What’s the Worst Thing About Owning an Apartment in a Small Building In NYC?

Nick at Hauseit (https://www.hauseit.com) discusses the worst aspects of owning an apartment in a small NYC condo or co-op building. Save money when buying real estate in NYC with Hauseit: https://www.hauseit.com/buyer-closing-credit/

Save money when buying, selling and renting real estate in New York and Florida with Hauseit (https://www.hauseit.com). Available in NYC, Long Island, the Hudson Valley and South Florida. Established 2014. Learn how it works: https://www.hauseit.com/how-it-works/
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I will preface this video by saying that I love small condo buildings. Now small has a broad definition. It could be a small building comprised of two apartments, six apartments or 13 apartments. They're all considered to be small buildings. I like small apartment buildings because it generally lends itself to scarcity and scarcity is a great characteristic when you own property. It means that when you sell you'll have a better outcome since there is less competition.

The worst thing about owning an apartment in a small condo or co-op building in NYC is that it's just too intimate. If you have a condo building where all of the apartment owners, let's say there are five or six apartment owners, and they all want to be involved in every decision, it lends itself to a very uncomfortable environment where you can honestly sometimes feel like you're back in a clique in high school.

You may get text messages or email chains out of nowhere like on a Saturday or Sunday morning. You can just get blown up with 50 text messages about really small and irrelevant issues that honestly are not appropriate to be brought up on the weekend during someone's personal time. For example, you can get a text message from somebody who complains about the fact that somebody buzzed all apartments in the building at 4am.

So somebody will text and they'll say “hey that wasn't my guest…was that your guest?” Then every single apartment owner has involve themselves in a roll call basically where everyone denies that they were responsible for that person buzzing the building at 4am. What if you're tied up or on a flight and can't text back right away? All of a sudden, everyone thinks you're responsible for the random stranger who buzzed the building at 4am since you are the only person who hasn't denied it in the group chat.

On the other hand, you might actually like that level of communication. But the problem with this intensity and intimacy is that sometimes it's just overbearing and overwhelming.

That being said, not every building is like this. It is also possible that you can have a small building where all the owners just really are not involved at all they don't want to have anything to do with each other and they don't really care that much about getting involved in running the building,
and that has its own suite of problems.

The main challenge is that when it comes to serious things like making important structural repairs to the building is the fact that everyone wants to be involved. Oftentimes these buildings operate on the presumption that every decision needs to have 100% unanimous support and
on a practical level that's just unrealistic. The end result is that important repairs are delayed or forgotten altogether, because owners are afraid to move forward despite having majority support out of fear of offending specific neighbors.
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Save money when buying, selling and renting real estate in New York and Florida with Hauseit (https://www.hauseit.com). Available in NYC, Long Island, the Hudson Valley and South Florida. Established 2014. Learn how it works: https://www.hauseit.com/how-it-works/

Hauseit LLC, Licensed Real Estate Broker
Tel: +1 (888) 494-8258
Email: [email protected]
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