How a new condo board president got finances in order

An Inspiring Story of Flowing Water

How a new condo board president got his association’s finances in order

This is a guest blog post by Bruce Nicklin

Our budget was broken and we were sending money down the drain. This was my thought in late 2009 coming in as a new Board member and President.

Our 204 unit complex was dead broke ($39 in the bank). The budget I inherited was full of baloney like all the years before. We would end up over spent and then need to borrow $100,000 or more from the now maxed out credit line (The credit line was fully used at a balance of $1,600,00.00).

As a new Board member I would not have the luxury of hiding the shortfall with borrowing (not my style to borrow anyway).

I was elected at the annual meeting on the promise of getting our financial house in order. There was zero support for any sort of Special Assessment so I needed to dust off my skills as a former CEO and look for cost cuts.

When I dug into the bills I found a wasteland of waste. Like any business cost cutting approach, one needs to look at the largest bill to see if it can be reduced. Our largest bill was water. We were using about 1,100,000 gallons of water a month. Of the 204 units only 170 were occupied.  This figured out to be over 6,000 gallons per occupied unit each month! (85% of our units are two bed rooms) Water along with the sewer charge was running $15 per thousand. So each occupied unit was using close to $100 a month of water/sewer (On an average monthly dues of $250).

My buddy at the water company said that about 1500 gallons per person is industry average. So with my guess of 3 people per occupied unit my initial goal would be 765,000 gallons (3 x 170 x 4500). I got the water company to install for one week a meter that would report hourly usage. I then examined the 3am to 4am time frame and found (using Monday – Thurs) 460 gallons going through the meter for that hour. This became my drip loss assumption. My thought was that everyone is in bed these 4 days at the time and my water flow should be zero. Well 460 x 24 hours x 30 days came up with the monthly drip number of 331,000 gallons per month. At $15 per thousand I was now chasing a possible savings of  $5,000 a month!

I got the water company to donate low flow faucet aerators, low flow shower heads and deals on new water saving toilets. I then got a local handyman to do washer valve replacements for $35. We had lots of dripping shower valves.  I got the HOA to pick up the tab for drip repairs. The handyman also offered to change the toilets at a very low cost that the owners paid. In the end we had maybe 1/3 of the units put in the faucet and shower items, maybe 20% to change toilets and many people used us to do the free drip repair (Remember a slow 1 drip per second is 321 gallons a month)

Within 60 days our bill dropped down to 700,000 gallons. This 400,000 gallon savings delivered $6,000 in cost savings per month. Per occupied unit this was about $40 per month in savings.

Now that several years have passed and we have 195 occupied units our usage is now 800,000 gallons per month which shows further reduction down to 4100 gallons per occupied unit. This has mostly come from a constant flow of people reporting even tiny drip. Our monthly HOA cost is around $350 a month but we save well over $6,000 per month on this higher occupancy.