A Tenant Reported Mold. A Landlord's Playbook for Apartments and Older Multi-Unit Buildings

By John Calhoun, owner of Mold Remediation Gettysburg PA · Updated October 29, 2026

A tenant calls: there’s mold in the bathroom, or behind the bed, or on the ceiling under the unit upstairs. What you do in the next two days decides whether this is a small repair or a long argument. Answer quickly, find the water, write everything down, and keep the other tenants in the loop. The EPA’s guide for larger buildings gives the framework, and the rest of this page walks through it.

Why buildings in town need a plan

Gettysburg borough has a lot of rental housing in shared buildings. Renters make up a little over half of borough households in the Census estimates, while about 16% of homes are in buildings with two to four units, and about 22% are in buildings with five or more. And the buildings are old: about 79% of borough homes were built before 1970. Shared walls, shared plumbing and decades of renovations mean a stain in one unit can start in another. Mold in rowhouses and shared walls covers how water crosses between units.

Pennsylvania has no mold statute for landlords. The duty comes from the warranty of habitability in Pugh v. Holmes and from the borough’s rental licensing, which requires units to meet the applicable codes. I’m not a lawyer, and this isn’t legal advice; for your obligations, ask an attorney.

The first 48 hours

1. Respond the same day. Acknowledge the report in writing.
2. Look and photograph. Size of the area, what it’s on, any water you can see.
3. Find the moisture. Check the unit above, the plumbing in between and the outside wall. A moisture meter, a thermal camera and sometimes a borescope through a small hole usually find it without tearing out a ceiling.
4. Stop the water. Plumber, roofer or HVAC tech, whichever it is.
5. Dry what’s wet. The EPA’s commercial guidance is to clean and dry wet or damp spots within 48 hours.
6. Then decide on the cleanup, based on size and material.

Sizing the job the EPA way

The EPA also notes that heavy growth in a small area can call for more care than light growth spread over a larger one. Size is a starting point, not the whole answer. Containment, negative air and HEPA scrubbers explains what containment looks like in practice.

Telling the other tenants

The EPA’s appendix on communication is practical. For medium and large jobs, tell occupants the size of the area, the planned work and the timetable. Name a contact person. Post regular updates. Give advance notice if anyone has to relocate. A building where people share walls fills silence with rumor, so a plain note is cheaper than a week of phone calls.

Lead-safe rules in older rentals

This is the trap I’d warn every Gettysburg landlord about. Most of the borough’s buildings predate 1978, and the EPA’s Renovation, Repair and Painting rule applies to pre-1978 housing. The rule’s minor-repair exemption covers disturbing 6 square feet or less of painted surface per room inside, or 20 square feet outside, but it doesn’t apply to demolishing painted surfaces, whatever the size. Cutting out moldy painted drywall is demolition, so it can need a Lead-Safe Certified Firm even on a small patch. The EPA says landlords doing their own work are covered, and that vacant rental units are not exempt. Ask any contractor you hire about their lead certification.

A yardstick for speed

Pennsylvania doesn’t set a deadline for fixing mold. HUD’s NSPIRE inspection standard, which applies only to HUD-assisted housing, does. Inside a unit, it calls for correcting mold-like growth within 30 days when it covers more than 4 square inches but less than 1 square foot, and within 24 hours at 1 square foot or more; voucher units follow somewhat different timelines. It also lists elevated moisture, confirmed with a moisture meter, as a deficiency in its own right. Even outside HUD housing, it shows how seriously inspectors treat this.

The paperwork that protects everybody

Keep the tenant’s report, your response, photos before and after, the moisture readings, what was repaired, what was removed, and the final readings showing it’s dry. Post-remediation verification explains how a job gets proven done, and what a remediation estimate should include helps you compare quotes. Tenants may want to read renters and mold in Pennsylvania.

This is John Calhoun at Mold Remediation Gettysburg PA. Landlords call me to find the source and to put the readings on paper, so the conversation with the tenant starts from facts. The list of mold services and the overview of mold remediation in Gettysburg, PA explain how I work, and the college area and borough rentals page covers rental inspections in town.