The room every inspector walks past
18-year-old equipment is the cheapest audit you'll ever skip.
Tennessee. 70 units. The deal looked clean on paper.
I walked the mechanical rooms with the seller’s broker.
Every HVAC unit on the property was 18 or more years old.
Not “approaching end of life.”
Past it.
The PCR mentioned equipment age in standard language. Three sentences. No alarms. The replacement spend wasn’t called out as a deal-breaker.
I ran the replacement math against the purchase price and the deal stopped working in year two.
I asked the seller to come down.
He wouldn’t.
I walked away.
The Reality: PCRs document what was checked. They don’t document what’s about to change the math.
Here’s the part that’s easy to miss. The scope of the inspection isn’t the scope of the risk. It never has been. And nobody on the deal team is paid to point that out.
Eighteen-plus-year-old HVAC across an entire 70-unit asset is a six-figure CapEx wave that arrives on someone’s watch. The question is just whose.
A property where every major piece of equipment is past service life is not a property with a clean PCR. It’s a property where the PCR was written to the scope of what could be inspected, not to the scope of what would have to be replaced.
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The shift I want you to make: equipment age is the cheapest energy audit you’ll ever run. It’s free. It takes ten minutes. It tells you what the next five years of CapEx look like before you sign anything.
Year one expenses don’t lie.
The PCR sometimes doesn’t talk loud enough about what year three through five are going to ask of you.
I walked away from that deal. The seller’s broker called me difficult. I called it reading the building.
That property still trades. The buyer who eventually bought it is now writing the CapEx checks the seller wouldn’t.
Inspection reports tell you what was checked. Reading buildings tells you what wasn’t. That’s the gap that decides whether year three breaks the deal or proves it.
Cheers,
Jon
P.S. If this hits home, forward it to whoever in your circle is looking at a building right now. The right question on Tuesday is cheaper than the wrong invoice in Q4.