Cleanlink News February 15 2010
Baltimore-Area Property Managers 'Getting Hammered'
As seen in the Baltimore Business Journal.
As the sun rose over Greater Baltimore Friday morning, what it revealed was a sight for sore and weary eyes.
After spending the better part of a week on high alert, property owners across the region awoke to find significantly less devastation than they had reason to fear from mother nature’s wrath.
Stanley C. Maros offered up this assessment: “We’re all still alive and we’re spending a lot of money.”
Maros is senior vice president of property management for St. John Properties Inc. of Baltimore. For the past week, Maros has been looking after St. John’s 10 million square feet of commercial properties in Maryland, but couldn’t estimate how much the company will spend when it’s all said and done. But Maros said the company typically spends 10 to 12 cents per square foot on snow maintenance, and expects this storm to cost as much as 50 cents per square foot.
That’s 10 million square feet of flat roofs that remained intact; acres of parking lots that, while pockmarked with mounds of tall snow piles, were down to blacktop; and a voice mailbox filled with, much to his pleasant surprise, mostly kind words from tenants pleased who could get to their buildings and park in the lots out front of them.
“Things are looking a lot better as we go along,” Maros said in an interview Friday. “We’re seeing what everyone else is seeing; lots of piles of snow. Our parking lots are mostly clear.”
Similar assessments were trickling into to Lynn L. Berger, president of the Building Owners and Managers Association of Greater Baltimore. Berger, also senior property manager for Liberty Property Trust, said many building owners and work crews paid a hefty toll cleaning up after the seldom-seen back-to-back storms.
Work crews scrambled well into Monday evening cleaning up from the first round of snowfall, which came to an end Feb. 6. That storm caused snow blowers and spreaders to break down from excessive use, and work crews did not have enough time to fix or replace them before the next storm came into the region Tuesday evening.
But the larger concern heading into that second storm, Berger said in an e-mail statement, was from roofing systems straining under the weight of the record snowfall. But by Friday, she said, none of BOMA’s members reported roof collapses.
The concern was top-of-mind with building owners, said Dom Correlli Sr., co-owner of Rosedale Roofing. Most building roofs are built to withstand 30 pounds-per-foot of pressure, and the back-to-back storm delivered close to that amount over the past week.
Correlli said his crews have been scrambling to check up on customers’ roofs, keep storm drains clear and make sure the strain is not enough to cause any collapses.
“It’s keeping us going, that’s for sure,” he said in a telephone interview. “We’ve got so many customers and every property owner, they’re all on red alert.”
Correlli said building owners are not out of the woods yet with another storm on its way into the region on Monday.
“It’s just a question of how much stress can the roofs take,” he said.
Heading into the weekend, Berger said, the storm’s legacy would likely be a spike in snow equipment supply sales, an increase in work for construction workers, and “overtime hours at an all time high.”
MacKenzie Cos. CEO Gary T. Gill agreed with the assessment but said it was too early to put a price tag to the clean up costs.
“We’re going to get hammered, I mean everybody’s getting hammered,” Gill said in a telephone interview. This winter has been snowier than anyone could have imagined, he said, meaning the cost of cleaning up from it will be more expensive than any company could have budgeted for.
