Nearly 4,000 co-op and condo boards facing a daunting deadline just got some good news. For these boards, there’s a free tool called the Prevailing Wage Rate Calculator that will help them determine the prevailing wages and supplemental benefits for their building staffs. The boards then have until April 15 to make a major decision: Do we pay prevailing wages to our employees in order to keep the co-op and condo tax abatement — or do we forfeit the abatement and keep our payroll intact?
“There’s a big sense of anxiety out there,” says James Park, founder of SparkSuper.com, a third-party company that provides more than 50 co-ops and condos with supers, porters and handypersons. “Boards have a duty to all their constituents to get this right because there’s a lot of money at stake, and nobody wants to get caught up in an audit.”
SparkSuper.com works with some major property management companies — Akam, FirstService Residential, the Andrews Organization, Tudor Realty and MD Squared Property Group, among others — and when the April 15 deadline began to show up on their radar screens, Park saw a need for the spreadsheet-based Prevailing Wage Rate Calculator, which walks users through a series of simplified calculations.
“I created it because there’s a lot of confusion about the law,” Park says. “The text is vague. The Calculator helps boards and their managers understand that the prevailing wage is not just about the hourly pay rate. It includes supplemental benefits that are...
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