I Bought a Glendale Property Without Testing for Lead and Asbestos. Here's What It Cost Me.

 I'm David Bellairian, founder and CEO of Glencore Associates. Real estate is one of five asset classes I hold, and I underwrite deals for a living. So when I tell you I skipped a lead and asbestos inspection on a Glendale property and paid for it, that's not a story about someone who didn't know better. It's a story about how a good deal can talk you out of a step you'd never skip on a bad one.


How I talked myself out of the inspection

The property checked every box I actually cared about. Right neighborhood, right price relative to comparable rents, right bones. Older homes in Glendale almost always mean lead paint and, depending on the era, asbestos in flooring, insulation, or popcorn ceilings. I knew that going in, the way anyone who's bought a few older properties knows it. I treated it as background risk instead of something to actually test for, because the seller's timeline was tight and a specialized inspection would have added time and cost to a deal that otherwise looked clean.

That's the part worth sitting with. I didn't skip the inspection because I didn't know the risk existed. I skipped it because the deal felt good enough that adding friction felt unnecessary. That's exactly the moment discipline is supposed to hold, and it's exactly when it's hardest to hold it.


What I found after closing

Once renovation work started, both showed up. Lead paint under later layers, and asbestos in materials that needed to come out as part of the work. At that point there's no more discretion involved. Once you know, you're legally and ethically required to handle it correctly. That means a licensed abatement contractor, not a general contractor's crew working around it, and it means the property doesn't move forward until that work is done and documented.

Licensed lead and asbestos abatement is its own specialty trade, priced accordingly, and it does not move at a general contractor's pace. It added real cost and real time to a project I'd underwritten without either. I paid for the abatement, paid for the delay, and paid for it a second time in the sense that every week of holding costs on a property not yet producing income is money that isn't compounding anywhere else.

The property is fully renovated now, brought up to a standard I'm genuinely proud of, clean, safe, and performing the way I underwrote it to perform before the surprise. That part has a good ending. The ending doesn't erase the lesson.


What changed in how I underwrite

I don't buy an older property now without a lead and asbestos assessment before closing, full stop, regardless of how clean the deal looks or how tight the seller's timeline is. That's not a complicated rule. The hard part was never knowing the rule. The hard part was noticing the exact moment a good deal was quietly asking me to skip a step I'd apply to any other deal without thinking twice.

That's the version of risk that actually gets people, not the risk you don't know about, the risk you know about and decide, just this once, isn't worth checking.


I write more on investing and company building at davidbellairian.substack.com and davidbellairian.com. I'm the founder and CEO of Glencore Associates, a Los Angeles private investment and asset management firm, and the founder of AIDiscover, an AI-powered marketing and brand discovery agency.

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