I love that my neighborhood leans into Halloween. The witches, ghosts, and skeletons are filling the yards down our block. Some are animatronic/motion activated with limbs stiffly gesturing, saying phrases like, “I will be in your dreams, making them nightmares! Bwhahahahaha!” I love it, but I often wonder how the young children who traverse our block to get to the HOA playground feel. How frightened are they?
As adults, we have different things that frighten us. Instead of monsters manufactured by Guillermo Del Toro, Edgar Allen Poe or Mary Shelly, our monsters are more…regulatory. The newest monster I have seen is building performance standards (BPS). I know people who wake up with clenched fists in cold sweats because of BPS.
BPS are jurisdictional targets of an environmental nature (passed at the city, county or state level) requiring that properties of a certain size or number of units perform at a certain level of efficiency. The standards or requirements vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The standards can regulate greenhouse gases, energy reduction, energy use intensity, energy star scores, etc. The point is they are not the same from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and a property could have to submit to more than one BPS standard and comply with all of them.
Failure to meet the requirements can be expensive. For example, let us say you have a property in Seattle Washington that is required to report for BPS. You will want to understand how your property is performing against the target today, because when the due date for compliance arrives, the penalty for noncompliance is currently set at $7.50 per square foot! To make it more stressful, the State of Washington also has a BPS standard, which is different from Seattle’s, and the state’s noncompliance penalty is currently set at $3.50 per square foot. That is a bit terrifying.
There are thirteen jurisdictions that have BPS regulations passed today. The map below from the Institute for Market Transformation (IMT) identifies those. If you are not following IMT.org I highly recommend it. Not only do they provide lists of where the jurisdictions are, they know what is coming.
There are 40+ more jurisdictions that have indicated that they will be implementing BPS requirements in the next few years. When? You might well wonder but no one really knows. It is sort of like guessing when the monster is going to jump out from behind a curtain. This is why I follow IMT as they keep the map of building performance standards updated so you will have time to prepare your property when the standard is issued and prior to the compliance due date. If you are informed and ready, it will not be nearly as scary or expensive.
