Condo Board Approval

If you do not provide what is needed in the application, the condo managing agent will refuse to submit it to the board. You can always get your lawyer involved and force the issue. However, it is much easier to make sure that all the information is submitted but it does not have to meet any particular standard - a recommendation letter can be three lines; financials can be barebones.

Firstly, like with everything else, it depends on the governing documents - Offering Plan, ByLaws, etc. And these can be altered over time by the owners. If I am remembering correctly, there have been cases where Condominiums have changed their Rules from right of first refusal to board approval (I seem to remember that at 2 Cornelia Street there was an issue with a tenant which got bad enough where this happened).
There are also exceptions - most condominium offering plans state that in the case of a foreclosure there is no right of first refusal by the condominium.
In most Coop sales of unsold shares, there is wording to the effect of "with the approval of the then managing agents, which shall not be unreasonably withheld." The second part of that is important because usually Coops can reject an application for "any reason or no reason." So if a managing agent did reject a sales application on unsold chairs, they could be required to give the reason why, would probably not be allowed to rely on "business judgment", nor would they be allowed to give the reason as that the board told them to do so (but again, this depends specifically on what is in the offering documents: there are some coops, like most of the Rockrose conversions, where this right is not limited solely to sponsor sales, but also the first resale. Others offer less protections for holders of unsold shares. Many also offer the protection to sales of foreclosures.)
I will also note that in almost all cases coops do not have the right of first refusal, so in the case of a sponsor selling a unit at what the board felt was to low a price they would not have the right to come in and purchase the unit instead of the proposed purchaser.
Lastly, I would think the easiest way to word a contract as far as what would be required of the purchaser is to simply enunciate what information the purchaser must supply right in the contract. You could go as far as making the purchase application a rider to the contract, stating that the purchaser must fully complete the application, but also that if the board insists on further document requests that the purchaser would have the right to rescind.

Remember the board at 817 5th Ave exercised their right of first refusal to prevent Richard Nixon from purchasing there.

I also know of several instances where Condominiums thought a price was way too low, exercised their right of first refusal, and then flipped the units for higher prices

Hmmm, interesting but I think very rare. V tough for a condo board to round up the dough.

This is what typically happens in a condo process: https://www.hauseit.com/the-condo-application-process-in-nyc/

Everything else is definitely the exception rather than the rule.

30, thanks for the thorough response.

I was primarily thinking of Southgate coop which has a sponsor unit for sale which I believe may also be a first resale. This coop board is/was notorious for being a major pain when it comes to board approval, not just for the amount of paperwork (to include up 6 recommendation letters) but also apparently to keep prices high. The sponsor unit listing indicates no board approval is required but I was told that management approval is required and that the board package is identical in either case. I asked the broker if "shall not be unreasonably withheld" language is in the offering plan but they never got back to me.

In looking at the project's listing history, I have seen a few accepted offers that are now back on SE so I assume some were board rejects. So, if one were to purchase a sponsor unit, perhaps both of these problems can be avoided or at least mitigated. This sponsor unit is priced higher than similar-sized units in Southgate and has been on and off the market a few times since 2011 with no recorded sale.

As for the purchase contract, I hope to see more general boilerplate language that could be used to protect a buyer from a board or managing agent rejection so as not to raise a red flag with seller.

I increasingly think that I am being overly optimistic that I can purchase a coop, whether a sponsor unit or not, with little to no hoops to jump through.

I live in a condo with a lot of board drama and one board member tried to block my sale, so I had to look into this. Typically the bylaws will provide the building with a certain period of time in which to exercise the right of first refusal (sometimes just a few days but often up to 30 days). So I suppose a condo buyer could just try to wait out the right of refusal period, but I would imagine you'd need to make sure your seller was OK with that and that you were not in breach of your contract to buy. Furthermore, the banks etc. typically expect to see a waiver signed by the condo board at close and you'd have to make sure they were also OK with that. Overall, it just doesn't seem worth the hassle.

I handled a few foreclosures as a broker for banks back in the 1990's and as you stated the board was a bit rough on those.
Note that this was an MJ Raynes conversion. As such, I could foresee an argument from the Coop that even though the unit is a "Sponsor Sale" that the chain of "unsold shares" status was broken when they went bankrupt. I would check with the managing agent to confirm the Co-op's stance on these units regarding Board/Managing Agent/ whatever approval they think will be required.

Also on the subject of Southgate, even though the buildings were designed by the same architect and built at the same time, there are some non insignificant differences in floor plans across buildings. Even more importantly, however, the share counts are a bit all over the place (if I am remembering correctly) so you need to be careful examining the relative share count of a unit you are interested in purchasing versus other similar units. This is because if you have two units which you think are virtually identical, but the share count on the unit you were thinking of purchasing is higher, the value will be negatively impacted by the higher maintenance. As such, you may be using a unit's sale price as a comparable, but you need to make an adjustment for maintenance differences. And since the maintenances in this complex are at the higher end of the scale, the impact of an even higher maintenance may be exponential to the simple calculation of how much debt service the differential would carry.

WRT "V tough for a condo board to round up the dough."
They don't necessarily have to to. I am aware of cases where they exercised their right of first refusal and then flipped the contract for a profit to an investor who closed on the unit.