What the equipment in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea can and cannot remove
A mixture of original through-wall units and modern split systems from refurbishments, and in an oceanfront building the condenser itself lives a hard life: salt attacks coil fins and cabinets, and an efficiency loss shows up as a system that runs longer and dehumidifies less well than it should. Seasonal occupancy compounds it, because a unit shut up from May to October has spent the wet season equalising with the outdoor air at a dew point in the low seventies.
The reason that matters is a gap between two numbers, both from the Florida Solar Energy Center at the University of Central Florida. Through the hot months, with cooling running, indoor relative humidity should not exceed 55% during the day on a regular basis. And the great majority of mold species need a material moisture content corresponding to a relative humidity of at least 70% to grow at all.
Note where that second number is measured. Not in the room. At the material. Air holds less moisture as it cools, so the film of air against a chilled surface sits at a far higher relative humidity than the room average. A wall at 68F with 78F room air at 55% is close to saturation at its own face, and it does not need a leak to get there. That is the mechanism behind almost every complaint where nobody can find a source.
So in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea we read surface temperatures with an infrared thermometer alongside the room air, calculate the dew point of that air, and record the margin at every surface that has one worth recording. FSEC also give the point at which cooling alone stops being enough: sustained readings of 70 to 75% mean dehumidification rather than a colder thermostat, and turning the thermostat down at that stage chills the surfaces further and makes it worse.
The commercial position in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea 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 Lauderdale-by-the-Sea itself changes
The buildings in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea
Lauderdale-by-the-Sea is a barrier island town of 6,900 units at a 1972 median, with 56% of them in buildings of fifty or more and only 15% single-family detached. Four in five homes here are in a building somebody else maintains, which is the single most important fact about assessing one. The stock is predominantly low and mid-rise oceanfront and Intracoastal-side condominium from the 1960s and 1970s, built at a scale that keeps the buildings in individual rather than professional management.
Where the water comes from
Salt on both elevations and nothing sheltered, which attacks the joints in a facade rather than the materials either side of them. Fifty years of chloride and ultraviolet on a window perimeter sealant is a long time, and the failure is progressive rather than sudden: a joint that has lost its elasticity admits a little driven rain each storm, into an assembly that has no drainage path, and the accumulation is what eventually appears inside. There is rarely a single event to point at.
Where it hides in these buildings
Nothing useful here is inside your own front door. The source is typically at a facade, a balcony, a parapet or a unit above, so the technique is establishing direction of travel through metering and thermal imaging rather than looking for something. In a low-rise building without a facilities manager, a written finding is frequently the only thing that gets an association to open an elevation, because nobody is going to do it on a verbal complaint.