What a general inspection misses in Davie
Two different inspections. On a site-built house it is the ordinary Broward survey with extra attention to the slab edge and to any additions. On a manufactured home the work runs underneath: belly wrap, floor insulation, ground condition and the ventilation of the void. Large-lot properties also frequently carry outbuildings, guest accommodation or converted stables, and those are habitually left out of an inspection brief until somebody asks.
None of that is covered by the three inspections normally booked on a Florida purchase. A general home inspection surveys condition visually. A four-point inspection tells an insurer about the roof, the electrics, the plumbing and the cooling. A wind mitigation report is about how the building is fixed together. Not one of the three includes a moisture survey, an air sample or any laboratory work whatsoever, and that is the correct and honest limit of each of them rather than a criticism.
The most productive question on a pre-purchase inspection in this county is how long the property has been empty and what the thermostat has been set to. A vacant listing gets treated as a bill to minimise: cooling set high or switched off, so the system rarely runs and therefore rarely dehumidifies, through the six months from May to October that carry 71% of this coast's rainfall at dew points in the low seventies.
So the survey on a vacant Davie property is weighted differently. Closets, the backs of built-in storage, exterior wall bases behind where furniture stood, the air handler cabinet and the condensate termination take most of the time, and the humidity is read as found. We also record the thermostat setting on arrival, because on a closed-up house that single number explains a great deal of what follows. Everything is scheduled backwards from your inspection period, including two working days of laboratory time.
The commercial position in Davie is the one published on every page of this site, because the rate card is not a Fort Lauderdale rate card. A flat price by property size, agreed before anyone drives out, with the accredited laboratory fee already inside it. It does not rise if the samples come back positive, nothing is added for the drive, and we take no payment of any kind from anyone who removes mold.
What Davie itself changes
The buildings in Davie
Davie carries 41,755 units at a 1989 median, and the headline number hides an unusually wide spread. Forty per cent is single-family detached, much of it on large lots in the town's long-standing equestrian districts, while 13.7% is manufactured housing, the second-highest share in the county. Those two building types have almost nothing in common: one is a site-built slab house on an acre, the other a raised floor assembly over bare ground. An inspection approach designed for either is wrong for the other, and Davie has plenty of both.
Where the water comes from
The town runs west to the Everglades boundary, and the western parts sit on land where the water table is close to the surface and managed by canal rather than by drainage away. On a large lot in that position, landscape irrigation, a pool and the natural table together keep the ground around a building damp through most of the year, which narrows the margin on a slab edge and on any part of a structure close to grade. Private wells and septic systems are present in parts of the town.
The cooling systems here
Split systems on the site-built stock, often with long duct runs to reach the ends of a sprawling single-storey plan, and packaged units or floor-ducted splits in the manufactured homes. On a large house the long duct run is the thing worth examining: the further a run goes across a hot attic, the more likely its insulation has failed somewhere along it, and a section of duct condensing over a ceiling produces a stain with no plumbing anywhere near it.