Who owns what in a West Park building
West Park has the oldest housing stock in Broward County, at a 1961 median across 4,944 units with 87% of them single-family detached. Although the municipality itself was only incorporated in 2005, the neighbourhoods within it are among the earliest built in south Broward. A 1961 median means most of these houses went up before central air conditioning was standard equipment in Florida housing, and were built accordingly: modest ceiling heights, small window openings on the sun elevations, concrete block walls and a slab with nothing underneath it.
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 West Park 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 West Park 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 West Park itself changes
Where the water comes from
Ordinary south Broward conditions on flat, low-lying ground with a shallow water table. What is unusual is the age of everything else. A 1961 house has had sixty-plus years of roof coverings, sixty-plus years of plumbing, and sixty-plus years of alterations by whoever was available. Water in a house this old rarely has one source and one date; it has a history, and reading that history from the material is most of what the survey does here.
Where it hides in these buildings
The slab edge and the wall base, as in all the early stock, plus whatever the retrofit history has buried. Air conditioning in a house of this age was added later, so the ducts run where there was room rather than where they should, frequently in an attic that was designed as a ventilated void with no thought of services in it. Tracing a run in one of these houses is genuinely exploratory work.
The cooling systems here
Retrofitted split systems throughout, with all the compromises that implies: air handlers in converted spaces, condensate lines improvised at the time of installation and modified since, and duct threaded through an attic with limited insulation around it. The single most useful thing to establish in a West Park house is where the condensate actually goes, because in a good number of them the honest answer is that nobody currently knows.