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Health & Fitness

The Mold Standard

Many home inspectors know that "mold is gold", so what are you being told?

Should home buyers get a mold inspection? Well, how many realtors can safely recommend “no” to a client that asks this question?

All we can do (and should do) is provide access to information and leave it up to the discretion of the client (and back that up with solid disclaimers on all our agency contracts).

I would like to make a few observations about mold inspections and provide some information. I guess the point of this post is to get across that the whole mold topic is not as straightforward as you would think so when faced with the possibility of mold don’t be too quick to be freaked out or too quick to be satisfied and relieved either.

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The ambiguity is clear (eh?) from the start of Real Estate training. "Mold can be found almost everywhere... there is considerable controversy... so closely follow current developments."  And then, in conclusion, “it can be difficult for real estate companies to know what to do when mold is suspected or found, as there are no federal requirements to disclose mold at this time.”

Here’s Centers for Disease Control on mold a good question and answer source. 

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“Where there is mold, decisions as to what to do about it have to be made individually” and “CDC does not recommend routine sampling for molds” and “standards for judging what is acceptable, tolerable, or normal have not been established” and “because the reaction of individuals can vary greatly, sampling and culturing are not reliable in determining health risks.” It’s not comforting, but it is exactly where we are at this time.

Here’s something interesting ASHI Reporter mold sampling, hype or help? the perspectives from an inspector. 

“If we observe mold, there’s no need to sample, we know mold is present and we need to advise clients to remove it, so testing is moot” and “if a mold inspector didn’t observe mold he feels compelled to prove it somehow and justify the fee he’s charging” and “It's ludicrous for a home inspector to think that he can take a sample, send it to a lab, and let the lab interpret the results without bearing any responsibility. The inspector is promising something that is not being delivered – a reliable, technically accurate assessment of the building for the presence or absence of problematic mold.”

I love his ramifications in his conclusion.

Study up and then ask yourself and any potential mold inspector these questions:

How accurate is a mold inspection?

How much do results vary depending on where, when, and how the tests are performed?

How often will two independent inspectors find the same things and make the same recommendations?

You can order up the analysis and reports, but with no official mold standard in place, you can be handed a report that says “yep there’s mold” and not be sure what it means. What molds in what concentrations are acceptable to which people under which conditions? Anybody providing mold information will come decorated in disclaimers.

I’ll end this post with a lawyer-type question: “So with all of this being the case, can buyers get out of a deal by playing ‘the mold card’?

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