Small buildiing with less than 8units

Nothing wrong with 6 units. You need to keep slightly higher money in your personal reserve fund due to unexpected repairs. When you bad financials, what do you mean? 100k reserves should be fine as smaller buildings typically assess for any major repairs. You want to make sure that the building is well maintained - boiler, facade, elevator, common areas etc.

In many ways, this is preferable for a long-term investment, because land appreciates in value, and buildings depreciate, and require redevelopment in the fullness of time. Other things being equal (i.e., for a given land area), the fewer units there are, each owner will own a higher proportion of the land.

To put it another way, if you think of any property's value as being a combination of (appreciating) land value + (depreciating) building value, a unit in a property with a small number of units will have a higher proportion of its value being the increasing land value, and a lower proportion being the building value - which is ideal.

As 300_mercer says, the only downside is in the case of repairs / operation costs, there are few other unit owners to split the costs with - the flipside being that in the long term, there are also fewer people to split the profits of land appreciation with!

Avoid taking advice from anonymous people on a message board. You might find yourself listening to someone who paid too much for a place beyond a reasonable budget and is nervous that an increase in rates will leave him stretched financially and under water when time to sell.

6 units is not that unusual. I would make sure you have a VERY thorough inspection done of the building. If something major needs to be fixed like 300_mercer said- boiler, facade, elevator etc, it can hit you pretty hard in the pocket. If it were a 2-3 unit coop in a brownstone " which I have seen a few of " then I would really think twice about it and only really consider buying it if the place was amazing.

Bryantpark, I used the same logic when I bought my first condo. This was in a country where, thanks to Ministry of Construction shenanigans, land reigns supreme and the structures built on it are ephemeral. In my mid-rise building, the ratio of units to land was low enough that I actually owned more land space (40 square meters) than room space (38). If the building were ever to be knocked down or destroyed with no compensation, that proportion of land that I own will always have value.

It really depends on the type of person you are and the property.

Personally, I would if I liked the property a lot.

Expect more work/cost etc.