The 2009 calendar year has officially come to an end and a new year has begun.  For property managers this means closing out the books, generating year end financial statements, and creating budgets for the new year.  This, to me, is an opportunity to prove my worth to my clients by showing them profits and/or savings, especially in this tough economy.

This year, in working through this excercise for one condo association I manage, I noticed something that made me raise an eyebrow – the water bill for the property was about 17 percent higher than the previous year.  This increase warranted a closer look.

So I broke out the water bills and started my investigation.  First thing I did was make sure that I didn’t make any bookkeeping errors – check.  Then I verified that there wasn’t a substantial increase in the water and sewer charges in the last 2 years – check.  Next I took a look at the total usage in gallons – bzzzz.  Our usage was up about 13 percent from the prior year.  Could it be that the tenants of this 16 unit building actually used that much more water?  Yes it is possible, but highly unlikely.  It was time to roll up my sleeves and start snooping around at the property.

I went to the building and started in the mechanical room.  I checked to make sure that there weren’t any leaks in the boilers, hot water heaters, slop sink, or anywhere else in the basement.  I then went outside and made sure that the lone spigot wasn’t leaking and that the knob wasn’t present.  Yes, I removed the knob about a year ago so that this didn’t become a public watering hole.  The only place left to look for leaks was in the individual apartments.  So I hand-wrote a note stating that I would be inspecting all apartments on Saturday morning between 8:30 and 9:30 and that all tenants should arrange to allow access to their unit.

Saturday morning came, and fortunately everyone cooperated – I got into 15 of 16 apartments.  Good news.  I believe I found the culprits – two running toilets and a dripping faucet.  One owner had no idea their toilet was running, probably because it was running constantly.  The other tenant with an intermittently running toilet said that they had been meaning to have it fixed.  And the owner with the dripping faucet said that he didn’t think it was a big deal.

I asked all three of the tenants if they’d mind if I worked on their plumbing issues right there on the spot.  They all agreed, and an hour later we had taken a step toward saving the condo association money as well as saving one of our most valuable natural resources.

One observation that I’d like to make is that when a tenant doesn’t directly pay for a utility such as water (the condo association does) they are much less likely to take the appropriate steps to conserve.  I will now be implementing a quarterly inspection policy in all of my buildings to ensure that water is not wasted.

Well, I can’t show the association a savings on water this year, but next year things should be different.