Proprietary lease expiration

It's not exactly analogous but I once lived in a co-op full of attorneys where a subcommittee of the board pulled the prop lease to change some pronouns (basically to allow same-sex couples to have equivalent rights to those that hetero couples had) and then was surprised when a shareholder was selling and was like, "hey, I have to get that prop lease out of committee stat."

Anyway, I'm not a lawyer but IIRC that got fixed in a week. It seems to be a document that can be turned pretty fast.

I am sort of puzzled, though, by the idea that the shareholder didn't know when the prop lease was expiring. This is something one *should* go over carefully at purchase, possibly via the proxy of your attorney but since it's basically what you're buying you should look at the document, yeah?

It's a <50 page document, and in the first two prop leases I just pulled out of my email, the expiration date is on the first page.

I mean certainly the board should have been running a countdown clock, like "we know the building's proprietary lease is expiring in Year Z but we plan to deal with it in Year Y" should have been a point raised at every board meeting within, say, three years of expiration ... but it's also kind of on the shareholder to know their documents.

Easily fixed and should not be an issue. W/r/t whether it signifies "poor management," my opinion is no. It should be a non-issue that can be resolved in short order. The bank was right to flag it, but it should not hold anything up.

*should not hold anything up because it can and should be fixed immediately.
If it is not fixed immediately and does hold up (or defeat) the sale, then my opinion would shift to "yes, bad management."

Would be very unusual / incompetent for it to actually expire - isn't the idea to keep 30+ years on it in order to match a typical mortgage term? Could see that slipping through the cracks until a new buyer's attorney starts diligence. Extension requires majority shareholder consent so that process can take a little while but it's in everyone's interest to do so, so not a problem.

I think the issue may often go undetected in buildings where mortgages have been historically rare.

What will be interesting is whether shareholders respond when the management company moves to fix the issue. I think in some of these buildings, some of the shareholders are of a vintage that modern communication is not their forte such that fixing what should be a non-issue ends up taking so much time that a prospective shareholder runs away. Hopefully Yentle's friend will keep her updated and she reports back. :)

I'm surprised shareholder was not aware of landlease timeline in the first place. Understandable if the apt had been inherited for example.

Proprietary lease (co-op corp as lessor and individual shareholders as lessees, same lease for every apt in the co-op), not a land lease between a third party and the co-op corp

Ah ha thank you.