The Avery Condominium’s Plan

Over his 13-year tenure as a resident manager, Ray Murphy led energy-saving projects in a Manhattan condominium, resulting in financial savings and environmental benefits.

During his 13-year tenure as the resident manager of the Avery, a 29-story, 266-unit condominium on Manhattan’s West Side, Ray Murphy has overseen three capital projects that have saved unit-owners hundreds of thousands of dollars — while reducing the building’s carbon emissions enough to keep it safe from Local Law 97 fines through 2030. Given Murphy’s philosophy, more are sure to follow.

“I try to do something every year, take little bites,” Murphy says. “I view these projects as a money thing. Your budget is going to go up 3% or more every year because everything gets more expensive. We started doing these projects because they made financial sense.”

The projects may have started as a money thing, but they have also turned out to be a planet-friendly thing. The Avery is proof that the two can go hand in hand. Here’s the evidence:

Lighting upgrade. Back in 2015, while attending a meeting of a property managers’ group called the Emerald Guild, Murphy heard about newly available Con Edison rebates for buildings that upgraded their lighting by switching from incandescent to LED fixtures in common areas. “When I heard about those rebates, it was a no-brainer,” Murphy says. “It was found money.”

The condo board brought in the lighting contractor Facility Solutions Group to oversee the installation of more than 500 lightbulbs and the replacement of some fixtures. The board used $60,000 from the reserve fund to pay for the project while the rebate covered the rest of the $180,000 price tag. With annual savings of $100,000 on its electric bill, the board recouped its investment in a little over six months. As a bonus, the LED lights don’t give off heat, which cut the building’s cooling costs.

“Once I was on the bandwagon, I started watching things,” Murphy says. “We were starting to hear about a new thing called Local Law 97.”

Heating and cooling. In 2018, a year before the city passed Local Law 97, the board hired DVM Industries to perform a major upgrade of the HVAC system. “We took 24 motors out of our air handler and replaced them with energy-efficient motors governed by variable frequency drive,” Murphy says. The project cost $50,000 and produces annual energy savings of $24,000.

Boiler-room insulation. The board has just signed a $54,000 contract with Thermaxx to install insulating jackets on all of the equipment in the boiler room, which will prevent heat from escaping the boiler, pumps and pipes, thus reducing cooling costs and heat waste. The project will save $12,000 a year.

Murphy admits there’s a downside to this flurry of energy-saving projects. “Any time an outside contractor comes into a building, it’s a pain in the backside,” he says. “But when we have projects like these, it’s worth the aggravation. I would say to supers and boards, ‘Don’t be afraid of these projects. They should be front and center.’”

Slava Hazin, a real estate lawyer at the firm Warshaw Burstein who has been president of the five-member Avery condo board since the building opened, couldn’t agree more. “Our fiduciary duty is to the bottom line,” he says. “But the benefits to the environment make these projects a win-win for everybody.”