Hard to say without more information. How big is your building's mortgage? Fuel costs? Other monthly expenses? Number of staff (full or part time)? Tax bill?

staff is six people. full time. but not a 24 hour doorman - the night guy is a porter from 1:30-7:30.
tax is about 300k ish. fuel - dont know - maybe 50-60k. 12 story high building.
mortgage was refinanced last sumer with a 200k prepayment panalty. it was a 4.2 million loan with the 2.3 paid off - leaving 1.9 for a new roof and pointing.
maintenance increase of 12.75% in the last nine months. assesment of 50k in May 07.

> How many square feet in your apartment, and how much is your monthly maintenance ($6.24 x # shares you own)?
> How many bathrooms in your apartment?
>Can you give me the square footage and monthly maintenance for another apt in your building with a different number of bedrooms and bathrooms?
> If you can do that, I'll give you a run-down on average costs. And if you're in Manhattan, and care to tell us which neighborhood, I'll give you the average cost for bulidings around you (not a scientific absolute, just my calculations from public info).

steve w

Hi steve

we have aprox 1650 sq feet with three bathrooms (2 of them, tiny. 324 shares. the building has aprox 121,313 sq feet of residential space (according to property shark) with 19,760 shares .
thanks

Hi, BA,

Thanks for your info -- just what I was looking for.

Let me discuss your original question first: Is $6.40 per share too high for a maintenance fee? It's impossible to give an answer to that question. Many people assume that one share in your building is equal to one share in my building, and equal to one share in every other co-op in the five boroughs.

It's not. Thanks to the wisdom of the lawyers who draw up co-op papers and the staff of the attorney general's office, which blesses those papers, the number of shares in a co-op corporation is arbitrary. For example, your 86-unit co-op has 19,760 shares. My co-op has 43 units and about 26,000 shares. So you can see that the price per share cannot be used for comparisons among co-ops.

So how do we measure one to another?

The way I do it -- and I'm no statistician, just a board treasurer who got tired of the complaints about our maintenance fee being "the highest in Manhattan" -- is to look at the monthly maintenance paid (in dollars -- NOT in shares) and divide it by the size of the apartment (in square feet). So, for example, if Alex pays $1200 a month in maintenance for an apartment that's 900 square feet, she's paying $1.50 per square foot.

1200 / 900 = 1.5

The weakness of this comparison is that it does not take into account tangibles (doorman or not, health club or not, basement apt vs penthouse) or intangibles (grand or dingy lobby, pre-war or modern, how recent the renovation, "fixer-upper" vs "move in tomorrow"). The strength is that it's quick and easy, especially because figuring out which building has which amenities is a challenge.

I decided to find out the average maintenance price in Manhattan co-ops by neighborhood. My source is a feature in the Sunday Real Estate section of The New York Times. If you're familiar with the paper, you've seen the "Sales Across the Region" grid. The top row always shows Manhattan sales. For 24 months (October 17, 2004, through October 15, 2006) I recorded every Manhattan co-op sale (not cond-op or anything else) by area (square footage), monthly maintenance, and neighborhood.

Here are the results. They include only those neighborhoods with at least five sales during that period in The Times. From most expensive co-op neighborhood to least, by square feet:

Midtown East: $1.42 per square foot
Murray Hill $1.40
Upper East Side: $1.36
Midtown West: $1.33
Chelsea: $1.25
Greenwich Village: $1.17
Grammercy Park: $1.07
East Village: $1.07 (tie)
Upper West Side*: $0.98
SoHo: $0.97
TriBeCa: $0.87
Hudson Heights: $0.86
Morningside Heights: $0.86 (tie)
Hamilton Heights: $0.75
Inwood: $0.73
Washington Heights: $0.70
Harlem: $0.51

*I include "West Side" sales with "Upper West Side."

So to answer your question (finally!), is your maintenance too high? Let's take a look.

You own 324 shares at $6.24 per share. That's $2022 monthly maintenance (rounded up). Your apartment's size is 1650 square feet.

2022 / 1650 = $1.225 (call it $1.23) per square foot

You live on the Upper West Side, where the average monthly maintenance is about 98 cents per square foot. So it's quite a bit higher than the average for your neighborhood.

But before you boil over, let's look at your entire building. It has 19,760 shares at $6.24 each, for a total monthly rent roll (that's the legal term, since in a co-op we rent from the corporation) of $123,302.40. You point out that according to Property Shark, the total residential area in the building is 121,313 square feet.

123,302.40 / 121,313 = $1.016 (call it $1.02) per square foot

That's four cents per square foot above your neighborhood average. (Or, to be more precise, 3.6 cents above.) So I would say that your building is neither too high nor too low, but basically spot-on.

Unfortunately for you, you live an apartment that has disproportionately more shares than your building's average. That mean's there's some lucky shareholder in your building who has many fewer shares! How are shares allocated? That's another story -- but in short, it's arbitrary, based on such things as the view, the number of bathrooms and bedroom, and so forth.

(Let me add that in the case of my figure for the UWS average, it's based on 57 sales. The most expensive I found on the UWS and West Side was $1.70 per square foot. I don't write down the addresses, but if you're curious look in The Times of Feb. 12, 2006. The least expensive was 57 cents, in The Times of one week earlier.)

If hope you find this useful. It sure taught me a lot about maintenance fees in the city.

In case you're wondering, I discovered that my building does not, as one shareholder put it, have the most expensive fee in Manhattan. It's 88 cents per square foot, which puts us in the middle third, in between SoHo and TriBeCa.

Cheers!
steve w

Steve - this is brilliant! THANK YOU. one thing: how reliable is Property Shark for such info? It may not be a correct figure.

Thanks, BigAl! I'm glad you appreciate it. Everyone thinks her maintenance fees are the highest in town -- an urban myth that lives on because it's so tough to compare.

As for Property Shark, I have no idea how accurate it is.

My own building is listed there at something like $4 million, which is far less than the value of all the apartments in it. Granted, that's different from the value of the building.

I don't know how much it would cost to build a seven-story brick building with an interior courtyard, tile on all the public floors and plantings, but I'll bet it's more than that.

steve w

As Tad stated it, it boils to many variables. Also, a true measure of your maintenance would be if you were to know the total square footage of your builidng and you were to find out what does it take to maintain it per sq. ft. However, the number you get means nothing unless it is compared to other similarly situated buildings with similar amenities and you were to compare sq ft by sq ft.

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