Maintenance fees

no. never. maint. is the operating costs. taxes are going up, not down to fund the gap in city budget. Deflation unlikely. Buildings plan the budget off of previous maint. plus growth in expenses. Not probable that those expenses are expected to decrease. the buildings would like to build a slush but the proprietary lease keeps it tight.

Maintenance has to do with expenses. Unless expenses go down, maintenance won't go down. So, if we have big time deflation and the price of everything goes down down, you MIGHT get maintenance decreases, but that is highly unlikely. In general, your biggest chance of a maintenance decrease in any building is if they choose to get a fully self amortizing underlying mortgage and pay it off, as opposed to the usual "5 like 30" or "interest only".

and to answer some points I anticipate coming up:
1) No, RE Taxes are not going to go down.
2) No, the cost of fuel won't go down enough to cause maintenance to go down, to some extent because
3) Boards will always find ways to spend ever nickel they can get their hands on, and as a result most are really "behind" what they should actually be charging because they can't politically make as many raises as they should.

How Do I find coops with the lowest maint fees. Is there a way to search that?

Use SE's Advanced Search. Whether you like what you see in the results is another story.

I've never had the balls to do it but many apartments with very high maint, trade at significant discounts. If you are cash heavy, it is often a good arbitrage. That said, there is a reason they trade low: no one else wants them. Hence, I've never actually bought one. But I think its an interesting investment to consider.

If you add the apartment's share of the building's mortgage to the sale price, you get a good picture of what you're taking on. That should be a dollar-for-dollar factor in how we look at prices, but often isn't.

Most of the other reasons for relatively-high maintenance have more to do with how the owners want to live. E.g., heavy staffing. Or better location with higher taxes. Tougher to figure whether the price is sufficiently discounted from the equivalent apartment with lower maintenance.

Some of the lower maintance fees are in the better serviced bldgs. ( sutton place, UES near the park.) Often those bldgs have rental properties (Look at Madison Avenue.)

If the building converted at a good time (good for the buyers, that is) then less likely to have been saddled with a big mortgage by the sponsor.

Commercial space is great, too, especially now that the IRS's 20% rule is gone. Too much commercial space can detract from the building, though.

Always lots of tradeoffs. You really need to look and see *why* maintenance is unusually high or low.

If you want low maintenance, you will have to sacrifice.

1 - Lower floor.
2 - No Doorman.
3 - Part-Time Super.
4 - No Porter (Super does that job, so when he's off, dirty building)
5 - Low Reserve Fund
6 - Undesirable Views
7 - drum roll please....... Non-Stop Assessments......

Any combination of the above can yield lower maintenance, but not always.

"I've never had the balls to do it but many apartments with very high maint, trade at significant discounts. If you are cash heavy, it is often a good arbitrage. That said, there is a reason they trade low: no one else wants them. Hence, I've never actually bought one. But I think its an interesting investment to consider."

At the bottom of the market, it's almost always a good play, at the top of the market it's almost always a bad play. At the bottom, no one will buy the high maintenance units (examples: 1) 372 Fifth Avenue took back a penthouse unit and put it on the market for $10 plus half of whatever the appreciation was when the purchaser sold it. No one took them up on it. 2) 250 Mercer: you could buy any number of 1 BR units for just high of $100,000 that at peak went up to $800's to 7 figures).

"If the building converted at a good time (good for the buyers, that is) then less likely to have been saddled with a big mortgage by the sponsor."

Single biggest reason for "high maintenance" (and we have to remember to compare apples to apples service wise) is over leverage (too high underlying mortgage).

"Some of the lower maintance fees are in the better serviced bldgs. ( sutton place, UES near the park.) Often those bldgs have rental properties (Look at Madison Avenue.)"

I think you'll find more of a correlation between service level and NUMBER OF UNITS (i.e. how many share in the service $ paid) than ownership of commercial space.

"Commercial space is great, too, especially now that the IRS's 20% rule is gone"

I could be wrong, but I don't think it's "gone" just that they added a couple of loopholes for a bunch of Coops who failed the old "good income/bad income" rule to slip through. The first is if 80 percent or more of the total square footage of the property is used or available for use by tenant-shareholders for residential purposes. The second is if 90 percent or more of expenditures are for the benefit of tenant-shareholders.

30 Years - That is a really bizarre story, when did 372 Fifth do that? Sorry if I don't follow this board enough to know but are you a broker, investor, both?

One of the deciding reasons we continued renting was the likelihood of big maintenance increases + further rent decreases.

We thought we had the rent-to-own ratio we worked out... until we got a 20% discount on our rent and two of the units we were semi-serious about buying had large maintenance increases from 2008 to 2009. What initially looked like a fairly even ratio ended up being a $1,000+/month advantage in favor of renting. Given the magnitude of the discount we received, the fact that our building has now gone even lower, and the general state of the economy, I think it will take until at least 2012 before our building's rents hit 2007 levels again.

One of the arguments for buying has always been to lock in your house payment. I actually think there's a significantly stronger argument that you're doing that with a rental, especially these days. Maintenance and/or property tax are variable costs subject to just as many uncontrollable factors as rents, and your moving costs are exponentially higher. In a normal market, every extra tax increase chips away at your property value, as it's one less dollar a buyer can spend on a mortgage payment.

30yrs, right, they took away one hard-and-fast rule but added a couple of looser ones. Mine has no commercial at all, so haven't paid much attention.

my bldg has pretty low maint fees. i live (for one more week) in a 2bed/1 bath, 1100 sq ft and my maintenance just went up from $1193 to about $1225. it is the lowest maintenance i have seen in this neighborhood and we have full-time staff, porters, i live on 11th floor of 15, roof deck and backyard garden and the bldg is in good financial shape.

what are you lookng for umbrella? there are a couple units for sale in the bldg. one by owner.

Sniper: 2bed/2 bath with light, air nice floors and enough ceilings so I don't bump my head while I am playing hoops in the 2nd bR.

none of those in my bldg. 2 beds only have 1 bath and only two have sold in the last 5 years (and i was one of them).

"30 Years - That is a really bizarre story, when did 372 Fifth do that? Sorry if I don't follow this board enough to know but are you a broker, investor, both?"

But you have to know the maintenance was like $3500 a month when people were expecting less than half of that. Also, people tend to "get funny" when the maintenance on a unit is higher than their mortgage payment. So, naturally, as prices move up, "max acceptable mtc" moves up as well.

Don't remember exactly. Somewhere mid 90's.

And "all of the above and a lot more". (I put a list here http://www.streeteasy.com/nyc/talk/discussion/12361-why-buy-an-apt-wrent-controlled-tenant)