As with a first date or job interview, sitting before a cooperative board to plead your case for buying into its community is a daunting prospect. Though the pressure may be high, board interviews tend to be pretty straightforward. But what about those outlier encounters, when one party just can’t help but rub the other the wrong way, leading to a downward spiral of squirm-inducing, invasive, or just downright awkward conversation?

Be Careful

As attorney Matthew Leeds, a partner with the Manhattan-based law firm of Garner & Shore, LLP points out, one of the more atrocious board interview debacles was documented in the Biondi v. Beekman Hill House Apartment Corp. case of 2000, in which “a member of the board privately had notes that observed in weird and offensive ways that he had interviewed a mixed-race couple, [Gregory and Shannon Broome], to sublet an apartment.” There was, appropriately, an action filed charging discrimination, through which these notes came to light.

The lesson in Biondi for all board members is to take care during its deliberations because the court found Nicholas Biondi, the board president at the time, personally liable for damages. The court awarded the couple $230,000 in compensatory damages and $410,000 in punitive damages, of which Biondi was personally liable for $125,000. Insurance paid a majority of the final negotiated settlement, but Biondi had to sell his apartment to cover the remaining costs and associated legal fees.

Of course overt racism isn’t the only stuff of head-shaking board interviews. “I typically avoid being present during interviews, but I happened to arrive early for a co-op meeting and caught the tail-end of one,” says Georgia Lombarto-Barton, president of Barton Management LLC in New York City. “One of the board members asked the purchaser, a single female, unbeknownst to the board member, what she was planning to do if she and her boyfriend broke up. He went on to ask whether she ‘planned to date multiple people’ or ‘ease back into the scene.’” Correctly assessing this line of questioning as both inappropriate and irrelevant, the purchaser responded by pondering why this was being asked, and whether any of this was against the rules of the property. After an awkward ten-second silence, the board member simply replied, “No, not yet.”

Amore, No More

Snezan Cebic, an associate broker with the Brooklyn office of Douglas Elliman Real Estate, says he doesn’t “have enough hands to count the number of times that women have been asked about their love lives—obliquely, of course—by co-op boards. I also once heard a story of a board member mentioning that he could hear the wall shaking with someone they’d already approved, and that this disturbance on a regular basis was driving him nuts.” If you’re not wincing already, the board member was referring to his neighbor’s sexual behavior.

And Jay Cohen, director of operations at Manhattan's A. Michael Tyler Realty Corp., describes his experience with an elderly board of a 60-unit residence: “One of the board members had a granddaughter whom she’d been trying to fix up. A guy comes in for an interview, and, unaware of his sexual preference, the aforementioned board member asks him, ‘Are you single? Because I’d like to set you up with my granddaughter.’ The gentleman declined, and was later rejected by the board. A week later he filed a lawsuit for discrimination.”

To be fair, impropriety can run both ways.  “For a buyer, the interview process is the last opportunity to get out of a deal that they’re starting to regret pursuing,” says Harold Kobner, an associate broker at Manhattan-based Argo Real Estate. “So sometimes they will, in fact, purposely tank it. Once, a potential buyer began her interview by relating how she was on new medication for bipolar disorder, a condition which had caused the loss of her job. Now the board is in a quandary, because there are certain avenues which one should just not explore during an interview, but this woman took things there immediately, and now the board needed to make a decision. After much thought, they accepted the applicant, as, were they to turn her down only for her to claim that they did so based on health reasons, it could have caused problems. In this case, it eventually became evident that the whole thing was a ruse. They basically called the woman’s bluff, and she ended up walking away and losing her deposit.”

In a more mysterious case, David Berkey, a partner with the Manhattan law firm of Gallet Dreyer & Berkey, LLP, says his firm is representing the sellers of a co-op apartment in a suit that alleges that “the buyers, after attending a board interview where the president advised them of excessive building noise, elected to breach the contract of sale and purchase somewhere else.” Why a board would make disparaging statements regarding its own building, Berkey is unaware, but it is very much outside the norm, and the sellers attest that the statements were both excessive and partially untrue.

In this library of horror stories, It’s not always about manipulation and shady power plays, but simply mankind’s predilection for being weird. Robert Kuhar, an associate broker with Douglas Elliman Real Estate, and his wife purchased a Central Park West apartment, a place he refers to as “a massive dump” that the couple intended to completely renovate. During their interview, a board member started to ask them fairly aggressive questions, at which point, the other members all turned to her and hissed, “What are you doing?! We don’t want to scare them off!”

All's Well That Ends Well

And Marcy Grau, an associate broker with Manhattan luxury brokerage, Stribling & Associates, represented a couple heading into an interview that was probably “the most qualified that the co-op board in question had seen in every way: career-wise, socially, active in their communities. They were just lovely, and more than prepared. They get to the interview, and the board members look at them, clearly unsure as to what they should even ask. Eventually, the board went with ‘What are your hopes and aspirations?’ This was literally their only question. The buyers were shocked, and just vamped their way through. They were accepted right away, and really liked the place. I just think that the couple had such glowing letters of recommendation that the co-op didn’t know how it should conduct such an interview.”

This all goes to show, both board and interviewee can prepare their hearts out, but there’s little accounting for humanity’s capacity to be completely rational,  or on the other hand, completely unhinged.

Mike Odenthal is a staff writer for The Cooperator.