Commercial Real Estate Pro Network

if you're willing, I'd like to ask you, Manny Renteria, what is the BIGGEST RISK?

Manny Renteria 

So the biggest risks that we run as a nationwide consultancy, and myself myself personally, as a consultant that has, that has a phone with with over 1000 clients, and that call me You know, every other day is, is, is not meeting the performance, right. So I've, I've made this mistake, you know, when I, when I first started consulting, in the consulting business signing agreements, on behalf of service providers, so I would be the the in between the service provider and the customer. And so, in this agreement, I'm the one presenting disagreement to the customer and saying, hey, these are all the benefits of, you know, doing solar with, with my, with my service provider. And so in these agreements, it's it's not, it hasn't been a standard to have a performance guarantee. And that I think, is the biggest, biggest ticket item for me, for my customer. And for him, even for the for the service provider, is to have that, because now without that I cannot sell anybody's product, I cannot promote or sign anybody's agreements, unless there is a performance guarantee, which covers me, and it covers my, my, my client, in this case. And what that is, is very simple if if your system is, is out there and is producing power, but the power that it's that it's supposed to be producing, let's say I presented you with a proposal that says, hey, this, this system is is supposed to produce 10,000 kilowatt hours every month, okay. And for the first year, you know, multiply it by 12, that's 120/3, whatever that is, right. So, so they sign up based on the fact that you showed them, you know, a performance estimate on the proposal that they signed, and then the agreement didn't really have any performance guarantees. And what happens is, a year later, when this system underperforms significantly, and and your customer ends up with with a system that doesn't produce or meet their needs, and on top of that, now they have a huge utility bill, why because all the power that they didn't produce is now coming from the utility and now they have this extra bill on top of whatever, you know, if they're financing, then they have the only have two bills. And so what ends up happening is I have to go and explain why the system is underperforming, or whether or not they need more panels. And I'm stuck in between, you know, explaining to the customer, hey, you know, your system didn't produce because these trees are still in the way or something like that. So it's really, really important that that a performance guarantee is set in place by any service provider. And then that performance guarantee has some sort of sort of sort of monetary compensation in in the event that the system underperforms in a certain year or every two years and typically what a performance guarantee does is every two years if the accumulated power doesn't equate to this much you get reimbursed at this rate. So that to me now is is one of the biggest risks that I that I've had moving forward. And so now I always look for that in service providers to give me that performance guarantee. Otherwise, I'm out there, you know, exposing myself and my company as as you know, as being untrue or just on I don't know, just not not trained, I guess