Articles Posted in Real Estate Hints and Help

Financial planning is essential when you are buying a house– the bank checks and you want to know what your monthly nut is going to be. But, you are buying an old house which appears to have several exemptions and possibly an absurdly low tax assessment. Will your taxes go up after you close on the house?

In New York, an assessor may not selectively reassess your new property unless she is prepared to explain why a reassessment is necessary while other properties’ assessment go unchanged. Why? Because reassessing particular properties or particular neighborhoods may result in discriminatory enforcement of tax laws.

Although the highest court in New York, the Court of Appeals, has not specifically articulated a ruling on selective reassessment, lower courts have even if the decisions have been split. The divided case law results from a balancing of considering the statutory and constitutional requirements of equality in assessing properties against evaluating individual facts on a case-by-case basis. In Feigert v. Assessor of the Town of Bedford, 204 A.D.2d 543, 614 N.Y.S.2d 200 (2nd Dep’t 1994), for example, the court upheld a reassessment of a property based on proof submitted by the petitioner that a prior assessment was based upon a resale of the property. In Towne House Village Condominium v. Assessor of the Town of Islip, 200 A.D.2d 749, 607 N.Y.S.2d 87 (2nd Dep’t 1994), on the other hand, the court struck down a reassessment that was based solely on a property’s conversion from an apartment complex to a condominium property.

As reported last year around this time, New York State revised its Power of Attorney Laws.

A Power of Attorney is a very powerful legal document which grants legal authority or “power” to another person to act on your behalf in a legal or business matter. The person authorizing an individual with power of attorney is known as the principal. The person being equipped with the power is known as the agent.

Retroactive to September 1st, 2009, the New York legislature has amended the law and the appropriate forms to address several concerns raised by various attorneys and trade associations. These revisions relax the 2009 law, including:

As reported in past entries on this Blog, bedbugs complaints and media reports of serious infestations in hotels, offices, and residential buildings are on the rise in New York City. As a result, bedbug disclosure is now required.

In a nutshell, when a renter and landlord negotiate a lease in New York City, both the tenant and the landlord must sign a disclosure listing the prior history of bedbug infestations reported in either the apartment or building during the preceding year. As with any law, there is an adjustment period. Before sighing with relief, landlords are worried that these disclosure forms will increase the length of time empty units remain vacant. Accordingly, as with any new law, changes may be in the horizon as New York City landlords lobby to have the disclosure modified or eradicated (like the bugs themselves). For example, they argue that the form is too broad because it makes no distinction between serious infestations and minor ones. Really– do you care?

The Bottom Line– as renters struggle to stay “infestation free,” landlords struggle to keep ahead of the game, proving profitable for exterminators.

I just noticed this recent post in the NYTimes about more modest weekend homes and retreats in the Hudson Valley.

When purchasing a second home we recommend hiring a local real estate attorney to give you the “lay of the land,” to direct you as to issues that arise in “upstate” real estate transactions, and to help you avoid the pitfalls. In the past three years, as second home prices have fallen in the region, distressed real estate has become a haven for problems caused by neglect, economic desperation and ignorance. Leaking oil tanks, failed septics, contaminated water, even leaky roofs have caused problems.

Planning Boards play an important role in shaping how our community will look, feel, act and react. In a very real sense, the Planning Board is charged with overseeing the “orderly” development of real property, and in the process shaping the “public” face. Developers want the best return on their “investment,” homeowners want to protect what they know, and the Planning Board must implement the laws as enacted by the Village, Town, County and State, a difficult tight rope for a Board comprised of local volunteers and neighbors.

The process begins with an application to the Building Inspector. The homeowner (we’ll call her the “Applicant”) completes an application with the Building Inspector, who reviews the proposal (or “Site Plan”) to see if it meets various code requirements– is the lot large enough to support the planned structure, is drainage adequately directed to prevent run off, are the plans professionally drawn and contain all of the technical data required by New York State’s building code. The Building Inspector next refers the Applicant to the Planning Board with instructions to “post” notice of a “public hearing.” In Nyack, we meet the first Monday of every month to hear these applications.

The Planning Board receives the Site Plan and the Building Inspector’s opinion, and we review against our local Zoning Code and Comprehensive Master Plan. In Nyack, our Comprehensive Master Plan was adopted by the Village Board on January 11, 2007 (a process that took many years of hard work by various civic minded volunteers). Our Comprehensive Master Plan (available on line or at the Village Hall) sets the tone from its first sentence, “The Village of Nyack is a special place, proud of its historic, scenic and socially heterogeneous character– quite unlike the suburbs to the west.”