Leesburg isn’t a high-rise town. Inside the limits fewer than one home in five sits in a condo or apartment building, and they’re mostly low garden buildings and stacked units, many of them from the years the town grew out past the bypass. Lansdowne, just outside the limits on the same 20176 mail, turns that around: almost four homes in ten there are in condo or apartment buildings, and nearly every one went up after 2000.
That age gap decides what we find behind the closet door. In the town’s older buildings it’s often a First Co: a tall, narrow air handler built to slide into one closet, paired with a condenser on a pad, a balcony or the roof. In June 2026 we replaced one of those whole systems in a 20175 condo, the closet unit and its outdoor half together, because the closet, the return and the copper in the wall were all built around a matched pair. A First Co replacement here runs $7,900 to $12,500.
Lansdowne’s buildings are newer, so the system usually looks like a small house’s: an air handler or a gas furnace in a closet, a coil on top, and a condenser outside in a row with the neighbors’. Plenty of those are still the first equipment the building got, now pushing twenty years. The label on the outdoor unit tells us which refrigerant it was built for and whether the line set can stay, and we read it before anybody quotes you.
Wherever the building is, two offices weigh in. The permit is Loudoun County’s, in town or in Lansdowne, and the association decides where a condenser may sit and whether a crane can stand in the lot. Get both answers from the management office before you sign, because a condenser that has to move is a bigger job than a straight swap in the same spot.