted to do something, perhaps a little less dry than some of the real estate things
that we normally discuss and so we're going to be talking about the difference between houses in
London which is where I'm from and houses that we might find in Wisconsin. Now talking about Chicago,
that's actually is a quite good place to start because you know that a lot of what dictates
construction style is the history, the materials available and the and the vision and I found that
when you look at some of those early skyscrapers people had a huge confidence to build those,
you have to be able to build them and you know you're going to fill them.
Interesting point and building with confidence is something that we still do sometimes today
even Wisconsin Rapids so if you look at our 20 million dollar YMCA building they had to build
that with a lot of confidence and it's really paid off. I think when you aim high you reach high.
I have to be honest with you David, I again I was raised around architecture and I know it quite
well. I come from a city that really promotes and is proud of it and everything. It's a topic that's
been on my mind since I was a little kid. I don't think I've ever thought of that angle on it
that part of it. The idea that you're going to build something, to me I'm so focused on the
building and the actual structure and all that. I didn't even think about the people part of it.
If you're going to build this you've got to know you're going to fill it.
Right. It's an interesting aspect of that.
I love the history of Wisconsin Rapids and one of the first things I did when I arrived in town
15 years ago was I went to the library and I said where are the local history books and they told me
the Dave Engel books are all over there so I went I read almost all of them and got myself
a background in how the city was built and when we go around the city we can look at various
phases of development that tell the history of our city. So we can see some of the earliest homes
here. There's not many of them left from the Civil War era. There's precious few from before
that perhaps the Waikli House which is I think around 1840 and then we've got
when the lumber mills were really successful in the late 19th century we had a load of house
building there and then of course we have the big mansions and then when the paper mills became
successful in the early 20th century as well as having some of the homes built for the mill owners
we also had a lot of very functional workers housing. We had some houses built with you know
really no more than two rooms they had an outside bathroom and a kitchen and a little area that
would be for living and sleeping in and we see those all over town and yet some of them have been
extended and extended and they're really nothing like they used to be. So yeah it's the history.
Well you know I imagine that there's many factors that comes into a home either kind of surviving
if you will and kind of being updated or kept around and ones that just you know aren't or
demolished or something like that. So much of it imagine comes down to building materials certainly
ownership and a lot of those things a lot of many different factors but it's always interesting
to me to see those houses that hang around that have around for a hundred years or would have
you or something. And really the key to it is having a good roof and where I'm from I'm from
London and like the great Chicago Fire of 1871 we had a great Fire of London in 1666 so if you go
right to the centre of London you see no old wooden houses from before 1666 and then after
that period they said we're not going to build wooden houses anymore we're going to build them out
of brick. Where I'm from I'm from the suburbs and really people say to me oh your houses must be
really old because you're from England and some of them are but where I'm from I'm from a part of
London that was developed when the railroads moved out in the 1930s so because people could then
commute to central London for work they built this this whole commuter belt of 1930s homes and
wow really the house I own in Wisconsin Rapids is older than the house I owned in London. That's
interesting. So it's all to do with the history and the roof yes the roofs in in London you'd usually
have two materials you'd either have tile which is a ceramic tile and they usually last about
50 years or you have slate and the slate lasts about 100 years I bought my first house in the
late 80s and it had a slate roof and the house was built in about 1900 and it was just coming to
the end of its useful life and I had to replace it. Now here we have a variety of different materials
most common being the the asphalt shingle and that you usually have useful life of about 40 years give
or take 10 years. This isn't necessarily I know your wheelhouse David but you have a gigantic wheelhouse
so I don't know maybe it might be in there but just coming from my world in the construction it
from my background in construction I know that one of the things that we tended to do was looking
at other other companies and what they were doing or talking to other foremen and stuff and kind
of figuring out hey what do you guys don't know this works here on this type of sand especially
here in central Wisconsin where the land can change from just five feet away to another five feet
and some of that where the idea of maybe learning from each other and sharing information across
continents yeah I don't know how often that happens but it feels like a really good idea to
kind of share that information it's absolutely is but you've got to think about the materials
available so if you if you look at where I'm from in London there were a lot of areas of natural clay
and that meant that it was very sensible sensible to build ceramic tiles the slate quarries where
else were in the country but they used to move them through the canals and the railroads to London
now the other the other big factor that means you really wouldn't want to put a ceramic tile roof
on a house in Wisconsin Rapids is that the roof beams are not made to take that white so you don't
often see that around here you know David as we're talking about this topic I don't mean to get
us off into a side avenue here but it does come back to some other conversations we've had
as far as home ownership but when you're looking for a good home and I don't know how many people
you've brought this up before and and J.R. has and some others have but I don't know how many
you know my my fellow citizens when they're looking at homes I hear them look up you know we
don't think about the roof that often I maybe you hear it more than in conversation with actual
buyers and stuff and it's just me that doesn't hear it a lot in random conversations but I have a
friend who just sold a home a little while ago I have another friend out of state but another friend
who's been looking for a home for a couple of months now and I have not had one conversation with
either of these people or other individuals in the last couple of years that I can think of
about roofs that just is one of the more important factors I would think when it comes to purchasing
a home and when you buy a home you're not buying something that you want to last for a month you
want something that's going to last for a long time yes and a good roof a leak proof roof is the
single most important factor in protecting a building that's what you often see with historic
buildings the reason that they fall into disrepair and sometimes have to be taken down is that the
roof hasn't been maintained so the other option we have here of course is metal roofs where you
pay two to three times more than you pay for your your single roof but it could last you 80 years
yeah and and I imagine that it certainly depends on the structure the type of house you have
and what kind of roof you can have or within comes to these materials but I think we're going
more and more towards steel roofs where we're leaning more and more towards that direction I think
that's partly because when you put a shingle roof on well a few years later you might change it
for a steel roof but if you put steel roof on you're never going to go back to a shingle roof
right yes you're very solid point David another thing that stands out is the the siding in some of
that now this is something that I never knew anything about before I moved to Wisconsin because
their houses don't have siding when somebody told me when I lived in the UK somebody told me
I'm going to replace the siding on my garage I thought what on earth is a siding to me a siding
is where a train goes off a railroad track to park for the night so we just don't have them because
our exteriors are weatherproof so typically you'd have a brick exterior or if a house is built
now in London you'd usually build it with cinder block and then there'd be a brick facing
so they're all weatherproof you don't put anything on top of that the other the other construction
method that you might use is you might build something with maybe a rougher cheaper brick and then
you would often put rendering on and sometimes you put pebble dash on the rendering but all those
things are weatherproof right whereas here not only do we have to worry about certain weather which
you know obviously do in England as well but here we we lean so much into okay I want my house to
look good as well we lean I'm not saying that you don't have this obviously in England but here
it images such a big deal and and I think that that comes into play as well as long with also
having your house be able to handle any type of weather oh absolutely and the opportunity to
renew your siding really means you can change the whole look of the house and really make it look
completely fresh and new a lot of people too especially new homeowners this is one of the ways
they do this of kind of making the house their own I hear this a lot from homeowners you know especially
if you're buying a house that was maybe in the family or you you knew about this house in your
name you know your community for a long time and now you're owning that house but you want to make
it your own you want to do certain things to kind of whether it's a paint new paint job or it's
just the inside of the house that you completely redecorate that is a big deal to people especially
with some of these older more established houses right and the other thing you can do is you can
change your single color like many people in in the area I've just had hail damage to my roof
and they gave me a bewildering range of shingles to choose from and I just said to my wife will you
pick smart man very smart move we're speaking with David Fombrel and let's talk real estate with
our great friends of coal makers see your realtors one of the things that David and I are discussing
is the differences of London and Wisconsin homes but if I can go out west for a second David when
I moved out and was living in California I I was again an architecture kid I was blown away by
the way that in California they don't really tear down buildings they kind of just repurpose them
and a lot of them are those Adobe kind of like you know Mexican influenced kind of houses and
infrastructure and everything it's really cool to see but the thing that threw me I go out of my
friend's house we're hanging out and his his parents were in the living room and we weren't going
to go in the living room and hang out we'll go to the basement there's no basement man what are you
talking about we do a basement's account for it I was blown away I'm like in my mid 20s it I did not
know this I didn't realize so basements has got to be a quite a difference between London and
Wisconsin as well while we have basements here they vary around the world they do and a lot of
it's to to do with the weather so we have tornadoes here so it has been useful historically to have
a basement nowadays a lot of people in Wisconsin are building homes on slabs so they don't have
a basement but they do build themselves a safe room it doesn't have to be very large but just
something that can act as a tornado shelter we don't have tornadoes in the UK we don't have
really very much at all in the in the in the line of severe weather when I was growing up
our house had a very small cellar and it was the only one in the street that had that because it was
built by by the builder the builder built the whole street and he built one house for himself
and he put a little cellar in and the cellar was no bigger than this room that we're in now it's
probably about I don't know 15 feet by 12 feet and my dad had a work bench there and there was
a hole that the coal was pulled it poured down but that was really unusual most suburban homes in
in England do not have a found they don't have a basement they do have a foundation
and it's a it's a different sort of construction from here there's often a lot of aggregates
and concrete poured in but if you go to central London you do find basements and the reason for
that is that space is at much more of a premium and if you can get another floor by digging down
then you're going to do that so if you go shopping in central London you'll often see down that
there's another another floor and those those shops and and buildings sometimes are many more
floors high typically at home in England you just got your your main floor and an upper floor
one of the things that we talk about that comes up a lot in conversation with let's talk real
estate where their friends at coal bankruptcy or realtors over the years is inventory and needing
more inventory more homes you mentioned that a lot of some some houses nowadays are being built on
slabs and that without the basement does that do you think that that could lead to more inventory
if you don't have to even worry about a basement to make that you're just building the upstairs
the upper home and everything that we might get more homes this way I think it would be nice but
I don't think it's a significant factor in the in the cost of construction I think it's off
in a personal choice I've shown homes to a lot of people who say they will only buy a home with
a basement yeah I believe it I just curious I just ran a question here is there a lot of flooding
in England in London in particular do they deal with flooding a lot no because in the 1980s
we put flood barrier up so the river temes is a huge river and it runs probably three quarters
of the width of England and it goes out it flows out to the North Sea and it it is tidal because
it's so big it has a tide it's a river with a tide and at some point in the 80s they built
a huge barrier up there which prevents flooding and when the when the waters get up to a certain height
these big giant silver domes sort of flip over and the very cool and London's pretty good look at
them that's awesome you do have flooding in in the country and in other towns but it's not really
a factory in London anymore very interesting David what about garages how are those how do those
differ between no countries well this is this is something which there are commonalities but one
of the big problems you have in London is space so the last house I lived in was built in the 1930s
and nobody owned cars so they didn't they didn't put a garage there there was a space to park
in the street but that was all you could do now we don't get the snow over there that we we get
here and so you don't have to worry about you know maybe we got a couple of inches you know once or twice
yeah so a lot of homes are built without garages and if you had one that was built with one in the 30s
it meant that you were a pretty well to do family you know sort of sort of upper middle class
any home that's built now they will put one or two garage spaces oh that's interesting
because because people wanted if you or they demand it the buyers demand it really if you build
apartments in the center of London then you almost always have underground parking
interesting what about the years of construction how about that part of this so if you're looking at
like I said where where I'm from London was built over many thousands of years but a lot of the
early buildings were swept away in the fire in the in the center and then they they changed their
attitude to building after that big event when you're looking at the buildings in the outskirts
they were influenced by the spread of transport links so I mentioned the 1930s railroad expansion
but there was also another big railroad boom in the late 1890s so you'll see huge areas where
there were homes built in you know the whole neighborhood was built in 1898 or 1902 and then you
find other neighborhoods where it's all 1920s or 1930s and then you'll find a big gap because of the
war and then you'll find after the war houses were very very cheap very functional people didn't
really have the money and then there was another big housing boom in the 80s and people started to
build on fields now by this point people were building in the areas that were accessible via the
motor car so we had these big roads that spanned all around the edge of London and they would develop
all those fields that the roads were next to with these modern 1980s housing and it's just continued
since then it's very interesting David we got about two three minutes left I wanted to talk about
yards and get into that how the difference of the yards in London compared to here in Wisconsin
you mentioned not a lot of room in London yeah that's right and we say it here when we are in
the city of Wisconsin Rapids we'll see a city yard and I've seen some city yard down by the the river
which only point 11 acres and that means you've probably just got room to let your dog out and that's
about it and I've seen some yards here you know there's a 1 2 3 4 5 acres so here in Rapids it
depends whether you're in the center of the city or whether you're in the outskirts and it's pretty
much like that in England but London is so popular so you've got eight or nine million people
that there's such a huge percentage of the population live there you know there's only about
66 million people in total so wow I never really have a huge percentage of population
actually live in London yeah yeah and generally we would have something like an average size city
yard so it would be something like 0.2 or 0.25 of an acre for a London house some of them don't have
any yard and you know you open your front door and you're on the street well yeah yeah that's that's
wild it sounds a little familiar to my old stopping grounds a little bit actually but it's
quite interesting and really gives us a lot more questions honestly for both countries and follow
up because we're gonna come back to this topic one day because this is a fun topic I thought
it would be interesting and I thought it would make a change from saying that houses in Wisconsin
rapids have gone up by 7% so yeah it's a great idea it's very good David if people have
follow up questions not only about our topics today but other ones and want to know more how can
they reach you well they can call me or text me on 715-323-8594 or they can message me through
Facebook Messenger I have a realtor page you can you can find me pretty easily it's David
Farmer realtor and you can find out more at cobaltmaker.com be sure to bookmark that page cobaltmaker.com
follow them on social media looking forward to talking again next month David have a great day
today thank you to more let's talk real estate next month right here at midday magazine on 97-5FM 13-20
AM WFHR locally grown radio
