The maintenance charges seem a bit high for the units in this building. Does anyone know why?

yep...a huge mortgage on the building. Basically you are only buyign about 60% of the apartment as the buildings owes so much on the underlying mortgage.

I've never understood thwy that didnt matter to most new yorkers.......

Because by and large, most New Yorkers don't look at it that way -- as buying only "60% of the apartment". They look at it only in terms of THEIR mortgage and their bottom-line monthly maintenance charges. The building's underlying mortgage is not on their personal balance sheet, and unlike the size of their personal mortgage, has no effect on their ability to sell and leave.

Most co-ops were formed 20 or more years ago, and their underlying mortgages reflect that. A co-op accountant once told me they look at anything under $50K per apartment as being no big deal.

There're some co-ops with huge mortgages, in the tens of millions, often because they'd been land-lease and then recently bought the land. E.g., 2 Fifth and that one in the far-east 60s.

With those, when you allocate the mortgage per apartment, the numbers get high enough to impact the maintenance and prices.

Agreed, a lot of buyers don't pay much attention to the share of the debt (mortgage) and assets (reserve fund) they'd be taking on.

Forgot to say, that $50K is looked at in context.

Take 998 Fifth, with only 18 apartments. They're spending more than $6,000,000 on facade work. If they'd had to borrow, that'd be more than $300,000 per apartment, but still trivial relative to prices there.

(As it happened, several years ago they sold their ground-floor doctors' offices as an apartment, for $9,000,000, so didn't have to borrow.)

Didn't the St. George used to be an SRO, years ago -- before it got converted to condos?

There is probably a lot of mortgage debt on this property, as deanc said.

it was a hotel then turned long term welfare hotel, then..... finally condos

It's $11,000,000, not bad for that big a building.

The co-op has a pretty good web site: http://www.111hicksstreet.com/building/development_finance.php4