CJC.org

Fortuitously, the New York Times real estate section this week has an article about some of the issues involved with combining two apartments in a building.

Basically, doing this in a co-op is straight forward. This is because the co-op as a corporate entity direclty owns the building and the board has the capability of rearranging internal space. The apartment owner owns shares in the co-op, and it’s a matter of redistributing shares from the previous owner to the new one, as well as a copy of the proprietary lease. Interior changes requires the owner’s architect of engineer to file a particular type of alteration form, but I suppose this is similar to form any landlord would have to file to customize space for a tenant.

Condos are considerably more complicated to combine. The theory is that each apartment in a condo is a separate piece of real estate, with its own surveyor’s record, title, etc. City records would have to be amended to go through with the combination, for example. Also, each apartment is separated by commonly owned property, so a supermajority of condo owners in the building would have to approve the alteration and grant that commonly owned property to the owner of the combined unit.

The article notes that combinations are becoming more popular. I’m not sure if it’s a matter of the real estate market being ridiculously high, so that combining units appears to be a better, less risky option compared to buying a new unit. It might be less a matter of the absolute price level than how quickly the price level has risen in the past few years, which may make people forget about the opportunity cost of selling the current place and paying a larger down payment on the new apartment.

Hmm. This is one instance where the 30% condo premium doesn’t pan out. But how often do apartments get combined, compared with the available stock?

Anyway, I’ve archived a copy here before it goes into the NYT pay archive in a couple of weeks.

Posted on Sunday, March 16th, 2003 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Apartment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.