u/ParsleyIll9583

Looking for practical advice from people with real experience dealing with repeated moisture issues, indoor air quality problems, property maintenance, remediation, or finding housing after repeated building-related problems.
I need to help locate a 6+ month rental in the Studio City / Los Angeles area for clients who became significantly ill after long-term exposure to mold and water damage in their home, followed by a couple of rentals that ended up not much better. The LA market is also unusually difficult right now because of the fire displacement situation.
Before moving into their current rental, they screened multiple properties using dust testing, but then chose the cleanest-looking option they found, partly because it was also a very new build. Unfortunately, after move-in, it turned out there were major concealed moisture problems related to bad shower installs and water intrusion.
So now I’m trying to figure out the straightest line to getting them into a house that has the best possible chance of not becoming another problem.
Not “perfect.” Not sterile. Just a genuinely well-maintained house with the lowest reasonable likelihood of active moisture issues.
The problem is that there is no realistic way to do invasive investigation on every rental property before even applying, we would lose out on the application timing. At the same time, visual walkthroughs and “it seems nice” clearly are not enough either, because that is exactly how they ended up in another bad situation.
So I’m trying to understand what people with actual experience think matters most when trying to reduce risk as much as possible in a real-world rental search.
Do you trust dust testing at all as an early filtering tool, even if imperfect? Do you rely more on the age and maintenance history of the property? Do you avoid flips and investor-owned luxury rentals? Is the answer simply seeing a huge number of homes until one stands out as genuinely cared for?

I need help to come up with a procedure to move forward with in my search.

At this point I’m less interested in theory debates and more interested in hearing from people who have actually found a workable process that got them closer to the right house without turning the search into a six-month forensic investigation.

*this is a revised re-post, as I inadvertently triggered previously, possibly referring to testing names that had been recommended to me. I just need some help here. They’ve been very ill and need a healthy place to start rebuilding their lives.

I need some direct help, hopefully from someone who has navigated this process successfully in the past.

*If your internal response is “mold is everywhere,” without understanding the health impacts of toxic mold on immune susceptible people, this post is not for you.

I’ve been hired to help locate a 6+ month rental for clients in the Studio City / Los Angeles area who became significantly ill after long-term mold exposure in their home, followed by a couple of rentals that ended up not much better. The LA rental market is also rough right now because we are still recovering from major home losses from the fires.

Before moving into their current rental, they performed ERMI testing on several prospective homes and chose the cleanest option they found, partly because it was also a newer build. It was borderline on the HERTSMI at 14, but they believed the results might reflect old tenant moving dust rather than active issues.

Unfortunately, it turned out to be a much larger problem, with bad shower installs, active moisture issues, and a landlord who does not want to acknowledge the extent of it or follow safe remediation protocol, despite independent inspection, moisture verification, cavity sampling, and lab testing. They are at their wits’ end and cannot go through the process of finding another place themselves again.

So they hired me, and I need to come up with an efficient procedure for finding the cleanest possible house for them to rent. They have a healthy but not unlimited budget, and are looking for something nice, ideally 3+ bedrooms with some privacy and a yard. But we now know expensive does not mean healthy.

Right now my thought is to line up a large number of viewings myself, narrow them down based on smell, visuals, etc., then test the strongest candidates using HERTSMI, then upgrading to ERMI is a property qualifies, and present the final options to the clients. But that was essentially their previous process too, and it still failed, possibly because the testing approach itself was too limited. After ERMI testing 6 previous properties, they still ending up in a problematic house, I feel like I need a more direct or thorough approach. It also can’t become an endless process or we lose prospects.

I do have a mold inspector willing to discreetly look at 1-2 finalist properties, but even that may slow things down too much. Honestly, I wish I could hire an inspector to handle this entire process, but I haven’t found the right person yet.

My instinct is that the best option may be a well cared-for family home where the owners genuinely maintain the property, rather than another furnished “luxury rental” run primarily as a business. Over the winter, they stayed in a couple of those, where very obvious leaks happened during the rains and management brushed it off and refused to do the work to address the issue in any way that would have prevented mold damage, in favor of a little putty and paint, and having a next tenant come in the following week. 

They do not need perfect, and they absolutely do not want sterile. They just need clean enough to begin recovering, which they haven’t been able to do because they’ve had to move multiple times over 5 months. Furnished with some character would actually be ideal so it still feels like a home.

What efficient process would you use in this situation? Are there specific professionals who can handle this type of search from beginning to end?