Removing Rent Stabilization?
Hello, I purchased a Brownstone a few years ago that has ten units including my own. I rent the nine (Class B) on the upper floors while living in the only Class A, but it is an absolute nightmare. They are all SROs and the building is Rent Stabilized. I finally acquired a Certificate of…
Hello, I purchased a Brownstone a few years ago that has ten units including my own. I rent the nine (Class B) on the upper floors while living in the only Class A, but it is an absolute nightmare. They are all SROs and the building is Rent Stabilized. I finally acquired a Certificate of Non Harassment a while ago after an epic battle with HPD. However, ever since the beginning it has been a constant war with my tenants who are impossible to evict with the regulations, and I am tired of the struggle. What I am looking for desperately is someone who can tell me how to remove Rent Stabilization. I see from the definition that it applies to buildings built between 1947 and 1974 and that have “six units or more”, and I was wondering if I were to convert the nine units that I rent down to five or less, would that remove the Rent Stabilization? If not, is there another way? Someone please help! Thank you.
You will get very little sympathy from the Bstoner crowd, myself included!!!
I believe an apartment becomes de-regulated once it hits a certain rental value. $2,400 per month pops into my head for some reason.
In the case of an SRO however, I am not sure how this would work out since I have yet to hear of an SRO which has a room value of 2,400 per month.
If you are converting the property to larger units with less apartments in the building overall, then it would seem that you could get around rent stabilization and charge market value.
This being NYC though, that seems too simple. If that was the case there are blocks and blocks of buildings in bushwick and ridgewood that would have gone that route years ago.
I would contact a lawyer and an architect who specialize in these types of conversions before proceeding any further.
You can kick everybody out and use the entire building as your personal residence. Short of that rather drastic step, which of course wipes out all of your rental income, I don’t know of any way in which you can remove everybody and then re-position the building as a five family.
Oh, yeah, you could buy out everybody’s leases. Budget about a mil’ for that, and then you have construction costs afterwards.
If you were completely naive going into this, you have my sympathy, but where the hell was your attorney? If you went into this with some sort of greedy plan….
It doesn’t sound as if you know what you bought. Have you taken some RS landlord classes? If not, you really should. This is a highly regulated environment. You can’t just evict tenants, that’s the whole point of RS. The answer to your question is no.
If you are tired of managing a SRO (I can empathize with that bit), you could try to sell it now that you have a certificate of non-harassment. Hopefully you paid very little in the first place.
not going to happen…The units can’t be combined unless you get people to vacate. Not going to happen.
And even if get # of units below the 6— units that were not combined still are rent-stabilized.
. <— see that, it’s the world’s tiniest violin! you are essentially asking for advice that could be life-ruining for a lot of people. you didnt realize buying such a building would be a nightmare?
*rob*
“How about being a good landlord? The price you paid obviously reflected the fact that it was occupied by tenants with protection under the rent stabilization laws.”
Exactly.
not a lawyer, but unless DHCR has reversed itself in recent years, you aren’t getting out of this as easy as you imagine i.e. i think the answer is no
Sell it and walk away now. You don’t own it — your tenants do.