Selling a House With Mold in Tulsa

Why mold stops a financed sale

A buyer with a mortgage needs the house insured from the day they close, and needs it to pass the lender's condition requirements. Visible mold and an active moisture source will fail one or both.

What follows is predictable. The appraiser notes it, the lender requires it corrected before closing, and the correction has to be paid for by somebody before the money exists to pay for it. Sellers are asked to fund remediation on a house they are trying to leave.

That is the real reason these houses sit. It is not that buyers are squeamish. It is that the financing will not complete, so the buyer pool narrows to people paying cash.

Our article on mold and an Oklahoma house sale goes through what turns up on inspections.

Nobody in Oklahoma has to be licensed to remediate it

This matters more than any other fact on this page, and most sellers do not know it.

Oklahoma does not require a licence to carry out mold remediation. The states that do are a short list, and Oklahoma is not on it. In practice that means anybody in Tulsa can print the word remediation on a van and quote you for work you cannot easily judge.

So do the judging yourself:

Ask for IICRC certification. Where a state does not license the trade, that certification is the recognised standard and a serious firm will have it.

Get three written quotes, each from somebody who has physically been in the house. Ranges for this work vary widely across the Tulsa market and a figure given over the phone is not a quote.

Ask what they are fixing, not just what they are cleaning. A quote that does not name the moisture source is a quote to repeat the job in a year.

Be careful when one company both tests and remediates. The firm telling you how bad it is should not be the firm being paid to fix it.

Check local contractor licensing separately. Remediation may not be licensed, but the repairs attached to it often are. Confirm with the city.

Confirm the current position yourself. Licensing rules change and this page is not a substitute for asking.

Testing, and when it is worth paying for

If you can see it and smell it, a test mostly tells you what you already know. Where testing earns its money is when the problem is suspected rather than visible, when a buyer has raised it and you need something written, or when you want a clearance result after work is done.

What actually needs finding is the water. A camera behind the wall, a moisture meter, and somebody willing to look under the house rather than only at it. Our articles on crawl space moisture and camera inspections cover the two commonest hidden sources.

In Tulsa the usual suspects are a roof that has been leaking quietly since a hail season, a failed water heater, a slab leak, guttering that has been putting water against the foundation for years, or a bathroom fan that vents into the attic instead of outside.

What you have to tell a buyer

Mold that you know about is not something to leave off the paperwork, and neither is a leak you had fixed.

Oklahoma has a statutory disclosure regime covering known material defects in residential property, and our article on Oklahoma seller disclosure requirements sets out how it works.

If remediation has been done, keep the paperwork. An invoice naming the source that was repaired, and a clearance result, is worth considerably more to a buyer than a verbal assurance that it was sorted out.

Undisclosed mold is one of the commonest sources of a claim against a seller after closing, because it reappears, and when it reappears it is obvious that it was there before.

When fixing it beats selling, which is often

If the source is a single identified leak, the affected area is contained, and the quotes are within what you can fund, do the work. A house with the leak repaired, the area remediated and a clearance result in hand sells on the ordinary market to ordinary buyers, and that will put more in your pocket than we will. We would rather say so.

The arithmetic changes when the water has been running a long time. Once it is into subfloor, framing or ductwork, you are no longer buying a clean-up, you are buying a reconstruction, and the number stops being predictable.

It also changes when the house is empty and unheated, when you are managing it from another state, or when the moisture source is something structural that has to be solved before anything else can be.

Run both routes before deciding. Our net proceeds calculator puts a repaired listing against a cash sale, and it is free whether or not you ever call us.