CO-OP/CONDO BUYERS

Admission interviews by co-op boards strike fear in even the most confident apartment-buyer's heart. Stories abound of New York City boards rejecting people for some imagined imperfection, or for being Madonna or Richard Nixon. Many co-op buyers tell of having to bring their dogs to the interview, so that the board can feel assured that Rover's not an aggressive, 75-pound hell-hound. So what about children, be they toddler tantrum-throwers, teenaged skateboard thugs or, like your kid, of course, well-behaved and above average? Must parents bring children kids to the co-op board interview? Brokers tell all in BrickUnderground.com's latest "Ask the Experts" column.

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The average price of an apartment in certain Brooklyn neighborhoods is now higher than that of Manhattan co-ops and condos, according to a StreetEasy study cited by Crain's New York Business. While the magazine notes the "obvious caveat" of comparing neighborhoods with an entire borough — where apartments in Inwood and other upper-Manhattan locales sell for far less than in such luxury area as Central Park South or Tribeca — at least two Brooklyn spots blow Manhattan's $890,000 median out of the water: DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Underpass), at $1.5 million, and the Columbia Street waterfront, running through Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, at $1.147 million. DUMBO, in fact, averaged less than just a half-dozen Manhattan nabes. On the bright side, Kensington is still very affordable.

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Illegal hoteling is one of the many banes of co-op and condo boards, and one that stings particularly hard because of the the security issue off non-background-checked strangers roaming your building's halls and stairwells. There's also the loss of sublet fees paid by approved residents who play by the rules, and the fact banks won't offer mortgages to people buying an apartment in heavily rented-out cooperatives and condominiums. Plus, New York law forbids apartment rentals for less than 30 days, in buildings with three or more units.

Airbnb and similar short-term rental sites don't much care about any of that. In fact, Airbnb and the organization Peers began a PR and lobbying campaign this spring to try to overturn our laws governing short-term rentals. But now to combat that deep-pocket carpetbagging comes a coalition of more than 100 affordable-housing advocates, community groups, elected officials and others attempting to highlight the impact of illegal hoteling.

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$1 million will buy you a pretty good, though hardly high-end, New York City co-op or condo ... or one parking space — because that's the price tag on each of the 10 being offered by the developer of the under-construction 42 Crosby Street condominium at the corner of Broome and Crosby in SoHo, reports The New York Times. The spaces — first come, first served for buyers in the 10-unit building — are bigger than a single lane, some as large as 200 square feet, each with storage space and a charging station for electric and hybrid cars. Technically, they're just being leased for 99 years, which means if you sell the condo you have to give up the space. A Tribeca sparking space sold for $345,459 last year, with the average being $136,052, the paper said.

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So who's responsible for eradicating mice in your co-op apartment when your cat's too lazy to do the job? That depends, say legal experts in BrickUnderground.com's latest "Ask an Expert" column. In most cases, the little rodents are emanating from one of the common areas, usually the garbage or compactor room. And co-ops, since they operate under a proprietary lease, are subject to such rental statutes as those involving the warrant of habitability, meaning the board has to keep the building up to a certain legal standard of livability. On the other hand, if you're a hoarder or just a really, really, really messy person, getting rid of your mice might not be the board's responsibility. 

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New Yorkers are continually assaulted by sound — traffic, construction, the neighbor's music, you name it. And noise is an especially sensitive issue within cooperatives and condominiums, where complaints about noisy neighbors can create disputes among residents. Unfortunately, noise is a highly subjective issue, and conflicts can become extremely difficult to resolve. The legal system may be the only remedy to the situation, but this should be a last resort.

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Regardless of what type of emergency for which you're preparing, the hallmarks of your plan should be communication, organization and clarity. If everyone knows what his or her role is in an emergency — including the property manager, board members, shareholders, and building staff — then executing that plan becomes much simpler.

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What do you do when your building doesn't own the land on which it sits? 

Yes, that's a thing — it's called a "ground lease," a real estate instrument in which a cooperative or a condominium corporation owns the building but only leases the land. Usually it's for long periods of up to 99 years, after which, theoretically, the landowner can tell the board to move the building elsewhere. And in the meantime, your monthly payments include ground rent.

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HELOC may sound like a successor to Marvel Comics' espionage agency SHIELD — and Headquarters for Eurasian, Latin-American and Oceanic Control does sound pretty cool — but it stands for, rather, "home equity line of credit." In the case of co-ops, says a National Cooperative Bank loan officer writing in BrickUnderground.com, this differs from a traditional mortgage refinance in that, first, co-op loans aren't mortgages, and, second, you can borrow small amounts, effectively treating your apartment "like a credit card." It's also unlike a traditional refinancing, he says, in that it only costs only a few hundred bucks to set up. While some co-op boards naysay HELOCs, most, he asserts, will OK them up to a certain percentage of your apartment’s appraised value.

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Following the stringent conditions that the River House co-op board placed on the sale of Arlene Farkas' 14-room apartment, which wound up scotching a $7.8 million sale to the French government, the place will be sold at a public foreclosure auction today, reports the New York Daily News. Farkas, who owes $6 million in mortgage payments has lived at the old-money co-op in Turtle Bay since 1969 and, for the larger part of 24 years, was negotiating the legal waters of divorce and share-ownership. This followed her discovery that husband Bruce R. Farkas, an heir to the Alexander's department-store fortune, was simultaneously married to another woman for many years. Which is a whole story in itself.

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