TESTIMONIAL
DE WOLF REALTY CO.,
SAN FRANCISCO, CA
De Wolf Realty Executive Vice President Aaron Sinel shares his top reasons why Adviro is the best environmental testing company he has trusted —for more than a decade— to conduct mold testing for all of the properties he manages in the SF Bay Area.
Established in 1879, De Wolf Realty Company has been managing and developing real estate properties in the SF Bay Area for more than 145 years. Nowadays, the preeminent San Francisco-based firm focuses on commercial and residential property management.
As part of their services, De Wolf solely partners on Adviro environmental testing to conduct mold testing for their properties—and has done so for more than a decade. Today, we’re sharing some key insights from the Executive Vice President of De Wolf, Aaron Sinel, on what makes this working relationship so valuable to the company.
Q: Aaron, can you tell me a little about yourself?
A: Yes, I’m Executive Vice President. That’s my title, but I’m also a property manager. I don’t want to tell you how many buildings, because people won’t believe it, but I manage a lot of buildings. And I’ve been here for 41 years.
Q: Where are the properties that you manage located?
A: Predominantly in San Francisco. But we have some in the East Bay, and a little bit down the peninsula. [These consist of] residential buildings with some commercial and some mixed use.
The average building is probably a 12 unit building, with some 50 unit buildings and 75, 100 unit buildings. It’s quite intense position to be managing all these situations on all these different properties. This is a very, very stressful business. Very stressful.
And one of the reasons it’s so litigious…There’s a high level of demand for getting the job done right the first time.
Q: So, that brings me to my question today — how did you find out about Adviro and start working with them?
A: I don’t know the answer how I found them, but once I found them, I found them to be near perfect. They really are. They’re very “Johnny on the spot.” You send a work order out to them—they answer it immediately. They generally get it out as close to the next day as possible. And I would say they seem to be available for us. They do a good, honest report. They express to us what needs to be addressed and what doesn’t need to be addressed.
Q: When you first started working with them, do you remember what the job was for?
A: We hired them, obviously, to test and test for mold. That’s the main one. And the protocol to mitigate the mold. So first they test it [to see] if there’s elevated levels of mold.
The regulations are basically this: We breathe the air outside every day. There’s mold in that air…in this room…there’s mold everywhere. The question is, what those elevated levels are — is the mold inside higher than the mold outside?
If it is not, it is not at elevated levels. That’s the protocol. So, there could be a high level of mold in a unit— but [if the mold leve] is- higher outside, this means it’s not high.
So basically [Adviro] comes in, they write a report, they give us the numbers of spores of mold spores outside the number of spores inside. Then, they tell us whether it is or is not elevated—which we can read—but they tell us. And then if it’s elevated, they tell us what the protocol is to get rid of it.
Q: So that’s what Adviro provides in its report.
A: Correct.
Q: Have you used other companies before?
A: Well, before we did, yeah, but I only use Adviro. I don’t use anybody else. They’re awesome. The staff is really good. They’re one of my really top notch vendors.
Q: Adviro doesn’t take care of the mitigation, but they definitely take care of all the testing?
A: That’s correct. Yeah. And there, you don’t want your test or mitigating [done by the same company] because that’s kind of like dipping your own work. They send their tests out to a lab. So their tests are not biased in any way — all they do is collect the information and the information collected is looked over by an independent testing company. They don’t know when what the result is going to be. They have no idea because they’re not a lab.
Q: So are there any projects in particular that stand out that Adviro worked on?
A: Nothing. They’re just good at everything. They go in and do what they need to do.
They know what they’re doing.
Q: How often do you call on Adviro?
A: Probably 12 times a year…or 20 times a year, something like that.
Q: Can you give me a rough idea of how many properties or units you have in the San Francisco Bay Area?
A: We have a couple hundred properties.
Q: So how would you summarize Adviro in one or two sentences?
A: I’d say they’re professional. They’re Johnny on the spot. they have good quality people, they react very quickly and the reports come in quickly as well. There’s nothing negative about them
You know every contractor that you work with—and I’ve worked with hundreds, right? You’re going to have problems with every one of them, of course. [I’ve] never had a problem with them…That’s probably the only vendor I can think of, off the top of my head, that I’ve never had a negative experience with.
Q: That’s amazing. Thank you for sharing!