When the average American taxpayer (or tax-dodger, one supposes) hears the word “audit,” they’re likely struck with a feeling somewhere between annoyance and terror. Usually that’s because being audited means that something has been found a…
Cash flow is the lifeblood of any multifamily residential community, be it a rental building, co-op, condo, or HOA. However, because the latter three are nonprofit entities, maintaining consistent cash flow is even more critical to their he…
As has been widely reported lately, Fannie Mae, which is under the conservatorship of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) has developed a secret blacklist of condominiums, HOAs and co-ops that are ineligible for “conventional financin…
With inflation and supply chain disruptions dominating much of the news these days, multifamily boards and managers are feeling the squeeze, whether in the form of rising prices for necessary supplies, or lack of those supplies altogether, …
In a May 3 statement, National Housing Conference (NHC) President/CEO and former Treasury Department official during the Obama and Trump administrations David M. Dworkin expressed serious concerns about the Fed’s move to increase interest …
The recent failures of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), Signature Bank, and First Republic have shaken public faith in the US banking industry, again. While not the disastrous level of bank failures that led to the Great Recession in 2008, recent…
In early 2020, our firm was hired to prepare a reserve study for an unremarkable 136-unit, 12-story condominium in south Florida. It was the kind of association you could drive right by without noticing, not much different from all the othe…
In our current environment of steeply rising costs, it’s more important than ever to safeguard your reserves to ensure that your association has sufficient funds available for immediate and future capital projects. Unfortunately, many assoc…
A recent article on a real estate website posed a common question: What’s the best way for a condo board to collect unpaid common charges? The author of the article - presumably an attorney - gave some pretty good advice…and some not so g…
Like baseball players, condo and co-op owners are often creatures of habit. Settled into their units, they’re used to costs rising over time, but on a regular and predictable basis. That means once a year - usually in January - and by a co…