Solar Leasing On A Investment Potential Property Explained

[Ted Strzelecki]

So many people have questions on how the process is covered on both the purchase side and the sale side of solar leasing. Luckily for this topic less and less people are doing this process. Ownership is the way to go going forward and will continue to be the case. Having experience with over 1000s of installs across the country the following includes a link and some commentary for those of you RE investors. An avid RE investor myself I thought I would write this to aid you fine folks on the specifics. Enjoy.

When you lease solar panels they put a UCC lien on the equipment, true, to hedge against you defaulting. HOWEVER in the case of a sale it becomes enforced as a lien to ensure the finance company holding the paper on your equipment doesn't get discarded with the new owners. This is the common issue in all 50 states and solar leasing companies do NOT want to transparently address it. Here's a link for you on how residential solar actually works in the event of a sale. https://financere.nrel.gov/finance/content/residen...

In this, notice the line - Financiers can take security interests as per the UCC, which is a set of legal rules for creating and enforcing rights in property subject to sales, leases, loans, and other types of transactions

In other words it's harmless as long as you either live there, don't refi, sell, and payments if any needed are being made. Once any of the detailed signal a flag it's no longer a happy harmless "Just a UCC filing" and as it states can enforce "security interests" as per the UCC rules.