talk to your current mortgage lender first. Also check your mortgage terms to see if you are even allowed to do secondary financing. You can always do things without a broker but you need someone that knows the mortgage market.

If you you use "consultants" they will alway try to get you to replace elevators that are not actually broken. They will claim they are obsolete. This also depends on the age of you elevator.. if it is old and the "drum" is fine, do NOT replace it until ithe drum breaks. They try to sell you on replacement as the contract is so big. Sometimes managing agents also push for this. The lesson: do your due diligence. Talk to companies that actually repair and maintain elevators and not consultants if you want objective advice.

"managing agent employees putting their hands in the co-op and condo cookie jars. The favorite cookie seems to be price fixing of large repair or capital improvement programs where thousands of dollars are paid by the building to contractors, engineers and architects. The prices of the jobs are inflated and everybody skims a little off the top"

Allegra T. is totally and absolutely correct. In our building, we have two elevators (2 buildings, 6-floors each), which needed "repairs", the Managing Agents tells the corrupted fools in the Board. These are 25-years old elevators, who were already cosmetically renovated 5 years ago to the tune of $7.000. "That's not enough", says the Hungry Wolf, "we need to renovate the entire elevator system, $260.000". We organized petitions of residents shareholders telling the corrupted fools in the Board, that the elevators were working reasonably well, and such expenditure was not needed. To no avail. The job was done (2 months of construction) and we were imposed a 5% assessment for 5 years. An investigation of the contractors industry revealed that the whole renovation work could be done for only $40K per elevator, $80.000 total for both. So, right there you can detect a " small" skimming of $180.000! These peoples, named by Allegra as contractors, engineers, architects, all of them under the command of the Managing Agent, and they are mafia. They are insaciable parasitic predators, and won't stop their feeding frenzy until they have banrupted the coops. All coops. We are in the grip of several mafias. May the gods have mercy on us, and send us a champion to defend the resident coop shareholders. Jerry Grosof, Concerned Citizens for Coop Reform. g5grosof@msn.com

since you are a 6 story building the chances are that you only have one elevator. If you plan the replacement in advance the job can take up to 3 months if you need to replace everything including motors and controllers.
If you have a major breakdown and need to replace the elevator on an emergency basis you can add months to the replacement time. Do it in a way so you can plan the job otherwise you will be in a walkup building for a lot longer than you need to be. Even if you have more than one elevator, if they are old you have frequent breakdowns. Replace on your terms.

i hate when people use this questions for their own agendas.

recommend you get a recommendation from your accountant and one from your attorney on the financing. you can of course look at an assessment for part of it. you may want to consider that because the additional financing ups your maintenance and that's a bigger red flag for buyers than an assessment.

as far as whether or not you need an elevator and how much it should cost:
-yes, get more than one reputable company to inspect
-if you move forward, i assume you have an intelligent board who reviews the bids. triple, quadruple, quintuple bid it. ask your friends on other boards who they have used. we just did our LL11 work and got 6 bids. we know we got a good price. not everyone is out to cheat someone.

Mr. fghtth: why don't you reveal the actual "good price" you got for your elevator? That way we can compare with the one we got: $40,000 per elevator, $80K for both, as opposed to the $260.000 that our management "assessed" us for. As for having an "intelligent board", that's a tall order: we don't know the directors, they don't release resumes, they don't reveal their level of education or qualifications to serve in the board, we don't even know where they live, or the email addresses.. For the two "renewable" directorships, they always select the newest arrivals, who must necessarily be dumb because of their ignorance of the coop affairs; they are insignificant people who automatically follow the elders of the "board", originally appointed by the Sponsor, who have been in power for 25 years.
And, Mr. fhgtth: don't get so angry with shareholders who question the board, observe the coop scene, compare notes and draw conclusions: this is not an "agenda": it is our fundamental right as shareholders. This is also called the "pursue of knowledge", a fundamental right of the individual in the western democracies since the times of Socrates. It is also called "transparency" in business & corporate affairs, a concept abhorred by our secretive unscrutable, autocratic despotic boards. Exactly as the sponsor wanted them (our sponsor, now called HUS, has been here for 25 years, and has no intention of ever leaving. He's not going "to walk away from his investment", he claims). Jerry Grosof - Concerned Citizens for Coop Reform - g5grosof@msn.com,
P.S.: Who's in charge of collecting the list of "bad" managing companies? I want to contribute ours to the list.

Mr. fghtth: why don't you reveal the actual "good price" you got for your elevator? That way we can compare with the one we got: $40,000 per elevator, $80K for both, as opposed to the $260.000 that our management "assessed" us for. As for having an "intelligent board", that's a tall order: we don't know the directors, they don't release resumes, they don't reveal their level of education or qualifications to serve in the board, we don't even know where they live, or the email addresses.. For the two "renewable" directorships, they always select the newest arrivals, who must necessarily be dumb because of their ignorance of the coop affairs; they are insignificant people who automatically follow the elders of the "board", originally appointed by the Sponsor, who have been in power for 25 years.
And, Mr. fhgtth: don't get so angry with shareholders who question the board, observe the coop scene, compare notes and draw conclusions: this is not an "agenda": it is our fundamental right as shareholders. This is also called the "pursue of knowledge", a fundamental right of the individual in the western democracies since the times of Socrates. It is also called "transparency" in business & corporate affairs, a concept abhorred by our secretive unscrutable, autocratic despotic boards. Exactly as the sponsor wanted them (our sponsor, now called HUS, has been here for 25 years, and has no intention of ever leaving. He's not going "to walk away from his investment", he claims). Jerry Grosof - Concerned Citizens for Coop Reform - g5grosof@msn.com,
P.S.: Who's in charge of collecting the list of "bad" managing companies? I want to contribute ours to the list.

I would find it cheaper to self-finance, by the coop itself imposing a special assessment towards the total price of the elevator (about $50K?), projecting it over the next 3 years or so. But if you want want a bank, google www.ASK.com, then write Bank Rates, and they will give a choice of banks offering short term loans at about $2.70% to 3%.