Welcome to Hamptons Rental Season

East End Landlords - its time to make sure your rental permits are in order, you have a valid Certificate of Occupancy, and you have a sample lease / house rules drafted to rent out your place for the season.

Real estate agents should ask their clients to see the rental permit / Certificate of Occupancy to avoid their own License Law liability.

Throughout the coming months, this blog will focus in on the tricks of the trade to enhance landlord profitability & to minimize landlord exposure.

Starting this up with a bang, Lieb School just submitted a new continuing education course, Property Manager Liability, to kick the season off.

In this course you will learn NYS laws for property managers license requirements, security deposit rules, unique exposure for offering services to foreign owners, premises liability, and fair housing / discrimination.

Most of all, you will learn to make your landlord money so that they can increase their portfolio of properties.

Gold Cost Mansions on PBS

This program is a must watch for anyone involved in New York real estate.

Simply put, to not understand the treasures of New York's grand mansions is to not understand our market in the first place.

PBS is airing this program twice; first on 2/17/14 (Monday) at 9:15pm on WLIW/21 and again on 2/21/14 (Friday) on WNET/13.

Hope you get inspired and find the right mansion for you.

Fire Insurance Issues - Leverage the Law to get Commissions

Fire insurance policies were just addressed by NY’s highest Court. Real estate agents should get familiar with these policies because value-add agents are successful agents, particularly in the commercial setting where fires often spur relocations and the availability of multiple brokerage commissions.

In the case before the Court, the insurance company disclaimed coverage because its policy had a time limit for claims, but required that the cost of replacement be known in order to recover for a loss. However, the cost wasn't known until construction was complete, which didn't happen until after the time limit for the claim. Hence the predicament for the insured building owner.   

Specifically, in Executive Plaza LLC v. Peerless Insurance Company, it took the building owner over 3 years to renovate over one million dollars in damages to its property, but the policy only gave the owner 2 years to submit its loss.

Great news – the Court ruled that “such a contractual limitation period, applied to a case in which the property cannot reasonably be replaced in two years, is unreasonable and unenforceable.”

So, the policy’s purpose of insurance except where you need it was negated by the Court.

Now, you understand a predicament faced by your commercial building owners and you understand that in NY, insurance companies can no longer play the game of impossibility to avoid paying out a claim. So, go armed with knowledge when you help commercial tenants relocate after a fire and when you help a new building owner with their purchase and getting insurance.  

StreetEasy is Free

Zillow just announced that StreetEasy is now a completely free service and no longer has its $10 per month fee for advanced search features.

Plus, StreetEasy now has a terrific new website - so, go check it out!

Now users can get access to past sale prices, building permit applications, tax abatements and much more.

Lieb at Law, P.C. is hiring a Litigation Attorney

Energetic, collaborative and technologically advanced law firm with a focus on real estate litigation seeks attorney with 1- 5 years of experience in litigation to join a team of driven professionals in representing brokerage companies, landlords and individuals. Trial experience a plus but not required. Excellent career opportunity. Firm culture: No case, no statute, no talk.

Send cover letter and resume to careers@liebatlaw.com. 

*Office location in Center Moriches with cases throughout NY Metro Area.

Obama Backs and Encourages Mortgage Finance Reform in his State of the Union Speech

In his state of the union speech on January 28, 2014, Obama asked Congress to focus on mortgage finance reform in the upcoming year. He stated, “Since the most important investment many families make is their home, send me legislation that protects taxpayers from footing the bill for a housing crisis ever again and keeps the dream of home ownership alive for future generations.”

There have been proposals in the Obama administration to overhaul Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants which own or guarantee about 60% of all mortgages in the United States. These government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) have prospered for decades by buying and selling mortgages to provide capital to lenders and borrowers. However, when the housing bubble burst in 2008, the federal government took ownership of the mortgage giants, costing billions of dollars in taxpayer dollars to bail the companies out of financial ruin.  The housing market is now in recovery and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are profiting once again, but many government officials fear that another financial crisis is still possible. The goal is to take away Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s monopoly on the mortgage market, limit the federal government’s role and risk, and to focus on private lending instead. However, it will take years before the current system is completely overhauled and replaced with one dominated by private lenders.

It is imperative that brokers understand that the housing market is on its path to recovery, but may be facing drastic changes over the next two to five years. Middle class consumers may have difficulty obtaining a 30-year mortgage in a market that is run by private lenders unless the reforms allow for some substantial governmental intervention. We may only be in the early stages, but these proposals in Congress will lead to one of the biggest reforms this country has seen in the last decade.