How Co-op and Condo Boards Can Reduce Costs Without Switching Their Property Manager
You can cut real costs without firing your manager by re-marketing insurance, competitively bidding contracts, grieving your property taxes, confirming your abatements, and planning ahead for Local Law 97. Switching firms does not touch any of that.
Rising charges do not always mean a bad manager. Often they mean contracts and coverage no one has revisited in years.
Do you have to switch managers to save money?
No. Most of the biggest savings live in areas your current manager can help you fix.
Where do the savings actually hide?
The usual list, in rough order of impact:
Insurance. Re-market your policies and right-size coverage. Often the single largest controllable line.
Recurring contracts. Competitively bid elevator, boiler, cleaning, landscaping, waste, and security on a regular cycle.
Property taxes. A tax certiorari review can lower your assessment.
Abatements. Confirm your co-op or condo abatement is actually being applied and passed through.
Local Law 97. Plan efficiency work now so a future emissions penalty becomes a managed investment.
Billing audit. Catch duplicate charges and quiet annual creep.
A quick win most boards miss
When you compare vendor bids, pull sales tax out as a separate line and compare on a pre-tax basis. Different tax handling can make the wrong bid look like the cheapest one.
Small detail. Real money. And exactly the kind of thing a generalist skips.
Why this is harder than it looks
Each of these takes specialized knowledge: how to re-market insurance without dropping protection you need, how to structure a real competitive bid, how to time capital work against emissions caps.
Do it wrong and you either leave money on the table or cut something you needed.
This is why boards bring us in on a contingency basis. We find the savings across insurance, management fees, and repair projects, and we are paid out of what we save you. If we do not save you money, it does not cost you.
Want the savings found for you? The Folson Group's cost reduction service is contingency-based across insurance, management fees, and repair projects.
