Condo Media - September 2012 - 29

by Fred Schernecker

Are You Making These Exterior Maintenance Mistakes?
How to Tell if Your Association is Wasting Money on Exterior Maintenance — and What You Can Do About It

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abor Day may signal the end of summer, but for New England condo communities, it marks the beginning of the rush to complete exterior work before winter. Unfortunately, it’s also a time when many well-intentioned trustees make maintenance decisions that end up doing more harm than good. As you review your property’s siding and roofing needs, watch out for these common and expensive exterior maintenance mistakes. Keeping Your Exterior on Life Support Past the Point of No Financial Return The closer your roofing or siding is to the end of its natural lifecycle, the less cost-effective it is to keep fixing it, and the more sense it makes to choose full replacement. That’s because no roofing or woodclad siding system lasts forever. When roofing and siding reaches the end of its service life, full replacement is the only viable option. But before your new exterior can be installed, all existing roofing and siding materials will be stripped down to the sheathing and trashed — along with every dollar spent on spot repairs and maintenance. How do you know when paying to keep your failing exterior on life sup-

port is a waste of money? First, you need an accurate estimate of your siding’s and roofing’s remaining service life. Important: The service life of your exterior is not simply a function of years left on your shingle warranty or the date of your siding installation. The longevity of building envelope materials is affected by a variety of factors, including weather, maintenance, and construction quality. Poor ventilation, inferior materials, and improper flashing techniques can significantly reduce the service life of roofing and siding systems. Another reliable guideline is to estimate the percentage of your property’s exterior that needs to be replaced. According to conventional wisdom, full replacement only makes sense when you need to replace more than 50 percent of a building’s siding or roofing. But that old rule of thumb no longer applies. When you run the numbers, the actual tipping point for full replacement is only 10 percent. If you need to replace less than 10 percent of your property’s siding or roofing, spot repairs may be justified. Otherwise, the long-term cost savings of full replacement trump the short-term savings of making spot repairs.

The best way to determine your exterior’s remaining service life and how much siding and roofing you need to replace is to hire an expert. Ask a qualified contractor or hire an engineer to perform a physical inspection of your association’s buildings. Then ask them to run a lifecycle analysis comparing the long-term costs for spot repairs and replacements vs. full replacement over 15 and 30 years. Confusing Short-Term Savings with LongTerm Value One of the more difficult challenges of making sound exterior maintenance and improvement decisions is recognizing the difference between shortterm savings and long-term value. It’s understandable why cost-conscious associations repeatedly choose less expensive spot repairs over solutions that deliver far greater long-term savings and value. But the immediate gratification of short-term savings is usually a by-product of short-term thinking, which almost always leads to much higher costs over time. A classic example is when an association habitually replaces failing pine trim before every maintenance painting cycle. Pine is a relatively inexpensive, but notoriously high-maintenance

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CONDO MEDIA • SEPTEMBER 2012

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Condo Media - September 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Condo Media - September 2012
