LIEB BLOG

Legal Analysts

Thursday, May 03, 2012

Co-Op House Rules & the Proprietary Lease

When purchasing a cooperative apartment you should always read the house rules as they set the standards for living in this environment. For example, the house rules may require that a percentage of an apartment be covered with carpeting to prevent noise or a house rule may not permit swimming in the pool after a certain hour or the rules may contain a no pet policy. Nonetheless, house rules should not be read in a vacuum and its quite important for prospective purchasers to not only study the house rules, but also the proprietary lease, which sets the outer limits of a Board's authority to set the rules. So, when a rule exists in the house rules that is contrary to the proprietary lease, the lease typically holds the day.

Yet, if you are planning to move into a building where the proprietary lease authorizes the Board to set rules for something like carpeting and the house rules do in fact set such a rule, you will be blown away to know that a Board needn't enforce this rule and no one can force them to do so. Why is this you may ask? The answer is called the Business Judgment Rule whereby a Board acting in good faith is shielded from suit when making decisions. So a rule is only enforceable rule when the Board elects to enforce it.

Nonetheless, Boards should act reasonably and their rules are much more likely to be enforced when the rule not only is embodied in a house rule, but also exists in a proprietary lease. Moreover, Boards should uniformly apply their rules or be mindful of both Fair Housing Act violations for discrimination or claims of waiver when they do choose to enforce the rule randomly.

So, perspective purchasers should review the rules and proprietary lease prior to purchasing, but realize that its also important to get to know the members of the Board because their personalities may dictate your living environment.

Know Your Terms


A recent legal malpractice case finds a client suing its former attorneys for failure to include terms in a lease addressing their landlord’s ongoing construction.  As a result of this construction, the client was unable to occupy its office space for nearly four years and claims to have suffered lost profits and consequential damages amounting to millions of dollars. 

Attorneys must be aware of potentially disruptive issues like construction when they negotiate a lease and be sure to address them all in the contract. These attorneys failed to include a single lease term, and now they find themselves defending a multi-million dollar lawsuit arising from a simple commercial transaction. 

There is a lesson here for non-attorneys as well.  Oftentimes real estate brokers will rely on form contracts or draft provisions themselves.  Don’t.  A missing or improperly drafted term in an agreement can have significant financial consequences.  If even skilled attorneys, trained to anticipate litigation around every corner, may miss these issues, how confident are you that a Blumberg form will cover them?

Wednesday, May 02, 2012

License law doesn't equal company policy

While litigating a brokerage commission dispute this afternoon, it dawned on me that real estate agents just don't know their company policy on many issues that they face in their profession. In fact, when they do know their company policy they fight it saying its not what their license permits.

To be clear, company policy is not the same thing as license law, nor is it Department of State regulations and it certainly isn't ethics opinions. What company policy is instead is your company's rules that are much more restrictive than any of the proceeding categories. You see companies have to manage on the macro and try to minimize risks so they make internal rules that narrow the line of legality to attempt to avoid the line of illegality as much as possible.

So imagine license law, regulations and ethics opinions constituting a large circle and company policy as a smaller circle therein of what you can and cannot do as an aspect of your job. All big companies have policies and most agent's independent contractor agreement incorporates these polices by reference, so agents must know and constantly be updated on their policies.

Go read your manuals.