Building Restoration in Palm Beach County

Palm Beach County is the outlier of the three, and in a way that works in a board's favour. It has no county recertification programme of its own.

What Palm Beach actually requires

Where Miami-Dade and Broward each run their own inspection programmes on top of state law, Palm Beach does not. What applies here is the state milestone inspection under Florida Statute 553.899, and that is all.

One requirement instead of two is genuinely simpler. It also means the thresholds are the statutory ones rather than a local variation.

Note the 25-year coastal threshold. Palm Beach County states the three-mile rule plainly, which is not true everywhere in Florida — in other jurisdictions the coastal reduction is described as a local option. If your building sits near that three-mile line, confirm which side of it the county places you on before assuming you have five more years.

Who administers it depends on where you sit

The county's Planning, Zoning and Building department administers the milestone programme for buildings in unincorporated Palm Beach County.

If your building is inside an incorporated municipality — and most of the county's condominium stock is — your city administers compliance, and several run their own recertification requirements in addition. Boynton Beach and Delray Beach both do. So the practical answer to "what do we owe and when" is a call to your city's building department, not the county's.

What fails on Palm Beach buildings

The mechanism does not change with the county line. Chlorides carried in salt air migrate through concrete and reach the reinforcing steel; corroded steel expands and pushes the concrete off from the inside. What surfaces as flaking, rust staining, or a hollow-sounding patch has been running for years underneath.

What does change is exposure. Oceanfront towers in Highland Beach, Palm Beach and Singer Island take the full salt load and fail first at balcony edges and railings. Buildings west of the Intracoastal in Wellington or Royal Palm Beach fail later and concentrate at parapets, sealant joints and window perimeters, where wind-driven rain finds its way in.

Where we work in Palm Beach County

West Palm Beach, Boca Raton, Delray Beach, Boynton Beach, Jupiter, Palm Beach Gardens, Wellington, Riviera Beach, Lake Worth Beach and Palm Beach, and the rest of the county north to the Martin County line.

Work that happens around residents

Nobody moves out. We phase by elevation and stack, so work travels through the building in vertical bands and a resident loses the use of a balcony for a defined window rather than for the length of the project.

Walkways and entries are protected overhead, access is coordinated with management, and rope access and swing stage crews reach every floor without standing scaffolding across your entrances for months. The board receives photo documentation and progress reporting the property manager can forward straight into the board packet.

If a notice has arrived

Establish who sent it. In Palm Beach that determines almost everything else — county or municipality, milestone only or a local recertification alongside it, and which deadline governs.

Then engage the engineer before approaching contractors. The report defines what has to be repaired; bidding before it exists produces four numbers solving four different problems. Where Phase 2 finds substantial structural deterioration, repairs must begin within 365 days, and most of that year is consumed by scoping, bidding, a funding vote and permits rather than by construction.

Tell us about your building. We'll come look at it, and tell you honestly what it needs.