Sponsor Sales

In all likelihood, the sponsor will be happy to do it because a sale is a sale, and capitalizing the taxes makes the selling price look higher in the public records.

If you run into resistance, it might be from your lender or the Board - and rightly so, perhaps. If you don't have enough liquid assets to pay the taxes, you might be overextending.

Why not have the seller pay the taxes, etc. In today's market the seller might agree, especially if you paid close to his/her asking price.

You'll find that in buildings where many units are sponsor sales (new dev being the most obvious example) negotiating on transactions costs is more favorable to the sponsor than negotiating on selling price, as the reported closing price won't look like a discount. However, if the sponsor isn't motivated to negotiate, it doesn't really matter. On the other hand, if the sponsor is very motivated, you may want to negotiate on the price as well as transaction costs. In a situation where you can't get the sponsor to budge and you still want the place, I have heard of cases where buyers have rolled the closing costs into the mortgage, but I don't know if that's harder to do in these days of tighter credit. Maybe one of the mortgage brokers here can offer advice. shong, diedven, MortgageMan787?
Besides the lack of a co-op board interview, the only other advantage to a sponsor sale is the lower down payment requirement, which isn't a help any more since in almost all cases the bank wants a minimum of 20%.

Disregard my previous mention of possible Board resistance; for a sponsor sale, that's obviously not an issue. But lender resistance might be a big one.