Hello,
Greetings from the states. As we gain more responsibility of taking care of aging family members, we are slowly downsizing our portfolio. The property directly in question is a business park we own with 8 warehouses that are all individually parcel'ed out when we bought it 20+ years ago so they can be individually sold. While discussing this as we have had a friend that has wanted to purchase one of the front buildings for his business for many years now, I thought of a very obvious problem we did not factor in until now as it is always something we took care of for our tenants, but the whole business park is on one main water meter. This is very much suddenly an issue we need to figure out a solution to.
The water bill is not addressed to any unit specifically rather the generic address of the business park. On average the water bill for the whole park runs $500-600 a month, unless there is a leak such as a running toilet all month, it can peak at $1000. So far I've only been able to come up with the concept of whoever we sell a building to first is responsible for the water bill, and they will need to collect a fee from each individual building owner(currently us) of say $75 a month ($75x7 $525 to cover the bill). This is obviously unattractive as its extra administrative work and does not cover any variation. Of course it could be a fee collected from each individual building owner based on the monthly bill divided by 8, but again, running into the issue of actually having to collect it from your neighbors and people not getting feelings hurt if they didn't turn their faucet on etc why should they have to pay "more". Not quite a good solution.
We've talked about if we can get the units individually metered but we do not know if this is possible/worth the cost etc. I have not been able to explore it yet as its just something we thought of last week, but I will.
So I would just like to see if anyone else has any other ideas how to handle this situation. Thank you.
Edit: I will add in that while we could simply negate the issue by selling the 8 parcels as one whole lot, at the current moment there are some buildings that produce good income and we have spent $70-100k completely refurbishing them over the years and may want to hold on to them longer versus letting some of the other ones go now. We will also be able to make more money by selling them individually.
