The New York Foundation for Senior Citizens has a program that is dedicated to making minor home repairs easier for senior citizens within the confines of New York City.

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Are you on the Board and using either your personal or work email address to conduct Board business? If so, this may be a bad practice that can affect your personal and work lives. What do we recommend? Each board member should set up a brand new email address specifically for all board related items.

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In a Cooperative, the Board of Directors has a lot of leeway when approving or rejecting a proposed sale of shares (of course, they can only deny for legal reasons), but in a Condominium, since there is no Proprietary Lease and the apartments are all fee-simple in ownership, the Right of First Refusal plays an important part in how the Board of Managers can impact a pending sale or lease agreement. A Right of First Refusal is the mechanism that gives the Board the option of stepping into the proposed deal on behalf of all unit owners, instead of allowing the deal to go through with the purchaser that has submitted an application to purchase.

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In Property Management there are two types of property managers; the dedicated (full-time, on-site manager) and a portfolio manager. While many of the duties of either type of manager will be similar, there are some stark contrasts between the two.

A dedicated manager is a property manager that is responsible for only one client. Oftentimes, particularly if the property is large enough, the property manager will be on-site to deal with residents, staff and board issues as they pop up. The building, in turn is absorbing the complete cost of the salary + benefits of all management staff members that are assigned to their building full-time. This could include bookkeeping staff, assistant property managers and property managers. The management company, separately, will usually be handling the back-office or financial needs from their home base. A benefit of a dedicated property manager is that the manager assigned to the building will have a laser focus on the building and will not be involved in other issues throughout the portfolio of the management company.

A portfolio manager is exactly what it sounds like. Handling a portfolio of buildings, they could range in number from 2 to 8 properties, depending on the size and time requirements of the buildings that they are managing. Some managers may manage a very large building and then a small or medium-sized building whereas another may manage 8 smaller buildings. It really comes down to the expectation of time spent on each property.

In interviews, we’ll often be asked how many buildings the manager that is up for the particular job is currently handling. It’s a delicate balance when managing a portfolio of properties. Clients who retain a property manager that is working on a portfolio are typically not paying for a full-time property manager so this manager will be responsible for dealing with multiple buildings and boards at the same time.

Either way that a building should retain a property management companies services, they’ll always receive the same amount of attention and care from our staff and back-office and will receive the same financial and oversight services. Either way, it’s a win-win.