I am sitting here on a Thursday painting my soon-to-be-first rental, a primary residence that I am renting out once I move to Florida in a couple of weeks. Buying a third floor condo in a very desirable area of Delaware made it a great buy. Meeting the 1% rule and almost at a 2% cash flow to purchase price. I have learned a couple of things about a third-floor condo I just had to pass along.

Starting with, If the condo has a washer and dryer in the unit check when the last time it was cleaned. I say this and some people will laugh, but a small state like Delaware took 16 calls to 16 different companies to finally get one that could clean a dryer vent on a third floor. The reason why it is getting harder to find companies that can do this is that any crew that needs to use a ladder over 40 feet I guess has to have that coverage in their insurance contract. Meaning a lot of these dryer vent and HVAC companies don't have insurance coverage for this due to the increased premiums of the insurance agencies over the last 2 years. I'm not sure if this is a Delaware-specific thing or not but 4 of the 16 companies specified this was the reason and the others just didn't offer the service past a second floor, to begin with. The builders of the condo back in the day may have not followed code or there wasn't a code for dryer vents as of yet but sometimes they will use a flex hose all the way to the dryer outlet which means it cannot be cleaned. In this case, you will have to get it replaced with hard metal tubing.

Ways to fix this problem that I have found is to contact the COA or HOA and ask to get the outlet for the dryer re-routed. This depends highly on the politics of your HOA/COA. I am currently working on this issue with my COA and will update to let yall know what I find. The fix I found was to call a big name company like Stanley Steamers that can do this and they are coming out next week to do the job. The problem with this is that it is extremely expensive for them to break out the 40 FT ladder because it takes 2-3 guys to do the job at this point. In the end, you only have to clean it out once in a while but it's a pain in the butt, and if Stanley steamers leaves ... There's no company that can clean out this dryer vent. There are over 60 third-floor condos in my community. Big problem if anyone has insight let me know! Thank you all and have a great weekend!

Wilmington, Delaware

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