Good Records Can Help Correct Faulty Filings

INSIDE TRACK: The following article appears in the July/August issue of Habitat, "Insider Tips from 47 Top Management Leaders."

We currently manage a condo where the property had some issues with filings with city agencies. They were doing annual boiler inspections and, although the details of the technical problems with the boilers were correct, the city had the wrong address. The city also collected the fees and the funds every year that were required to register the boilers as safe and legal. Although the city did not have a record of this condo, it collected the money anyway. 

These errors came back to bite the property. When it was time to do some capital work and the board began looking for alternate financing, it was stymied by violations. The board was surprised. They had always paid on time – or thought they had. When we picked up the building, we also had a full-time department that does what we call compliance. My department had already figured out that the address that the city had was wrong and that none of the fees paid had been credited to the condo.

We had to get expediters and licensed plumbers to demonstrate the truth to the city. The board gave us a lot of the paperwork about what they had been doing, and that helped. But we had to do a lot to correct it. The board was really helpful, because it had kept all its paperwork together and it was filed in an office. We needed to go back 12 years. It took us roughly six to eight months to fix the problem. But we got it done. 

The lesson here is that good record-keeping can be a lifesaver. A board needs to be proactive in its filings, keeping all the property records (fire sprinklers, elevators, boilers, water pumps) in a safe location. This way, when the city decides to do some auditing, if there are typos or some miscommunication, the board has the ammunition for management to rectify the situation, without paying fines.

Gary Andriotis is vice president of All Area Realty Services.