In 1976, the Federal Superfund program established the ground breaking legal concept of Joint and Several Liability which made an owner of a property liable for 100% of government mandated environmental cleanup costs regardless of whether or not the owner's actions contributed to the contamination. Spurred to action by Superfund, in the early 1980's most states adopted similar liability concepts combining them with statutes and regulations requiring assessments and disclosures of environmental conditions on properties and giving them the authority to place so-called "superliens" which allowed the state to supercede a lender's lien on a property to recover up to three times the State's cleanup costs. These actions created a need for reacquisition assessments of the environmental conditions of properties that had never existed before and a new industry was born. 

Since 1982, GZA has completed thousands of environmental site assessments (ESAs) associated with real estate transactions for clients at sites throughout the United States and internationally. Many of these site evaluations were completed as part of corporate‑wide contracts with Fortune 100 companies. Often the site evaluations are completed as multi-site projects that may cover several states over a short time frame.  Our site assessments range in scope from reconnaissance‑level characterizations to comprehensive and detailed investigations involving facility audits, subsurface explorations, and various types of environmental sampling. GZA personnel make presentations at seminars regarding environmental site evaluations and environmental due diligence to developers, industrial, real estate, banking and legal firms.

GZA has been providing our clients over 1,500 pre-transaction Environmental Site Assessment and Operational Audits, supported by our other engineering and cost estimating experience per year since 1981with projects in virtually every state. We have conducted thousands of single and multi-site investigations as part of mergers or acquisitions and/or Security and Exchange Commission reporting for operators, purchasers, sellers, REITs and financial institutions.