How Two Board Presidents Save Their Buildings Money
March 25, 2015 — Early last week, we introduced you to two people who represent a new breed of board member. The first is Josh Fox, who has been on the board of the 206-unit condominium at 340 East 23rd Street for the entire seven-year life of the building, and president for the last three. The second is Michael Herzog, who is president of the 68-unit co-op at 257-291 Cedarhurst Avenue in Cedarhurst, and has been actively involved in the affairs of the garden apartment house for more than three decades. Fox and Herzog are take-charge guys who have made money-saving into an art form. But how?
One of the most integral things Fox does is to inspect the building. "When you walk around, notice things. You might say: 'Wait — the lights in the gym are always on, but people are in the gym only a certain number of hours. Does that make sense?' Logically, you say, 'What if I put timers on the gym so that the lights aren't always on?'" If you really spend some time walking through your building and really keeping an eye and an ear open to things, you start to get really creative.
"The average recommendation from our management company and others is that common charges, typically, should be raised somewhere between 7 and 10 percent a year," Fox notes. "We don't have to; we are finding other ways to save 7 to 10 percent. If our budget is a couple of million dollars, then we are saving 7 to 10 percent of a couple of million dollars."
Yet even that doesn't take into account Fox and Herzog's passion and zeal for the job. Sure, they want to save money, but that's not the ultimate goal. What they finally want to do is to make their homes a better place in which to live.
"I bought a three-bedroom in the building, and that wasn't cheap," explains Fox, "and I wanted to try to use my skill set to help the building control its costs. When you are running a public corporation and you are on the board of directors, your job is to make sure [every] investor's money is protected. You try to run that company in the most efficient way possible. It's my job to try to help everyone protect the building and everyone's investments in their homes."
"I e-mail our manager every day," Herzog says. "We are in touch all the time. Any course of action I want to take that is other than routine, we check with each other before we do it. I am probably a pain in the ass to him because I am e-mailing him or calling him and his staff so much. But it's not only a co-op — which is a business — it's my home. I just want to make sure it is the best place for my family and everybody else to live."
Observes Chris Torres, the resident manager at Fox's building: "I can say having highly involved board members is great for unit-owners and residents alike. They're scrutinizing everything that's spent, bringing it down to a bottom line. They're really looking out for the owners."
Adapted from "Highly Involved ... Highly Evolved" by Tom Soter (Habitat, March 2015).
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