Latest news with #NYCapartments
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Thousands of rent-stabilized NYC apartments face foreclosure in tenant ‘bloodbath'
Thousands of rent-stabilized apartments in NYC are under threat of foreclosure as an increasing number of landlords stop paying their mortgages — making the coveted units even more scarce, insiders told The Post. Buildings with a cumulative 176 rent-stabilized units have been foreclosed upon since 2022 – a figure that's been doubling every year on average — with another 2,093 stabilized units have been put on notice by banks in April that landlords are defaulting on their mortgages, according to an analysis by PropertyShark data. 'It's a bloodbath,' said Sarah Saltzberg, co-owner of Bohemia Realty Group, who rents pre-war units in upper Manhattan. Owners lose money on stabilized units, so they leave them empty and skip the listing — or walk away entirely, leading to foreclosures, Saltzberg said. 'The owners are under water — that's why in the past year it keeps happening over and over,' she said. Many of the pre-1974 buildings — the year NYC established the rent stabilization system — desperately need repairs, but owners have stopped investing due to 2019 laws capping rent hikes after improvements at 2% and banning landlords from raising rents by up to 20% upon vacancy — changes that cut property values. Rising interest rates over the past three years also slowed renovations to a crawl. Tenant advocacy groups and Democratic state legislators lobbied hard for these changes, considered the biggest overhaul of New York's rent laws in a generation — arguing they were necessary to protect tenants against rent hikes and evictions. And they succeeded. But NYC tenants could end up paying the price. 'A lot of us might end up displaced — a new owner can come in and kick us all out,' said Coco Portofe, 34, whose East Village rent-stabilized building is the subject of ongoing court proceedings. If a landlord defaults, a new owner has to keep rent-stabilized units stabilized and keep rent the same. But the issue is when no one wants to buy the foreclosed property because the rent-stabilized units make it so financially unattractive, insiders told The Post. In that case, the building's residents could face eviction. 'There are situations where given the rent-stabilized nature of the tenancy, any purchase price over $1 would be ludicrous,' said foreclosure attorney Alexander Paykin. Experts point to a recent case in March, when mortgage lender Santander Bank refused to even take the keys of a foreclosed rent-stabilized building in Harlem, as indicative of what could come. Some fear a repeat of the 1970s, when New York landlords simply walked away from decaying buildings that were no longer profitable to rent out. Portofe's landlord – private equity firm Madison Capital Realty — is accused by its lender, the Community Preservation Corp., of not making mortgage payments on her building since January 2024, court records show. 'I have to pay rent on time, and they are not upholding their part of the bargain,' said Portofe, who pays $2,200 a month for a rent-stabilized one bedroom on East 12th Street. Market rate for one bedroom in her nabe rent for an average of $3,800, according to StreetEasy. A total of 209 rent-stabilized apartments across 15 East Village buildings are part of the lawsuit. Residential portfolio acquired by Madison acquired those units in 2021 as part of a residential portfolio for $153 million — a small part of the real estate investment firm's $22 billion assets under management. Madison Capital is accused of 'intentional misconduct' and 'gross negligence for 'wrongfully' collecting rent and failing to turn over that money to its lender — to whom it's said to owe more than $76 million in mortgage payments, interest and late fees. Madison Realty Capital didn't respond to The Post's request for comment. According to data from the Rent Guidelines Board — 10% of the 643,140 pre-1974 rent-stabilized apartments in New York City — an estimated 64,314 units – are losing money, a figured that's doubled since 2019 and is only expected to grow. Before the rental laws were overhauled, rent-stabilized buildings were a lot more profitable. 'The extent of this rent shortfall will grow over time, risking the long-term sustainability of these key segments of the city's affordable housing stock,' said Mark A. Willis, a senior policy fellow at NYU's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. And about to make matters even worse is a tax-lien sale the city Department of Finance is planning to hold on June 3 — the first since the pandemic — to sell the debt of landlords who've been delaying property tax, water or sewer payments to try to stay afloat. Whoever buys up that debt could foreclose on the properties to collect what's owed. Additional reporting by Helayne Seidman
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
NYC renters built a website to help them triumph over landlords trying to hide rent-stabilized apartments
Some New York City landlords try to hide their rent-stabilized units to make more money. Two frustrated renters wanted to make the availability of stabilized units in NYC more transparent. Their new website, RentReboot, alerts users when rent-stabilized apartments are listed on the market. In February 2024, Ilias Miraoui devised a plan to navigate the hellscape that is apartment hunting in New York City. The 28-year-old data scientist would populate one browser tab with StreetEasy, the popular Zillow-owned site that has the most comprehensive collection of NYC rental listings. In another tab, Miraoui pulled up the city's official list of buildings with rent-stabilized apartments, which are often cheaper because their monthly rent increases have been capped since 1969. The system worked. He scored a one-bedroom rent-stabilized apartment on the Lower East Side for $2,400 a month. Based on the rents of similar but market-rate units he toured, Miraoui estimates he's saved about $600 a month since he moved in. This process should be easier for everyone, he thought. So Miraoui teamed up with software developer Adam Sebti, 30, to launch RentReboot, a new website that alerts users when buildings on the rent-stabilized list have new listings on StreetEasy. "The idea is to show that information and make it more public," Sebti said. "So everyone can have a chance." RentReboot users enter what they're looking for in an apartment, including budget, number of bedrooms, preferred neighborhoods, and building amenities like an elevator or doorman. They receive two emails or texts each day summarizing new listings that fit their criteria for free. For $12 a month, users can get real-time email alerts and three texts a day with their best matches. For $20 a month, users get unlimited texts and first access to any new tools. The duo said they had 20,000 signups in the two weeks after launching the website in mid-April. Renters see these diamond-in-the-rough apartments as a saving grace in one of the country's most expensive housing markets. Citing recent city data, The New York Times reported in April that the typical monthly rent for a market-rate unit is around $2,000, but it's only $1,500 for a rent-stabilized unit. In February, the median asking price for NYC rentals was $3,645, 2.6% more than the year before, according to StreetEasy. A committee approves annual increases for stabilized units, which can be a maximum of 2.75% on a one-year lease and 5.25% on a two-year lease. Data from the City of New York shows that, as of 2023 — the most recent year with available data — there were about 2.3 million renter-occupied units in NYC. According to the Rent Guidelines Board, the group that sets and monitors rent increases for stabilized units, only about 1 million of those apartments are rent-stabilized. For many New Yorkers, finding a rent-stabilized apartment is like discovering the Holy Grail — and just as difficult to secure. In 2019, New York City repealed a former rule that allowed landlords to raise rents 20% on vacant units, aiming to curb soaring rents. Some housing-market analysts believe this has led certain landlords to keep their units off the market, hoping the rule will eventually return. The Housing and Vacancy Survey, a report published every three years by the New York Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the US Census Bureau, shows that between January and June 2023, about 33,000 of the city's roughly 2.3 million apartments were vacant and available for rent. The survey estimated that 26,310 rent-stabilized apartments were left vacant in that time period. While that is less than the 43,000 vacant units in the same survey in 2021, it is not much less than the 33,210 units of all housing that were for rent between January and July 2023. Some renters have had success challenging landlords who have illegally charged them market-rate rent for what is actually a stabilized unit. Last year, a New York City renter named Danielle, who declined to share her last name with BI for privacy reasons, reached a $150,000 settlement with her former landlord after discovering she was paying market-rate for a unit that was actually rent-stabilized. "I already didn't kind of trust landlords, but I guess I had lived in this world where I assumed that people, for the most part, told the truth about stuff," she told Business Insider in 2024. Units on RentReboot come from cross-checking addresses with the city's official list, but some are additionally flagged as verified if their StreetEasy profiles also mention their rent-stabilized status. Miraoui and Sebti are working on ways to quickly verify a unit's rent-stabilized status with its broker, even if it's not explicitly mentioned in the listing. They also plan to add additional features to the website using generative AI, like analyzing photos of windows in the listings to figure out which units have the most natural light. Read the original article on Business Insider
