Condo board members: how leak protection protects your building and residents

The risk most boards underweight

As a condo board member, you make decisions for the whole building. Water damage deserves to be near the top of that list. It now accounts for more than 70 percent of real estate claims by dollar value, and it comes from ordinary sources: a burst pipe, a failed appliance, a valve that lets go in a mechanical room.

When it happens, the costs land on the people you represent. Families are displaced during repairs. Residents can end up paying deductibles for damage they did not cause. Repairs often draw on the reserve fund, which raises costs for everyone later. For the building, water destroys mechanical equipment and finishes and lowers value, and repeat claims push premiums up or make coverage hard to keep. The good news is that this is a preventable problem. The leak is not the variable you control. The response is, an argument we lay out in leak detection is an operations problem, not a gadget problem.

What protection looks like for a condo building

A complete program covers the building from the main to the suite:

• Automatic and remote shutoff at the water main and PRV stations.
• Shutoff valves on hydronic heating and cooling systems.
• Sensors and shutoff in common areas, amenities and mechanical rooms.
• Riser sensors that catch water, temperature and humidity on lines passing through suites.
• Domestic-zone shutoff to isolate sections of the building in an emergency.
• In-suite protection at the appliances most likely to fail, like washing machines, dishwashers and water heaters.
• Unit submetering that doubles as unit-level leak detection.

A live 24/7 monitoring center verifies every alert and escalates it, and a dashboard gives the board real metrics: consumption, incident resolution times and asset-risk insight. If you are comparing a managed program to an off-the-shelf kit, see multifamily smart leak detection.

From developer handoff to board control

The smoothest path starts during construction, where developers install the system so the building is protected from day one. At turnover, the board inherits a working program rather than a blank slate: training and onboarding, documentation, a dedicated customer-success contact and the same monitoring center watching without interruption. The handoff is exactly where the worst water events happen, which is why we cover it in the construction-to-operations gap.

Frequently asked questions

How disruptive is installation in an occupied building? Eddy is designed to retrofit with minimal disruption, installing around the systems you already have.

What support does the board get? A 24/7 monitoring center handles alerts around the clock, plus training, documentation and a customer-success team at handoff and beyond.

Can monitoring help with our insurance? Yes. A documented record of caught and contained leaks supports better premiums and deductibles and helps keep the building insurable. See how to reduce losses with proactive risk management.