Selling a Scarsdale Home That Has Taken Water

Two separate things happen, and they are different in kind. You answer New York's Property Condition Disclosure Statement in writing, which since March 20, 2024 you can no longer avoid by giving the buyer a $500 credit, and it asks about indoor mold testing, water penetration and flooding. Separately, Village of Scarsdale Chapter 244 requires a Discharge Compliance Certificate on the sale of any property in the Village, which means a camera survey of your whole sewer lateral by a Westchester County licensed plumber or a New York licensed engineer or architect. The first is a question you answer. The second is an inspection you cannot answer your way around.

What changed on the disclosure form in March 2024

New York's Property Condition Disclosure Act was amended effective March 20, 2024. The seller's $500 credit in lieu of delivering a Property Condition Disclosure Statement was removed, and seven flood questions were added. Real Property Law section 465 as it now reads contains no credit provision, and states that a seller shall be liable only for a willful failure to perform the requirements of the article, and for such a willful failure shall be liable for the actual damages suffered by the buyer in addition to any other existing equitable or statutory remedy. For a generation of New York sellers the practical default was to skip the form and hand over $500 at closing. That option is gone, the written answers get given, and the moment to understand your own water history is well before a buyer's attorney is reading it. What follows describes what the form asks. It is not legal advice and it is not advice about how to answer, which is a conversation for your attorney.

The questions that touch water and mold

Question 27 of the statement, form DOS-1614-f revision 02/25, asks whether the property has been tested for indoor mold, and if yes, to attach a copy of the report. Read it carefully, because it is a question about testing and about the report, not about whether mold was ever present. Question 38 asks whether there are any flooding, drainage or grading problems that resulted in standing water on any portion of the property. Question 39 asks whether the structure has experienced any water penetration or damage due to seepage or a natural flood event such as from heavy rainfall, coastal storm surge, tidal inundation or river overflow. Question 28 covers rot or water damage to the structure, and question 45 asks about material defects in a sump pump. Question 39 names heavy rainfall explicitly, which in a village whose own commissioned study found the drainage in the studied area grossly undersized above a 1-year storm event is not a hypothetical category.

The seven flood questions, and the ones that follow the house

The flood block runs from question 10 to question 17. It asks whether the property is in a FEMA designated floodplain, whether it is wholly or partly within the Special Flood Hazard Area or the 500 year floodplain, whether federal law requires flood insurance on it, whether the seller or any previous owner received FEMA, SBA or other federal disaster flood assistance, whether there is flood insurance on the property, whether a FEMA elevation certificate exists, and whether a flood damage claim has ever been filed with any insurer including the NFIP. The form warns that for properties that have received federal disaster assistance the requirement to obtain flood insurance passes down to all future owners. Two of those answers attach to the building rather than to you, which is why buyers' attorneys in this county go to questions 14 and 17 first. For context on how ordinary this is locally, FEMA data as of July 2021 records 347 policies in force in Scarsdale, 492 paid claims and 47 Repetitive Loss properties.

The Discharge Compliance Certificate is a different instrument entirely

Local Law 5 of 2023, adopted February 28, 2023, created Article II of Chapter 244 of the Code of the Village of Scarsdale, covering illegal discharges, activities and connections to the sanitary sewer system. Enforcement began October 1, 2023. A Discharge Compliance Certificate is required upon the sale of any property within the Village, and prior to the issuance of any building permit for residential work with a value of over $100,000. Existing common interest developments had to secure one by April 1, 2024. Note the second trigger as well as the first: if you are rebuilding a finished basement after water damage and the job runs over $100,000, the certificate is in your path before the Building Department signs off, and it is much cheaper to learn that at the start of the project than at the closing table. Scarsdale is a coterminous town-village, so one Village Hall administers the building permit, the floodplain and the certificate.

Who is allowed to do that inspection, and what it involves

The Village's program handout states the inspection is required to be performed by a Westchester County licensed plumber, or a professional engineer or architect licensed in New York State. It must include closed circuit television video recording of the entire sewer lateral, and it requires an affidavit that the lateral has been tested and that any illegal connections or defects have been eliminated, repaired, replaced or rehabilitated. The presence and discharge location of any sump pumps on the premises must be reported. The certificate is valid for five years, or ten for common interest developments. To be completely clear about the boundary: a mold assessment or remediation firm holds none of those credentials and no mold work of any kind produces that certificate. This site explains what the requirement is and stops there. The plumber, engineer or architect is a separate appointment you make yourself.

What the camera tends to find in an older Scarsdale house

The Village publishes a list of common defects under the program. Sump pump connections to the sanitary sewer must be disconnected and rerouted into a drywell or pumped onto the property away from neighboring properties, and any connection from a driveway drain, yard drain or roof leader downspout into the sanitary sewer must be cut and rerouted. The handout explains the mechanism in its own words: where seasonal groundwater exists, coupled with poor foundation drainage or failed or failing waterproofing, sump pumps connected to sewers are sources of inflow, and where high ground water tables exist, defective sewer pipes are main contributors to infiltration, listing offset joints, cracked pipe, significant sag, collapsed sections and root intrusion. In a village where 2,831 of 5,847 housing units, 48.4 percent, were built in 1939 or earlier and the median year built is 1943, those are ordinary findings rather than exotic ones. They are also frequently the same defect behind a recurring damp basement, which is the part most sellers do not expect.

What a mold contractor can and cannot do for you at this point

Here is the honest boundary, because it is the thing most likely to be blurred by somebody bidding for the work. A remediation does not answer a disclosure question, does not erase a water event that happened, and has no bearing at all on the sewer lateral certificate. Nobody here completes, reviews or files any part of a Property Condition Disclosure Statement, and nobody here should be advising you on the wording of an answer: that is your attorney's job and the form has a liability standard attached to it. What is genuinely useful is narrower and more valuable than it sounds. New York requires a mold assessment licensee to give a written report to every client it assesses for compensation, and section 947 makes clearance conditional on the assessment licensee determining that the underlying cause of the mold has been remediated so that it is reasonably certain the mold will not return. A written finding about where the water came from, and a clearance record saying the cause was addressed, is a document rather than a memory.

Why owners are better off doing this early than at contract

The state Department of Labor says plainly that in most cases air sampling and mold testing is unnecessary, because there are no EPA or federal standards for mold, so any interpretation of sampling results would not be based on any established health or environmental standard. That is worth reading before you order a test simply to have something to attach to question 27. What holds up under a buyer's attorney is not a spore count, it is a written diagnosis of the moisture source and evidence that it was dealt with. Doing that in the spring before you list gives you time to fix the cause, and the cause is often a cheaper repair than the finishes it ruined. Doing it during attorney review gives you a number written by somebody else. One more piece of local context for buyers reading this: about 35 percent of Westchester's paid flood claims were rated in zones outside the Special Flood Hazard Area, so a clean flood zone answer on the form is not the same as a dry basement, and only the City of White Plains among the towns covered here told the county it maintains a list of flood damaged properties.

A sensible sequence if you are selling within the year

Establish the moisture source first, in writing, through a licensed mold assessment contractor, because everything else depends on knowing whether the water is a building fault or a street drainage condition. Fix the cause next, using whichever trade the finding points at, which may be a plumber, a mason or a landscaper rather than a mold company at all. Do the remediation and the clearance after the source is dealt with, not before, since New York's clearance test is written around the cause and not the surface. Book the sewer lateral inspection with a Westchester County licensed plumber or a New York licensed engineer or architect in good time, because if the camera finds an offset joint or a sump pump plumbed into the sanitary line, that repair has its own schedule. Then answer the disclosure with your attorney, with documents in front of you rather than recollections. If you want the first step started, send the details of the property and what happened, and we will set up the assessment.