What a general inspection misses in Lighthouse Point
Slab-edge moisture is invisible until flooring is lifted or furniture is moved, so the survey here concentrates on the lowest 300mm of every exterior wall and on the floor covering itself. The signature finding is a dark line at the skirting on a wall that reads perfectly dry at chest height, and it is routinely missed by an inspection that takes readings where a person naturally holds a meter.
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 Lighthouse Point 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 Lighthouse Point 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 Lighthouse Point itself changes
The buildings in Lighthouse Point
Lighthouse Point is a small town of 6,316 units at a 1967 median, 56% single-family detached and 77% owner-occupied, laid out almost entirely along a network of finger canals cut for boat access. The characteristic building is a single-storey concrete block house on a slab, frequently with a terrazzo or tiled floor, built at a time when nothing resembling a modern vapour strategy existed. There is no capillary break under most of these slabs and no perimeter insulation anywhere.
Where the water comes from
The canals are the defining physical fact and they are tidal, connected through the Hillsboro Inlet to the ocean. What that means for a building is a groundwater level close to the underside of the slab and moving with the tide rather than only with rainfall. A slab in that position stays damp underneath permanently, and the floor becomes the coolest large surface in the house through the cooling season. That is exactly the condition that produces condensation at the floor and at the base of the walls without a single drop entering from outside.
The cooling systems here
Split systems retrofitted into houses built before central cooling was standard, with the air handler squeezed into a converted closet or the garage and duct run through an attic that was never designed to carry any. The commonest single failure in this town is a condensate line routed the shortest available way rather than the best one, so that when it blocks, which it does every few wet seasons, it discharges into a wall or a floor rather than somewhere a person would notice.