Real estate investors routinely order a Property Condition Report in order to understand the condition of the asset that they are purchasing. The Property Condition Report should illuminate any immediate repairs or deferred maintenance issues and should provide a schedule of capital replacement reserves. But the Property Condition Report only addresses what is broken and what will need to be replaced. What about the opportunity to save money?
An Energy Audit in conjunction with a Property Condition Report will illuminate how a building should be performing. Often the Energy Audit will discover multiple aspects of a buildings energy management program that are suboptimal and can easily be corrected. Energy Audit will also give the user a list of potential energy efficiency investments and will rank these investments in terms of payback period—often several opportunities with sub-3-year payback periods are indentified.
The Energy Audit and Property Condition Report go well together as they are addressing the same systems. The Property Condition Report may schedule the replacement of a roof mounted HVAC system in year 8 of the replacement reserve as that is the end of its useful life; however, the Energy Audit may make a case for not using an old inefficient system until it fails; rather, the building owner may receive an positive return by replacing it sooner.
My company, Partner Engineering Science, and our sister company Partner Energy routinely provide these services in tandem.