From Liability To Asset

Getting on top of things. Rooftops, especially in older buildings, are often seen as a headache, but they actually offer tremendous opportunity because they’re a means to comply with some increasingly stringent, and potentially costly, local laws and mandates. When you simply do repairs, you never get your money back on those expenses. But maximizing your rooftop space by going green or solar offers benefits that are well worth the investment.

Under Local Law 97, there will be fines for buildings that don’t meet caps on carbon emissions. So we encourage boards to look at their buildings holistically and consider any planned energy retrofits because those can potentially be coupled with work on the rooftop to secure a bundle of financing.

A trio of packages. We sit down with our co-op and condo board clients and ask them a variety of questions regarding their buildings’ infrastructure and existing roof condition. Then we outline all the potential investment ranges for different systems, as well as the estimated returns on each of these investments. We help them understand how they might pay for green retrofits and what financing they may be eligible for — everything from the city property-tax abatement program and the state program for solar to the new federal Inflation Reduction Act.

Urbanstrong offers clients bronze, silver and gold packages based on our level of involvement. At the bronze level, we work with boards to design a couple of different options for optimized rooftop layouts, and we introduce them to a variety of vendors — our solar engineering, procurement and construction partners. For the silver package, in addition to introductions to vendors, we go back and forth to get different iterations on the proposals and then present them to boards, get their feedback, go back to the vendors and have these proposals adjusted until the client is satisfied. For the gold package, basically we quarterback the whole thing from start to finish. We act as an owner’s rep, and we work with the board from the design all the way through construction.

Avoiding fines. Each system’s configuration will determine how much of the Local Law 97 fines can be avoided. We’re working with a co-op in the Bronx to develop a rooftop system that is going to help them avoid $8,000 in annual Local Law 97 fines and will generate $15,000 a year in passive income. It’s going to net them $380,000 over 25 years, with a payback of just 2.4 years. Their roof will become an asset.