Meet Our Team

About SERVPRO of Lake Nona

Lake Nona is the newest part of Orlando, and that shapes everything about the restoration work we do here. Most of our service area didn't exist twenty-five years ago. The oldest neighborhoods, Northlake Park and parts of Nona Crest, went up in the early 2000s. Laureate Park, Randal Park, Eagle Creek, and Storey Park came in waves after that, and new phases are still going vertical along Innovation Way and the southern stretch of Narcoossee Road today. People assume a new community doesn't need a restoration company. Our phones say otherwise. New homes don't fail the way old homes fail, but they fail, and when they do, the materials inside them are less forgiving and the timelines are shorter.

SERVPRO of Lake Nona is owned by Susan and Vern Boatman, who have owned and operated SERVPRO franchises in Central Florida for more than fifteen years. The Lake Nona operation runs with the same crew discipline, the same documentation standards, and the same around-the-clock phone coverage as the rest of the Boatman operations, which matters, because a restoration company's habits are set long before your emergency happens.

What New Construction Actually Does

Here is the pattern fifteen years of Central Florida restoration work teaches you about newer housing stock. The plumbing failures aren't corroded galvanized pipe; they're braided supply lines that let go at the crimp fitting, plastic quick-connect fittings that were seated almost right, water heaters installed in second-floor closets and garages that reach the end of their service life all at once across a neighborhood built the same year. The AC systems run ten and eleven months a year, which means condensate drain lines clog with algae and overflow their pans into a hallway ceiling, an air-handler closet, or the drywall behind a laundry room. Second-floor laundry rooms send washing machine water down through floor systems and light fixtures. And the finish materials, engineered flooring, luxury vinyl plank, MDF baseboards, and paper-faced drywall, absorb water fast and don't recover, which means the window for saving a floor in a Laureate Park two-story is measured in hours, not days.

That's why the response pattern matters more here than almost anywhere. Our crews extract standing water with truck-mounted equipment, map where the water actually traveled using infrared cameras and moisture meters, set drying equipment against those readings, and monitor daily until the numbers, not appearances, say the structure is dry. Everything gets photographed and logged, and we coordinate directly with your insurance adjuster from the first visit.

A Service Area Built in Villages

The Lake Nona territory is really a collection of distinct places, and each one produces its own kind of work.

The residential villages are the heart of it. Laureate Park's dense, newer two-stories with garage apartments and accessory units. Northlake Park's first-generation homes, now twenty-plus years old and aging into water heater and AC failures on schedule. Randal Park and Storey Park on the east side, where builder-grade materials punish slow responses. Nona Crest and Nona South, where established single-family streets and attached townhomes each fail their own way; townhome losses in particular tend to cross party walls and involve two or three insurance policies at once. Waters Edge, gated on the shore of Lake Nona itself, where waterfront humidity changes the drying math. Eagle Creek, behind gates on the golf course, where open fairway lots take more than their share of lightning and wind.

Medical City is its own category of work. The Orlando VA Medical Center, Nemours Children's Hospital, the UCF College of Medicine, and the office, lab, hotel, and apartment buildings that support them generate commercial losses with commercial stakes: after-hours supply-line failures above ceiling grid, multi-tenant water migration, and business-continuity pressure where the first question is never about the water. It's about staying open. We work around operations, coordinate with property managers and building engineers, and produce documentation that holds up across multiple carriers.

The Narcoossee corridor strings restaurants, retail plazas, and multi-family communities from the 417 down toward St. Cloud: commercial kitchens with fire exposure, and three-story buildings where one washing machine hose affects three units.

And the edges of the territory go rural fast. Lake Hart and the Moss Park area bring lakefront properties, acreage lots, wells and septic systems, and detached buildings. Boggy Creek sits along its namesake floodplain south of Orlando International Airport, where saturated summer ground pushes surface water into garages and ground-floor rooms. Wedgefield, out along the SR 520 corridor by Hal Scott Preserve, puts homes on acreage where a burst pipe can run for hours before anyone knows. We also serve Meadow Woods, Taft, Williamsburg, Southport, Wewahotee, Shinglecreek, Christmas, and the surrounding south Orlando and east Orange County communities.

The Work Itself

Water damage restoration is the most common call by a wide margin: burst pipes, supply-line failures, water heater failures, AC condensate overflows, roof leaks, and appliance failures, from a single wet bedroom to a multi-floor commercial loss. Water categories drive the decisions. A clean Category 1 supply-line break handled the same day usually stays a drying job; the same break left over a weekend deteriorates toward contamination protocols and demolition. Speed of response is one of the few variables a property owner controls, which is why the phone is answered at 3 a.m.

Fire damage restoration covers everything from stovetop flare-ups to total losses: emergency board-up, suppression-water extraction, soot and smoke residue cleaning, contents pack-out and cleaning, odor treatment matched to whether the building stays occupied, and reconstruction coordination at the end. In newer homes, open floor plans and shared HVAC systems move smoke through the whole structure fast, so the cleaning scope is usually the entire house even when the burn was one room. Lithium battery fires, from e-bikes, scooters, and tools charging in garages, are a growing share of what we see in newer communities.

Mold remediation starts with the moisture source, because removing mold without stopping the water just reschedules the same job. Then containment, removal of affected drywall and insulation as contaminated waste, antimicrobial treatment, and HEPA air scrubbers running until the space clears. Tight, energy-efficient new construction holds moisture in wall cavities where it can't dry on its own. Mold in a three-year-old house surprises homeowners weekly, and it shouldn't.

Storm response is seasonal and it is serious here. Central Florida summer thunderstorms drop inches of rain in an hour; hurricane bands test every roof penetration, window seam, and retention pond in the territory at once. We tarp roofs, board up openings, extract, dry, and rebuild, and through the SERVPRO Large Loss Division, we can pull additional crews and equipment from the broader SERVPRO network when a named storm puts the whole map underwater at the same time. For the low-lying parts of our territory, one thing worth knowing before storm season: standard homeowner policies generally exclude rising water from outside the house. That's what flood insurance, NFIP or private, covers, and in Boggy Creek, Shinglecreek, or lakefront Moss Park, it's a conversation worth having with your agent before you need it.

Around those core lines, we handle sewage cleanup under Category 3 protocols, biohazard and crime scene cleanup handled discreetly, contents pack-out and restoration, document drying, air duct and HVAC cleaning, carpet and upholstery cleaning, odor removal, commercial cleaning, and full reconstruction, so the property owner isn't coordinating separate mitigation and rebuild contractors.

Why Water, Fire, and Mold Are the Center of This Company

Cleaning work matters and we do plenty of it, but water damage restoration, fire damage restoration, and mold remediation are the reason this company exists. They are the losses that threaten the structure itself, the ones where hours change outcomes, and the ones where certified process separates a restored home from a lingering problem. That is where the training budget goes, where the equipment investment goes, and where fifteen-plus years of Central Florida experience shows up most. When a Lake Nona family searches for emergency water removal at midnight, or a Medical City facility manager needs smoke damage cleanup before Monday, or a Laureate Park homeowner needs mold removal handled correctly the first time, that is the work we built this operation to win.

How the Big Three Actually Unfold

Every restoration company lists its services. Few explain what the work looks like from the customer's side of the door. The three walkthroughs below are composites of the losses we handle most often in Lake Nona, told the way they actually happen, hour by hour.

A Water Loss, Start to Finish

It's 6:40 on a Tuesday evening in Laureate Park. A family comes home from practice to find water dripping from the kitchen ceiling and the upstairs laundry room floor wet from wall to wall. The washing machine supply hose split sometime after lunch, which means the water has had five or six hours to work down through the floor system. The call gets answered by a person, who walks them to the main shutoff and starts a crew rolling. On arrival, truck-mounted extraction pulls the standing water out of the laundry room and the kitchen below while a technician maps the loss with an infrared camera: the wet path runs through the ceiling joists, down an interior wall, and under the engineered flooring in the hallway. That map decides everything. Air movers and dehumidifiers get set against the readings, a small section of ceiling drywall comes out because the meter says it can't be saved, and the flooring gets rescue-dried in place because the meter says it can. Over the next three days a technician returns to log moisture readings until every material tests dry. The homeowner's insurance adjuster receives photos, the moisture log, and the equipment record without having to ask. Total drywall replaced: one ceiling patch. Total flooring replaced: none. That outcome was decided in the first two hours, which is the whole argument for calling the moment you find water damage instead of the morning after.

A Mold Job, Start to Finish

A Northlake Park homeowner notices that the guest bathroom smells musty even after cleaning, and the baseboard at one wall has started to darken. The house is twenty-two years old and the original shower valve has been seeping inside the wall, slowly, for months. This is how most mold remediation in Lake Nona begins: not with visible growth, but with a smell that won't leave. Our inspection traces the moisture with meters and finds the wet cavity; Florida law separates mold assessors from mold remediators, and we walk the homeowner through that process honestly before any work starts. Once the plumbing leak is repaired and the scope is set, containment goes up around the bathroom, a HEPA air scrubber runs negative pressure so spores can't migrate into the rest of the house, and the affected drywall and insulation come out bagged as contaminated waste. Remaining surfaces get cleaned and treated with antimicrobials, the cavity gets dried to measured standards, and the space is verified before the walls close back up. The family stays in the house the entire time. The difference between this story and a whole-wing remediation is usually just the number of months the smell was ignored.

A Fire Loss, Start to Finish

A grease fire on a Randal Park stovetop is out in ninety seconds, but the house tells a different story. Smoke has already moved through the return ducts into every bedroom, soot is settling on counters and electronics two rooms from the kitchen, and the suppression water is soaking into the floor. Fire damage restoration is really three jobs layered together, and the order matters. First the structure gets secured and the suppression water extracted before it warps what the fire never touched. Then comes soot: it is acidic and keeps etching metal, glass, and finishes for days, so surfaces get cleaned in priority order while salvageable contents are packed out, itemized, and sent for facility cleaning. Then odor, treated at its source in the ductwork and materials rather than masked. The kitchen itself needs demolition and rebuild; the rest of the house needs meticulous cleaning, and knowing which is which is where experience pays for itself. Our crews photograph and document every stage for the insurance claim, and because reconstruction is part of what we do, the same company that cleaned the smoke rebuilds the cabinets. A loss like this typically runs a few weeks from first call to finished kitchen, and the family is back in the routine long before the smell of that night is a memory.

Certifications and Standards

Our technicians hold IICRC certifications across the disciplines the work requires: Water Damage Restoration Technician, Applied Structural Drying, Fire and Smoke Damage Restoration, Applied Microbial Remediation, and Health and Safety, and the operation is an IICRC Certified Firm. Crews train through SERVPRO's Employee Certification Training Program, carry OSHA general-industry training, and hold lead-based paint renovation credentials for the rare older structure in the territory. Certifications aren't decoration; they're why the drying plan is a calculation instead of a guess.

Insurance, Documented Properly

Most restoration jobs run through insurance, and the documentation matters as much as the drying. Adjusters need cause-and-origin notes, photos before and during work, written scope, daily moisture logs, and material removal records. We build that file as the work happens and coordinate directly with adjusters at State Farm, Allstate, Citizens, USAA, Progressive, Farmers, and the rest of the Florida carrier mix, so the property owner isn't playing messenger in the middle of a crisis. In a territory this new, some water losses also touch builder warranties; we can't make warranty determinations, but our moisture mapping and records mean nobody argues later about what got wet.

Built Around Emergencies, Not Appointments

Emergency water removal is a different business than scheduled work, and the whole operation is organized around that fact. The phone is answered by a person 24 hours a day, every day of the year, because water damage at 2 a.m. cannot wait for business hours and a recording helps no one standing in a flooded kitchen. Trucks carry extraction equipment, infrared cameras, moisture meters, and drying equipment together, so the first visit is a working visit rather than an estimate appointment. And the crew that answers a burst pipe in Laureate Park tonight is the same crew that handles the sewage backup in Nona South tomorrow and the smoke damage in Eagle Creek next week: one standard, one documentation discipline, across water damage restoration, fire damage restoration, and mold remediation alike.

Before Hurricane Season Reaches Lake Nona

Southeast Orlando earns its storm reputation every summer, and a little preparation changes outcomes. Know where your main water shutoff is before you need it. Have the AC condensate line flushed each spring, because condensate overflows are the most common July water loss in this territory. Photograph your home room by room while everything is fine, since pre-loss photos make any future claim cleaner. If your home sits on lower ground in Boggy Creek, near the Shingle Creek watershed, or along the lakes by Moss Park, talk to your insurance agent about flood coverage before a storm is named, because flood policies typically carry a waiting period. And when a storm does hit the whole territory at once, the SERVPRO Large Loss Division stands behind our local crews with additional equipment and manpower, so Lake Nona families are not waiting in a regional line.

Questions Lake Nona Property Owners Ask Us

How fast should I call after finding water?

Immediately, including at night. In newer construction, engineered flooring and MDF trim absorb water within hours. The difference between a call at 11 p.m. and 8 a.m. is often the difference between drying a floor and replacing it.

Do you handle both homes and businesses in Lake Nona?

Yes. Residential losses across all the villages, and commercial work throughout Medical City, Lake Nona Town Center, and the Narcoossee corridor, including after-hours response, which is when most commercial water losses happen.

Do you work with HOAs and property managers?

Constantly. Townhome and multi-family losses in Nona South or along Narcoossee routinely involve unit owners, neighbors, associations, and multiple policies. We document per-unit and coordinate with every adjuster involved.

My house is only a few years old. Can it really have mold?

Yes. Tight building envelopes hold moisture in wall cavities where it can't evaporate. A slow supply-line seep or a wind-driven roof leak can feed growth behind paint that looks perfect. If something smells musty, have it checked.

Does homeowner insurance cover storm flooding?

Interior plumbing failures and most roof-leak damage are typically covered perils; rising water from outside generally is not. That requires flood coverage through NFIP or a private carrier. We document either type of loss so the claim lands with the right policy.

Do you do the rebuild after the cleanup?

Yes. Reconstruction is part of the work, so one team carries the project from emergency response through final repairs.

How long does drying actually take?

Most residential water losses dry in a few days of continuous equipment run time, but the moisture meters decide, not the calendar. We measure daily and pull equipment only when readings hit dry standard, because damp-but-covered is how mold starts.

What should I do while the crew is on the way?

Shut off the water at the source or the main, keep people away from wet outlets and sagging ceilings, and move small valuables out of the wet area. Leave the flooring and drywall alone; the damage needs to be documented before anything comes out.

The Bottom Line

Lake Nona is new, fast-growing, and built tight, a combination that makes restoration work here more time-sensitive, not less. SERVPRO of Lake Nona pairs that reality with owners who've done this work in Central Florida for more than fifteen years, crews certified to national standards, equipment scaled for anything from one wet bedroom to a hurricane, and a phone that gets answered by a person every hour of every day. When something goes wrong in your Lake Nona home or business, call, and we'll make it "Like it never even happened."