HONG EXAMINER – May 2025
Monthly Newsletter of Hong Hong Consulting, LLC.
Covered Buildings List. The Covered Buildings List for the third wave of filers under the Better Buildings Benchmarking Ordinance has finally been published! The following link will take you to it: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kR3zE9jXAtLWHseY0bQip6FRUS0NyMjO/edit?gid=95891521#gid=95891521. Please note that the list includes the first and second wave of filers as well. That means the list shows all covered buildings, not just the third wave. If you know the gross floor area of your building is more than 25,000 square feet but are not listed, you can email the City & County of Honolulu (C&C) at bbb@energy.honolulu.gov to request a building ID in order to file. If you believe your property is less than 25,000 square feet or if you feel that your building falls under one of the other exemptions in the ordinance but find yourself on the Covered Buildings List, you can email the C&C to request removal from the list. It is important that you do so because the C&C will mark you as non-compliant if you don’t file.
The list contains 746 new buildings, which is by far the biggest wave of filers under the Better Buildings Benchmarking Ordinance (Ordinance 22-17). That makes it all the more important to start the process early as the utilities will be inundated with requests for usage data. Plan ahead by allocating enough time and resources to file. If you are short on time and resources, Hong Consulting would be happy to help prepare and submit your benchmarking report.
Webinars. For those property and site managers that wish to file on their own, Hong Consulting has been putting on webinars that go over the following:
· Why building benchmarking is required,
· Who must comply with the Better Buildings Benchmarking Ordinance,
· How a building owner prepares a benchmarking report, and
· When the benchmarking report is due.
Hawaii Energy follows up Hong Consulting’s presentation with a short presentation on how to use the benchmarking reports to save your building money by taking advantage of Hawaii Energy’s services and rebates to reduce your energy usage. The next webinar is April 24th from 2 PM – 3 PM. To register for the event, please email Hong Consulting at adrianhong@hongconsultingllc.com.
Loan Payoff Bookkeeping. I know that a lot of AOAO’s are having trouble with keeping track of loan pre-payments by individual owners, creating loan amortization schedules to allow for pre-payments, and making sure that pre-payments are used to pay down the loan balance with the bank. I believe my background as a CPA makes me a great fit for providing this service. Not only am I able to provide this service, using me would mean that you don’t have to start your bookkeeping from scratch if a property manager leaves an association. You will be able to have access to the data no matter what happens with the property manager at an AOAO.
If this is something that you would be interested in, please reach out to me to discuss.
