Our firm’s building assessment practice is focused primarily on two deliverables: the Property Condition Assessment (PCA) and the Seismic Risk Evaluation. These tools are primarily used in assisting clients in securing loans on purchases of real property but are also utilized for the purposes of negotiations between buyers and sellers of property, insurability evaluations and the derivation of building maintenance plans.
The primary purpose of the PCA is to assess the general condition of a property, structures and related improvements, identify conditions that will require remedial repair work and assign any such conditions an associated estimated remedial cost. The report is based on the evaluators’ qualitative and subjective judgments of the physical condition of the components, their ages and their expected useful life. Immediate needs are listed as those which are fire, life and/or safety driven. A replacement reserves schedule is also provided for recurring capital expenditures that are reasonably predictable both in terms of frequency and cost.
The parameters calculated during the Seismic Risk Evaluation utilized by risk managers are the Scenario Expected Loss and Scenario Upper Loss which are a way to express a Probable Maximum Loss value and represent monetary losses of a structure as a result of vibratory motion under conservative seismic event criteria.
