First Service never reply emails or phone calls

An owner will be better in getting the response. If you have an accepted offer and sent buyer's due diligence questionnaire associated payment to them, you have some standing.

I have to say my experience with them is different, albeit a different building. Recently bought a condo, they were reasonably responsive according to my broker during the purchase process. Since buying, I have emailed them several questions. They don’t always respond after the first email, but after the second email, they respond quickly.

Maybe the management company is still work from home?
try email them, instead of calling.

To be clearer, managing agent is supposed to answer either owner/owner’s broker or complete due diligence questionnaire submitted by a buyer’s lawyer with required fee after the owner has informed the managing agent that they have accepted an offer from this particular buyer. If a buyer’s lawyer doesn’t get a response to due diligence questionnaire in a week or so, owner has to follow up with the managing agent.

I'll just say they're not my favorite. They also managed a condo that I owned.

LOL "not my favorite." This is a company with a business model that routes a lot of things through Texas, and that means sometimes getting New York info is not the swiftest.

That said, 300 is correct that at this point most managing agents are not going to answer substantive queries from across the table unless you fork over a fee first. Have you paid for a "custom questionnaire?"

ali r.
{upstairs realty}

My building used to use First Service. The important message here is 'used to'.

Thanks for everyone's suggestions. My situation is actually not about the questionnaire. Here is what I experienced with this building and its property management key contact:

I had an accepted offer, and went through mortgage application and board application. During this whole process, no one in property management told the owner or the buyer that the TCO was expired a year ago, and we have to wait for at least a few more months to the building to obtain the new TCO. The bank is not able to close the loan due to lacking of effective TCO. With this being said, the property management had done a poor job in communicating with residents regarding the issue, and renew the TCO. I know this impacted other owners in the building who wanted to sell their apartments during that period.

I had an agreement with the owner to quit the contract due to this issue. Obviously this cause huge loss on both my side and owner's side. I asked the property management to refund me the fees that I paid in the board application as majority of the fees should be refunded if the transaction is terminated and this got confirmed by the property manager as well. I actually emailed and called them tons of times in order to get a confirmation regarding the fees refund. Almost two months are gone, I still haven't got any checks so I write email back to follow up on the check status. The only message I got from them (after I send probably 10 follow emails) is that "Check might take three weeks to process and I will help check the status on it.". There was no follow up or feedback afterwards no matter I emailed or called. Hopefully "three weeks" does not turn into three months!

This whole thing was crazy and time consuming. It will save everyone's life if someone can just jump in and give any update. I guess they are hard working people like working 18 hours per day and cannot afford a minute to reply a single email. What an excellent service!

A screw-up like that is dependent on more than one person not doing their job. My first thought is that I am not an attorney, but according to publicly available records that I just spent an entire three minutes looking up, the TCO expired in March 2021. Your attorney didn't find this why?

My second thought is that this is certainly a screw-up of the building, which should know if its TCOs are rolling and be on top of renewing them. Of course, sometimes buildings don't. The last time this happened to me it was also an "uh-oh" in that seller didn't know, and we ended up essentially paying buyer for their time until we could get a new TCO in place (which I had to move heaven and earth to do, and took a few months, IIRC).

Since your seller chose not to go that route... they now have to resell the apartment, in an environment where a few units in the building are on the market. So my third thought is, what are the agents at .. (*pauses to scan the listings*) three major brokerage firms doing to speed the TCO renewal process? Is the managing agent not getting back to you because they're getting an earful from a bunch of real estate agents about how they should hurry up on the renewal? (ok, probably not).

Anyway, what a time suck. I'm sorry that this happened to you and wish you better luck in the future.

ali r.

Spadecat, As Ali points out, your attorney screwed up. How about you give us the attorney’s name as well. First Service clearly screwed up on no renewing the TCO. I know of at least one more managing agent who has let the TCO expire more than once for the same building. Most large managing agent are incompetent or don’t have an incentive to apply them selected or combination. In the case of refund, they probably just don’t want to give it to you. Have your lawyer (the one who screwed up) send the head of First Service a legal notice. Would love to hear how they react. But wait, your attorney doesn’t want to disturb his/her relationship with first service. So you will need to write a stinking letter and cause the high ups in First Services some pain.

Start by calling the senior most person twice a day and if you don’t hear back after two calls call the other senior management. It is about causing them and their staff as much distraction as possible so that they make you go away. https://www.fsresidential.com/corporate/about-us/leadership/

In general, Coop/Condo Boards don't want to pay what good management would cost because it would mean raising maintenance/common charges. It's one of the reasons we have seen an alarming increase in add-on fees so annual payments for "management" can remain lower.

30, While the managing agents are not well paid, there is clearly pervasive bad attitude and sloppiness with many managing agents which has nothing to do with low pay. If the board president needs something, they are perfectly competent and prompt.

Some managing agents are gems! However, in general, if someone has the diplomatic skills, ability to juggle multiple files, and attention to detail that will enable a super job, then they can find a more lucrative career elsewhere and flourish doing that.

^ This. And it's sad that there isn't a middle ground of people smart enough to take advantage of this. There is such a culture of laziness in NYC. I never hear this discussed but it's everywhere.

Thanks for everyone's feedback again! I appreciate the suggestions. My attorney said this was a rare situation for a building that is over 10 years' old, and title search should cover this, Unfortunately the title search was normally ordered last step during a transaction, wish we could find out earlier.

Stache you are right, similar situations happen everywhere. I wish there is a panel board that building and residents raise more voices, they paid tons of money to hire the management company for their service and that cost comes from owner's CC anyways.

Good luck with this

Thank you everyone for the suggestion and help! Wish everyone Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!