Phase I Environmental Site Assessment (ESA)

The Phase I Environmental Site Assessment (ESA) is the key tool for managing environmental liability associated with commercial real estate transactions.  While companies battle to provide discounted pricing for Phase I services Insight Environmental refuses to sacrifice quality.

Hawai’i provides unique challenges to providing high quality Phase I ESA services.  A complicated property addressing system that often assigns multiple address to a property, incomplete local databases, and the absence of useful city directories are just a few of these challenges.   Mainland consultants contracted to conduct Phase Is in Hawai’i are often not prepared for these challenges and quality suffers.

The Phase I industry is dominated by the race to the lowest price.  The result is incomplete data collection, incomplete data assessment, and poorly prepared reports.  Missing an underground storage tank can result in thousands of dollars of burden to a new property owner.  The cost of missing subsurface contamination can be hundreds of thousands of dollars or more.  On the other side, identifying a recognized environmental condition for a situation that does not meet the Phase I standard results in unnecessary and unwarranted costs for additional investigations and project delays.

Insight Environmental prices Phase I ESA fairly as independent projects, not as the prequel to further investigation.  We focus on providing high quality assessments that follow the ASTM International Standard (ASTM E1527-05 ) for data collection and recognized environmental assessment determinations.

Phase I ESA pricing depends on the size of the property under assessment, the amount and history of development on the property, and the number and history of use of the adjoining property.