Mold covers entire family’s belongings, forcing them to flee only months after moving in

By Harry Samler

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    ATLANTA, Georgia (WANF) — Cynthia Gray masked up for a tour of the home she rented in June. As she stepped into the living room, she exclaimed, “I’ve never seen mold this much in my life!”

Cynthia and her daughter Delicia Davis moved into their Snellville rental property at the end of June. They’ve been fighting with their corporate landlord ever since.

“I didn’t know mold could grow on a television,” Cynthia said as she gave Atlanta News First Investigates a tour of her granddaughter’s bedroom.

Less than two weeks after moving in, Delicia Davis emailed her corporate landlord about the moldy smell but said Main Street Renewal did little to address the problem.

When mold started growing on her daughter’s furniture, she knew it was time to go.

Not long after the family moved in, Stacie Khayyam, the previous tenant, knocked on the Grays’ door with a warning. Khayyam said she and her husband moved out of the home two months earlier. Khayyam returned to pick up leftover mail but said when she saw someone was living there, she felt an obligation to warn them.

“I wanted to find out if the person who lived in that home was renting from Main Street Renewal because they needed to know the truth about what could happen to them, what could happen to their belongings,” Khayyam said.

Khayyam provided Atlanta News First with an email from a Main Street Renewal employee who acknowledged receiving pictures of “organic growth” and apologized. Khayyam said Main Street Renewal’s solution was to add a dehumidifier.

“I was terrified because when she opened that door, and I saw that they had moved all of their furniture in their living room set their dining room set, I knew what was going to happen,” Khayyam said.

Gray took Atlanta News First Investigates into the master bedroom to show a forest of mold growing on her shoes.

Gray and her daughter paid $2,500 to two different mold-sampling companies. Atlanta News First Investigates asked J.D. Ortega, a mold expert and the owner of No Mold Atlanta, to analyze the results.

Ortega said the house’s outside penicillin aspergillus level – which is a common type of mold – was around 194. “But in this particular house, when you compare it to the inside which was the master bedroom, it was 3,327,” he said. “That is an astronomically higher number than the outside.”

Ortega said at a 55% humidity level, mold spores will grow after three days. Results from the test show the humidity level in the family room was 78%.

On Oct. 4, Main Street Renewal relocated the family to a hotel. Delicia Davis said the company offered relocation to another property and reimbursement for their mold tests, but after Atlanta News First’s investigation, Davis said the company offered $7,500. She said their expenses, not including their lost belongings, are more than double that amount.

Here is a statement from Main Street Renewal: “Residents are at the center of everything we do at Main Street Renewal, and we strive to ensure that all our properties are safe for our residents and issues reported are promptly investigated. We are working with the resident to resolve this matter.”

Here are the takeaways to this story:

When renting a home, particularly if it’s owned by a very large company, do a pre-move-in inspection.

If you don’t know what to look for, hire a certified home inspector to check the appliances and the HVAC, and have them look for any major problems that could make your life miserable. A few hundred dollars for an inspection could save you thousands of dollars in damages.

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