CO-OP/CONDO BUYERS

Speaking of subletting a co-op apartment, check out this one couple's quandary. The pair want to sublet the place for a year while they are out of the country. The problem is that the building allows pets, including service animals, and the husband has severe allergies to animals. Should someone with a pet rent the apartment, it would mean having to professionally clean all the furnishings, "including Oriental rugs." They ask Ronda Kaysen in this week's Ask Real Estate column in The New York Times what restrictions, if any, they may put on animals. Kaysen replies, "Just because your building is pet-friendly does not mean you have to be. Simply advertise your sublet as a 'no-pet' rental and screen prospective subtenants carefully. Include a provision in the sublease that clearly explains the rule and your reasoning." Of course, if a potential subtenant requests permission to bring along a service animal "as a reasonable accommodation for a disability," then the husband's disability — severe allergies — would factor into a court's decision. "If accommodating a pet would aggravate your husband's disability," explains Kaysen, "it is unlikely that a court would consider a request for a service animal as a reasonable accommodation."

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Annual maintenance increases are an extremely important strategy to keep up with cost-of-living increases, which we face every year. Since overall operating expenses never seem to decrease, annual maintenance increases allow us to be proactive in planning to cover these expenses.

One of the co-ops we manage, 21 Fort Washington Avenue, a Housing & Development Finance Corporation building, implements a minimum 2 percent increase every year to maintain financial stability. Thus, even if our projected budget does not call for an increase, it is important to stay consistent and maintain the increase.

Also, it is much easier to communicate a 2-percent increase per year than a 15 to 20 percent increase every 10 years or when the co-op is in financial distress. Shareholders understand the need for these increases and it allows the building's accounts to maintain a positive cash flow throughout the year.

Joseph L. Bavaro is senior vice president and director of property management at Finger Management.

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The co-op we are interested in doesn't allow pets. My dog is a "comfort dog," so how do I handle this?

My advice is to be straight with the board. When you submit your purchase application, be sure and tell them about the dog. In your board submission, include proper documentation for the dog confirming that he is a true comfort animal (in some cases we have seen such certification). Additionally, you should submit proper documentation for yourself, or whoever is residing with you, asserting that the dog is needed. The board cannot discriminate against an applicant who legitimately needs a comfort animal and has proper documentation. Not being upfront can lead to an unnecessary legal challenge, which can be very expensive for all parties.

Ira Meister is president of Matthew Adam Properties.

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Residents of Cobble Hill are giving a resounding thumbs down to the high-rise condo towers that Fortis Property Group has proposed to build in the former Long Island College Hospital site. Locals believe the towers "would cause a drastic surge in population density and traffic congestion in the quaint neighborhood," reported DNAinfo. One of the proposals includes one tower that would be "at least" 40 stories high built between Pacific Street and Atlantic Avenue, along with 19-, 14- and 11-story buildings. The other proposal, which would require rezoning, "would put a 40-story residential building at Hicks Street and Atlantic Avenue closer to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway with 30- and 20-story buildings at the LICH site." Locals say both proposals are "out-of-scale" and that the tallest structures are at least twice as high as they think they should be. They are also "particularly anxious over the influx of new residents that the development would bring." They should also be concerned about that "at least 40 stories" — residents of the Lower East Side got a nasty surprise after a proposed tower they already thought was too tall at 56 stories got the okay to rise to up to three times higher than the Manhattan Bridge.

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We plan to travel overseas and will need to sublet our apartment. Should we look at co-ops or condos with this in mind?

Generally, condo rules concerning subletting are less restrictive than those of co-ops. The similarities are that both co-ops and condos usually limit the maximum term of a lease to one or two years and the minimum term must be a year. Many co-ops will not review a sublet package unless the shareholder has owned the apartment for a minimum amount of time (usually a year or two) and often have a limit on the number of years an apartment may be sublet.

Additionally, both co-ops and condos require that an application that includes financial information must be submitted to the board, similar to a sales package, and co-ops sometimes require an interview with the prospective subtenant.

However, one important difference is that co-ops can deny a sublet without giving a reason. Condos have a right of first refusal, which means that if a condo votes to deny a sublet application, then it must market and rent the apartment at the stipulated rent. This is the reason that almost all condo sublet applications are approved.

Arline Kob is principal at Key Real Estate Associates.

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It could be. But beware: you need to do some research. Has the building been taking money from the reserve fund into its operating fund to keep the maintenance stable? Has the building reduced services to keep the maintenance the same? Has the building had assessments to cover operation shortfalls? Does the building have a large amount of unpaid bills? Has the building balanced its budget or run a deficit? If the answer to any of the above questions is yes, then the "great" news is not so good.

Although not having increases may look great at first glance, it may be hiding a multitude of problems. This could be a ticking time bomb. The next maintenance increase may be huge to cover many years of operating shortfalls. It is very rare for buildings not to have even small maintenance increases year after year. Realistically, most expenses go up. Water, payroll, real estate taxes, insurance, and other essentials have risen every year. Some buildings have a small maintenance increase even when it is not needed just to gather extra operating funds.

So you need to do your homework, read the minutes, ask questions, and look deeply into the building's financial information to get a true picture of what has been and what is going on; then you will really find out if it is truly "great news."

Steven Greenbaum is director of property management at Mark Greenberg Real Estate.

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There are a multitude of reasons why sizable arrears should set off a series of alarms for owners and prospective buyers. Broadly, uncollected arrears signal that the board and management company are not focused on the property's fiscal or physical health.

Arrears may suggest an underlying physical impairment to the building, causing owners to withhold payment. If this is not the issue, uncollected arrears are a clear display of poor management. This also indicates that the board of directors is not fulfilling its fiscal responsibility to shareholders/HOA members by not utilizing all legal means to collect the funds.

Regardless of the reason, arrears undermine the financial stability of a property, potentially jeopardizing its ability to satisfy financial commitments to the mortgage holder and other creditors. Should this condition exist, the board may be forced to dip into the reserve fund to satisfy property debts. Further, banks and appraisers frown upon poor financials, often denying financing for prospective buyers. This makes selling more difficult and lowers the value of the property

Arlene Waye is broker and president of Awaye Realty.

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Take a walk in Midtown along Madison Avenue and what do you see? The sidewalk is very likely thick with people, including slow-moving, photo-snapping tourists, and commuters dashing in and out tall office buildings. And construction. Lots of it. Anywhere you turn there are construction crews and buildings rising that seem to jockey for position. Which brings us to the next question: what do you hear? Traffic. Lots of it: buses roaring up and down streets, cars and cabs honking horns, sirens screaming until your ears can't take it anymore. It's probably the last place you might imagine for a condo tower, but that's what's rising on Madison and 33rd Street. According to Tessler Developments, the 30-story luxury condo is in design development and once completed, in the second quarter of 2016, it will consist of 69 units. "Aware that residents of lower floors might have objected to passersby being able to peer into their homes," reported The New York Times late last week, "the developer made the building’s base tall, so that the first residential floor doesn’t start until about 40 feet in the air, versus 15 feet in comparable buildings." You may ask yourself who in the world would want to live in such a congested part of the city, and — like The Times — you may think the notion of location is no longer important to those snapping up luxury units like candy, but what wouldn't some of us give to be able to roll out of bed and enjoy an easy, short-ish commute to the office every morning? 

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An assessment is a recurring fee that is levied by a co-op or condo usually on a monthly or quarterly basis. As opposed to maintenance fees and carrying charges, which are typically used to cover a building's regular operating costs, an assessment is usually levied as a means to pay for capital improvement items, one-off transactions, extraordinary legal fees, or sometimes to balance an annual budget that is running a deficit. If a board has levied a permanent assessment (instead of increasing maintenance or monthly carrying charges) it may indicate that the monthly carrying charges are already high in relation to other comparable properties or that the property does not have sufficient reserves to cover extraordinary costs

Michael Crespo is president of Citadel Property Management.

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A common refrain among New York apartment dwellers is that there's never enough space for anything: not enough closets, not enough cabinets, not enough counters. But that won't be the case for anyone who snaps up a condo unit in 170 West Street in Greenpoint. New York YIMBY got a first look at renderings for the six-story project designed by StudiosC Architects. According to the real estate trade publication, "although 170 West was filed as two buildings, it will look like a single, 70-foot-tall structure." So just how big are the units? All 15 apartments will be divided over 22,770 square feet of residential space — that's an average of 1,518 square feet each. YIMBY adds that "there won’t be any parking, and the developer likely filed the development as two buildings to sidestep the city’s parking rules, which would call for seven parking spots in a 15-unit building."

Rendering by StudiosC Architects 

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