Unlike individual apartment owners’ insurance coverage, most co-op and condo buildings’ insurance policies are pretty standard—they include homeowners’ insurance, liability, and umbrella coverage. Usually, the common areas such as the ha…
Part of the process of bidding and hiring a contractor to work in your building is verifying their insurance coverage. Uninsured or inadequately insured contractors pose a serious threat to a co-op or condo community’s finances and can …
The economic crisis has affected many individuals, businesses and markets—the real estate and job markets, to name just two particularly nasty examples. Until now, one of the few industries that didn’t seem as deeply impacted was the ins…
Q “I am newly elected to the board of a small (32-unit), self-managed condominium, where traditionally there has been little transparency between the board of trustees and the unit owners. I have asked the board president several tim…
Q Our 200-unit condo association has seven delinquencies. Six of these cases have been delinquent for over a year. Liens are in place, and all are in the hands of our attorney for collection. Most are mortgaged past fair market value…
Q Do the shareholders in a New York City co-op have the right to obtain the tabulated results of a board of director’s election, rather than simply the names of the shareholders that won? If you are a shareholder who is running for th…
In the last two years, Fannie Mae has amended it’s guidelines for selling and serving mortgages on condominiums, cooperatives, and planned unit developments three times. Why should service providers, cooperative corporations and communi…
Proposed legislation by the New York City Council to require energy audits, while a nice idea, is extremely cost-prohibitive especially in today’s economy. The bottom line is that the spending proposed in this bill (Intro 967) will be t…
In today’s harsh economic times, maintaining a healthy reserve fund is more important than ever. A co-op or condo’s reserve fund can be used to cover any number of emergency expenses from sudden repairs to legal costs. In addition, a re…
Fresh from hoisting up the banking and automobile sectors, a newly muscular Uncle Sam is now turning his attention to putting the skids on the real estate meltdown. The Obama Administration earlier this year rolled out two maj…