Author: lazarus

Download Now It’s been a long, hot summer for much of the country. For a lot of us, warm weather lasted much longer than in years past. As the calendar turns to December, fall is well underway, and before you know it, the winter weather will be h...

The location of your water heaters matters more than you might think. So often tucked away in closets inside living spaces, it is easy to overlook their proper installation and maintenance. However, an improperly installed water heater can lead to se...

For large construction projects, particularly in specialized sectors like non-profit senior living, achieving alignment among developers, contractors, and financiers is essential—but rarely straightforward. An unbiased construction monitor serves as ...

Roofs, like all other components of the building envelope, need inspections on a routine basis. We would like to offer some general direction to help building owners and facility managers perform routine roof inspections.   zumBrunnen has foun...

As they say in the movies and on television: “The following is based on a true story.  The names and places have been changed to protect the innocent.” Of course, in the case of this story, it is really an amalgam of a number of stories and incidents...

Transition Report & Capital Reserve Study  Versus a Property Condition Assessment Report When dealing with homeowner associations (HOAs) and property managers for residential communities, condos, etc., we often get requests to provide a P...

Deferring maintenance can lead to a “breakdown event” and can easily escalate to a mind-blowing 15:1 ratio or even exceed a 40:1 ratio in terms of cost.   The senior living industry is now an established marketplace with facilities of all ages to ...

Sometimes, seemingly small errors result in problems that are surprisingly expensive to correct.  In the work we do, conducting thousands of facility assessments, one of the most common yet easily avoided problems we see is improper placement...

When it comes to energy performance studies in complex facilities like campuses, large multi-family communities, hospitals, or commercial complexes your average operations department might not be fully equipped for the task. But don’t worry – m...

Is It Necessary To Fully Fund Depreciation? Often when providing Reserve Studies we are asked, “When funding replacement reserves, should we adopt a Fully Funded Plan (funding accumulated depreciation) or is a Threshold Funding Plan (based on a ca...