Typical cost in Seattle
The homeowner shortcuts are not available to a Seattle landlord, manager or association. PSCAA wrote its single-family exceptions around a home used by the family that owns it, which leaves rental property and multiple-family units out. Seattle Asbestos Removal does abatement in rented houses, duplexes and apartment buildings.
Seattle is a renter’s city. Of its occupied homes, 56% are rented, and just over half of all housing units, 51%, are in buildings of five or more. Landlords and managers can reach us for work in Seattle, White Center and Tukwila.
A landlord working through a turnover may touch a different material in every unit. Whatever a unit’s renovation will disturb is surveyed by a certified inspector first, and the summary is passed to maintenance staff, the other trades and anyone else who might disturb the material.
A rented house may look like a family home, but PSCAA does not treat it as one. The owner survey exception and the homeowner notification tier are off the table, and the job falls under the tiers set by size for other buildings. Check PSCAA’s site for current fees.
Occupied buildings are worked in stages. Each stage sits behind sealed, restricted barriers, waste leaves by a set route, and the building keeps a running yearly total of what has been removed, since PSCAA’s thresholds are counted per building.
An annual notice is an option for owners of several buildings, with conditions on size (under 260 linear feet and 160 square feet per building a year) and a quarterly written report to PSCAA, due within 15 days of each quarter’s end. Bigger projects are filed separately. Since the owner tracks totals building by building, measured quantities from the survey matter.
Compared with an owner-occupied house, every step carries extra duties.
Under RCW 49.26.013 the inspection duty sits with the owner or the owner’s agent. A good-faith inspection must be done before work that may disturb asbestos, and contractors should receive the written report ahead of their bids. In practice, that means ordering the survey before you ask for quotes.
For a rented building, the state sends removal to certified workers under a certified supervisor on the job. L&I adds a notice of its own for projects greater than 48 square feet or 10 linear feet. When you collect bids, ask who the supervisor will be.
Recordkeeping belongs to the owner. Each friable load leaves for the disposal site with a waste shipment record, and the owner should hold on to the copies.
Which page next? If the building is coming down, pre-demolition asbestos abatement. If it is staying, asbestos testing and surveys explains the survey every rental job starts with, and with several units in play you can ask for it to be organized unit by unit so each report reaches the trades working there. The Seattle Asbestos Removal home page lists all other services.
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