Articles Posted in General Interest

Financial planning is essential when you are buying a house– the bank checks and you want to know what your monthly nut is going to be. But, you are buying an old house which appears to have several exemptions and possibly an absurdly low tax assessment. Will your taxes go up after you close on the house?

In New York, an assessor may not selectively reassess your new property unless she is prepared to explain why a reassessment is necessary while other properties’ assessment go unchanged. Why? Because reassessing particular properties or particular neighborhoods may result in discriminatory enforcement of tax laws.

Although the highest court in New York, the Court of Appeals, has not specifically articulated a ruling on selective reassessment, lower courts have even if the decisions have been split. The divided case law results from a balancing of considering the statutory and constitutional requirements of equality in assessing properties against evaluating individual facts on a case-by-case basis. In Feigert v. Assessor of the Town of Bedford, 204 A.D.2d 543, 614 N.Y.S.2d 200 (2nd Dep’t 1994), for example, the court upheld a reassessment of a property based on proof submitted by the petitioner that a prior assessment was based upon a resale of the property. In Towne House Village Condominium v. Assessor of the Town of Islip, 200 A.D.2d 749, 607 N.Y.S.2d 87 (2nd Dep’t 1994), on the other hand, the court struck down a reassessment that was based solely on a property’s conversion from an apartment complex to a condominium property.

As reported last year around this time, New York State revised its Power of Attorney Laws.

A Power of Attorney is a very powerful legal document which grants legal authority or “power” to another person to act on your behalf in a legal or business matter. The person authorizing an individual with power of attorney is known as the principal. The person being equipped with the power is known as the agent.

Retroactive to September 1st, 2009, the New York legislature has amended the law and the appropriate forms to address several concerns raised by various attorneys and trade associations. These revisions relax the 2009 law, including:

As reported in past entries on this Blog, bedbugs complaints and media reports of serious infestations in hotels, offices, and residential buildings are on the rise in New York City. As a result, bedbug disclosure is now required.

In a nutshell, when a renter and landlord negotiate a lease in New York City, both the tenant and the landlord must sign a disclosure listing the prior history of bedbug infestations reported in either the apartment or building during the preceding year. As with any law, there is an adjustment period. Before sighing with relief, landlords are worried that these disclosure forms will increase the length of time empty units remain vacant. Accordingly, as with any new law, changes may be in the horizon as New York City landlords lobby to have the disclosure modified or eradicated (like the bugs themselves). For example, they argue that the form is too broad because it makes no distinction between serious infestations and minor ones. Really– do you care?

The Bottom Line– as renters struggle to stay “infestation free,” landlords struggle to keep ahead of the game, proving profitable for exterminators.