Q: Our longtime manager of a 50-unit cooperative is retiring. Is it needed to rent one other super resident, or can his duties, that are relatively light, be outsourced?
AND: You can definitely delegate duties to your supervisor. The query is do you ought to.
New York apartment maintenance code requires the owner of a constructing of nine or more units to “provide 24-hour cleansing services”. One technique to do that is to rent an out of doors company.
Dennis H. Greenstein, an actual estate attorney on the Seyfarth Shaw law firm’s Manhattan office and former co-chair of the New York State Housing and Bar Association Committee, said many cooperative councils ultimately resolve not to interchange the resident caretaker with a service and rent a caretaker’s apartment. The fundamental reason is peace.
“Once someone was living there, things could have modified when it comes to the services people within the constructing expected,” he said. A live-in caregiver “means more frequent presence of somebody, especially in emergencies,” who may help resolve the difficulty immediately.
He added that the contracted cleansing service “could send different people every time”. They’ll know the right way to fix a boiler, but they will not know the constructing inside out or the individuals who live there. Residential supers, said Greenstein, “develop into a part of the community, and that is a excellent thing for the constructing.”
Eliminating the super apartment could also lower the worth of the apartment, Greenstein said, as many potential buyers see it as an asset to the constructing.
Mark B. Levine, owner of property management company EBMG and host of the show New York real estate podcast, then again, said that the boards of lots of his company’s cooperatives hire external cleansing services. However, he warned that doing so “often seems dearer than having a superintendent on payroll, together with his salary partially offset by free housing because the service will include insurance, payroll taxes and profit of their pricing model versus constructing directly paying for insurance and payroll taxes.
If your constructing is considering selling a caretaker’s flat, Mr Levine warned against doing so if money isn’t a difficulty, with a view to preserve the potential of having a tenant live in in the longer term.
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