New England Condominium February 2022

Dealing With
Disruptive Residents
Empathy & Education vs.
Enforcement & Eviction
BY DARCEY GERSTEIN
Boards, Managers, Landlords
Understanding the Difference
BY A. J. SIDRANSKY
February 2022
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By its very nature, life in a co-op or condominium community is different from
living in a rental unit or a private home. While that statement may seem pretty
obvious, many owners of co-op and condo units lack a clear understanding of what
exactly those differences are, and how they determine the parameters of what residents
can and can’t do in their units and in the common areas of their building or HOA.
There’s also frequent confusion about what physical, administrative, and maintenance
elements boards and management are responsible for in a community, versus what falls
to individual owners. All too often, owners think of their board as a landlord, rather
than an elected governing body, and mistakenly expect them to handle everything
from sorting the recycling to changing a lightbulb in their bathroom.
While there is a fair bit of overlap between the respective roles of boards, managers,
and landlords, they’re not interchangeable. Knowing the difference—and even more
importantly, respecting it—can go a long way toward smoother, more amicable
relationships between co-op, condo, and HOA residents and their community
administrators.
Is the Board a Landlord?
In a word, no. “The board is not a landlord,” plain and simple, says Daniel Wollman,
CEO of Gumley Haft, a New York-based management firm. And while some more
obscure legal positions take the view that co-op boards are a kind of “stand-in” for
the landlord or property owner (as the widespread confusion over the rent protection
legislation passed in New York State in 2019 demonstrated), in reality, it’s not equivalent
to either of those roles.
“The board members, like all the shareholders, are proprietary lessees,” notes
Wollman. “They have the same rights and obligations as the rest of shareholders. The
board [members] are the elected representatives of the corporate shareholders in a
co-op, or the unit owners in a condominium, [and the] governing documents of the
building dictate their authority. As such their responsibilities vis-à-vis individual units
Conflicts of Interest
Recognize Them Now to
Avoid Problems Later
BY A J SIDRANSKY
If you live in a condo or a co-op, you
most likely have heard the term
fidu-
ciary duty
, usually in reference to the
responsibilities and obligations of board
members and management. But what is
a fiduciary duty? In essence, it’s a legal
relationship between two parties that
gives one party the right to act and make
important decisions on behalf of the
other. Fiduciary responsibility is a cor-
nerstone of both board and management
service. Board members and managers
alike must put their obligation to the
corporation or association over personal
gain—which means avoiding situations
that could present a conflict of interest.
Simply put, a conflict of interest is a
situation in which the concerns or aims of
two different parties are incompatible. In
a business environment such as a condo
association or cooperative corporation,
it’s a situation in which someone—like
a board member or property manager—
is in a position to benefit personally
from actions or decisions made in their
official capacity.
Honesty = Best Policy
“A board member has a conflict when
he or she has a financial interest in the
subject matter being decided,” explains
Mark Hakim, an attorney with New
York-based law firm Schwartz Slad-
kus Reich Greenberg Atlas. “Examples
include a board member (or possibly
someone in a board member’s imme-
diate family) having an interest in the
building doing business with a specific
company, or a board member who is also
a broker handling sales in the building.
Such conflict must be disclosed, and can
be waived by the board—but disclosure
is the key. Board members must disclose
their conflict, and if it’s not waived or
If you live in, work in, or provide ser-
vices for a co-op, condo, or HOA, you
know that however harmonious a build-
ing or association is in general, there is
always that one person—or perhaps more
than one—who throws a wrench in the
works. It could be the guy who seems to
take pleasure in disrespecting the door-
man, or the lady who insists on feed-
ing the feral cats (and by extension the
neighborhood rats), or the family who
lets their kids play basketball
inside
their
apartment. These are the people who—at
best—regularly suck up more than their
fair share of energy and resources from
the community, or—at worst—create an
undesirable, unhealthy, or even danger-
ous living situation for themselves and
their neighbors.
Now throw in one of the most devas-
tating pandemics the modern world has
ever seen, and it’s a wonder we haven’t all
turned into some form of
that guy.
Af-
ter two years of loss—of loved ones, of
homes, of jobs, of normalcy— the news
has been full of reports of incidents rang-
ing from the outlandish to the criminal
going down in settings that are normally
benign: grocery stores, airplanes, hair
salons, restaurants, school board meet-
ings, even medical facilities. Whether it’s
for attention (even the negative kind),
an expression of deep frustration and
anxiety over the seemingly endless state
of crisis, or just jerks happy to have an
excuse to be especially jerky, it seems
that more and more people are indulg-
ing in disruptive, combative behaviors.
Has this also been the case in the nation’s
multifamily communities? We spoke to
several pros in the industry to find out.
The COVID Conundrum
The coronavirus’s rampant transmis-
sion and attendant restrictions on public
life have made time at home essential to
survival—both in the sense of avoiding
the spread of a potentially deadly conta-
gion, and in the sense of keeping work,
family, and other fundamental functions
going from within one’s own domestic
confines. In a co-op or condo, particu-
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are not the same as a landlord.”
What About Management?
In a rental setting, the owner and the management of the
property are often the same entity. Scott Wolf, CEO of BRIGS,
a property management firm based in Boston, notes that his
responsibilities as a manager in a rental building are basically
the same as they are in a condo building. The difference is that
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