Great class last night - Property Management

I just want to send a special thank you to the Mattituck-Laurel Historical Society for donating their fabulous school house for our continuing education course last evening. It was an experience that I will remember for a lifetime. What a thrill to each in an 1840s working school. I only wish that they had left the rulers to smack the naughty students with.

If you don't know about the Society, click here to learn more. While I loved the experience, the Society needs your help to stay erect and safe. In fact, we discussed the need for a walkway from the parking lot to the school in order to make visiting the site safer. Please do your part and donate to this worthy cause by becoming a member. Just click on this form to join.

Cooperative House Rules Illustrated

A case decided yesterday, 5/3/12, perfectly illustrates the power of cooperative boards. The case addresses whether the board, under the Business Judgment Rule, may create a house rule that restricts subletting. In the situation in the case the restriction imposed was as follows:

 "no [l]essee shall be permitted to sublet the whole or any part of an apartment or renew or extend any previously authorized sublease for more than two years during any four consecutive year period unless consent thereto has first been duly authorized by a resolution of the Directors or . . . by [l]essees owning at least 66⅔% of the then issued and outstanding shares of the Corporation."

The Appellate Court held that the board did have the power to enact such a rule under the Business Judgment Rule. Even going further, the Court rejected a prior decision to the contrary stating cooperative boards have “the authority to freely adopt a new policy in the legitimate interest of the cooperative”.

To read the decision, click here. 

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?

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.

Lis Pendens for a Brokerage Commission? Not So Fast

A recent article in the Nassau Lawyer argued for the use of the lis pendens to enforce a broker’s right to a commission on the sale of real property.  Before we get our hopes up and start filing notices of pendency on every unpaid commission, let’s take a closer look at the law on this issue.

The lis pendens is a document recorded with the county clerk which warns potential purchasers of real property that litigation is pending which may affect title.  The lis pendens creates constructive notice of the pending lawsuit and renders the property unmarketable.  While this might sound like a great way to enforce your rights to a commission, the lis pendens is available only for actions that affect title, possession, use or enjoyment of real property.  A claim for money due under a contract meets none of these requirements, and it has been consistently held that the lis pendens is not an appropriate remedy. 

One court expressed its utter exasperation that brokers who hold themselves out as real estate professionals could be so ignorant of this “basic tenet of real estate law.” In the Second Department, which includes all of Long Island, it is well settled that this remedy does not apply to brokerage commissions.  See Homespring, LLC v. Lee, 2008 NY Slip Op 7618.

So what is the proper way to enforce your right to a commission?  In residential transactions, the proper remedy is Real Property Law 294-b, which gives a broker the right to record an affidavit of entitlement to a commission with the county clerk who will hold the amount of the commission until the broker’s rights can be determined by a court.  For non-residential transactions, a narrow exception exists which creates a lien when the commission derives from the broker’s negotiation of a lease longer than three years.  Lien Law § 2 (4), 3.