Who owns what in a Pompano Beach building
Pompano Beach is two housing markets that happen to share a name, and an answer written for one is wrong for the other. Thirty per cent of its 61,070 units sit in buildings of fifty or more, concentrated on and near the barrier island, while 29% are single-family detached and sit inland. The median across both is 1974. On the oceanfront side the water almost always arrives from somewhere that is not your unit: a facade that has had fifty years of salt and ultraviolet, a window perimeter seal that has given up, a riser in a shared chase, or the flat above. Inland the buildings are single-storey slab houses on generous lots and the water is nearly always the cooling system or the roof.
In any building held in units, the first question is not what is growing. It is which side of the unit boundary the water came from, because that decides who pays for all of it. A condominium unit is defined by a line written into the declaration, usually running along the unfinished surfaces of the perimeter walls, floor and ceiling. Everything beyond it is a common element the association maintains. That line is invisible and water crosses it constantly.
In older stock across this county the sources are almost all on the far side of your wall. Facade and window perimeter sealant that has had decades of salt and ultraviolet, letting driven rain into the wall assembly. Plumbing risers and stack vents in a chase shared between stacked units. Roof and balcony drainage arriving several floors below the failure. And the unit above, which is the commonest of all and the slowest to establish because it needs access nobody wants to give.
What decides responsibility is where the source sits, not where the damage appears. So the inspection in Pompano Beach is built around tracing the path rather than documenting the stain: metering the wall and ceiling on a grid so the gradient shows the direction of travel, and thermal imaging to follow the cold path back towards the entry. We do not tell you what your declaration says, because that is a document for you and your lawyer. We tell you which side of the wall the water came from.
The commercial position in Pompano Beach 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 Pompano Beach itself changes
Where the water comes from
Salt is the variable that separates this city from the inland towns and it is chemical rather than atmospheric. Airborne chloride attacks sealant, fixings and reinforcement, and the first thing to fail on a 1970s beachside building is the joint between two materials: window to wall, balcony slab to facade, parapet to roof. Every one of those is a route for driven rain into the assembly. Inland the story is the ordinary one for this coast, a wet season carrying 71% of the annual rainfall between May and October, with a flat water table underneath it.
Where it hides in these buildings
On the tower side, access is the whole problem. The evidence for where water entered is usually behind a finish, inside a chase or in a unit somebody else owns, so the work is metering on a grid and reading the gradient rather than opening anything. On the inland houses the difficulty is different and more ordinary: attic air handlers, duct runs above a ceiling that has never been lifted, and slab-edge growth at exterior wall bases hidden behind fitted furniture.
The cooling systems here
Split systems with attic air handlers on the inland houses, and on the beachside blocks a mixture of through-wall packaged terminal units in the older buildings and modern split systems squeezed into closets in the renovated ones. The packaged terminal unit is the one to watch in Pompano: it drains through a sleeve cast into an exterior wall fifty years ago, and when that route blocks or the slope is lost, the water goes into the wall assembly rather than outside it. That failure wets a wall from inside and outside at once and it is routinely diagnosed as a facade leak.