Readers have been sending me examples of bureaucratic city rules that waste time and money. Here’s one that has persisted for decades: HPD’s annual property registration.
As the treasurer of a small condominium, I have been doing this annoying task for 30 years — and it still hasn’t been digitized.
As multifamily owners and property managers know, the form is online and is populated with the information from the previous year, which is helpful. But here’s the problem: You have to print it, sign it and mail it in. What the heck?
HPD’s technology is decades behind. In 1969, NASA engineers on Earth could chat with astronauts on the moon. Today, someone on a street corner can FaceTime a climber on the summit of Mount Everest. Yet HPD is still using paper for property registrations.
That means mail by the truckload is still being dumped at the agency’s doorstep and physically opened by city employees. Perhaps these millions of signed documents are being digitized and shredded, but my guess is the city leases storage space for them.
Not only does that waste time and money, but every so often, a fire erupts and irreplaceable records are incinerated. But the main problem is the inconvenience for multifamily owners.
“I don’t know why we can’t upload it like other things — check, check, check, e-sign and you’re done,” said David Eshaghoff, a Great Neck-based owner of rental buildings in Washington Heights and Hamilton Heights.
Adding insult to injury, for the privilege of mailing in registration forms, owners must pay $13 per property. At one time, they had to pay by check. The lone innovation that I can recall in three decades of filing is that the $13 can now be paid by autopay, like property taxes.
What happens if you forget to sign or miss the deadline to mail the form to HPD? You end up “spending hours dealing with them because they don’t respond to emails or phone calls,” one landlord told me via LinkedIn. “It is awful and pointless.”
Skipping the process is not an option, Eshaghoff said, because if a building’s registration is not current, violations cannot be cleared.
What we’re thinking about: Does using contractors with higher-paid construction workers pay for itself? It’s a crucial question for projects using 485x, with its wage floor for 100-or-more-unit projects. Developer Eli Lever has done the math and his answer is “no.”
“While it’s true that often (but not always) these firms may produce a higher quality build in a shorter timeline, going from 15 months to 12 months on a $40 million total deal might save $1 million or so in interest payments,” he said by email. “The additional cost to build with prevailing wages is multiples of that.”
Add in the compliance costs of building a 485x project with more than 99 units and it’s easy to see why few are being done. The difference is less glaring in expensive neighborhoods, Lever noted, but there, condo developers — who don’t use 485x and have no affordability requirements — tend to outbid rental developers for sites.
Send thoughts to eengquist@therealdeal.com.
A thing we’ve learned: About 15 percent of positions at the city’s housing agencies are said to be vacant, but I suspect it’s higher because the city’s hiring process is even more insane than I thought.
For civil service positions, even if an applicant can figure out what the obscure job titles mean and how to apply, it can take about a year to get through the process. A former employee for DCAS, the city’s administrative agency, told me this cannot be fixed without cooperation from the unions. Zohran Mamdani should junk the whole system and start from scratch.
Elsewhere…
A longtime critic of New York City’s real estate industry complained on X that Zohran Mamdani appointed Jed Walentas, chairman of the Real Estate Board of New York, to his transition team’s housing committee. Her issue was that Walentas heads a lobbying group.
I replied that everyone on the transition team is an advocate for something.
For a completely unbiased transition team, the incoming mayor would have to appoint only newborns. Between feedings and nap time, they would have little time to accomplish anything.
Closing time
Residential: The top residential deal recorded Tuesday was $26.5 million for a 6,618-square-foot condominium unit at 520 West 28th Street in Chelsea. The Hudson Advisory Team at Compass had the listing.
Commercial: The top commercial deal recorded was $88.6 million for 205 East 42nd Street in Grand Central. The Durst Organization sold the property to David Werner Real Estate. The three transactions included the fee title transfer, the condo units going to one company and another deed for part of the condos going to two entities.
New to the Market: The highest price for a residential property hitting the market was $11.25 million for a 2,619-square-foot, sponsor-sale condominium at 520 Fifth Avenue in Midtown. Corcoran Sunshine has the listing.
Breaking Ground: The largest new building permit filed was for a proposed 108,838-square-foot, 29-unit, mixed-use project at 31 Church Avenue in the Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn. Kao-Hwa Lee Architects filed the permit. The property is tied to Ben Tyberg.
— Matthew Elo
