Yes and No

The co-op Board experience, largely unique to the New York area and, to a smaller degree, to Chicago, presents more challenges to broker, buyer, and seller alike than any other aspect of our real estate business. There is no negotiation. While each building has a list of requirements, one can never really be certain what each particular building is looking for. Buildings do tend to have personalities, but they can change as different individuals rotate on and off the Board. Sometimes Boards seem to evince an almost total lack of awareness of housing discrimination prohibitions. So when, as often happens, a buyer asks one of our Warburg agents what the building is looking for, we can never honestly say we are 100% sure. Boards accept people who surprise us and they turn down people who surprise us. It is always a little bit of a crap shoot.

As agents, our role is to facilitate. Too often in the past the agent has been a more fastidious, and sometimes inappropriate, gatekeeper than the Board. Agents will say “He could never get into that building” when, in fact, perhaps he could. It is a point of pride for me that at Warburg we consider it a sort of moral obligation to try to eliminate perceived prejudices in the way applicants are handled. Because, as I said above, you just never know.

So here are a few words of advice. First, for buyers: no one can promise you a particular outcome. A skilled agent with a real understanding of how Boards work can substantially improve your chances, but there is no way to eliminate some element of uncertainty. That is simply the nature of the process. What you CAN do is make sure you present a perfect package. That means working closely with your agent to make sure your financials are absolutely clear (and every number is fully explained and accounted for) and that your letters come from people who really know you and are able to write articulately and in some detail about different aspects of your life. The best letters come from co-op residents (or even better, Board members) in the neighborhood. However if you don’t know people in the neighborhood, don’t worry. Just make sure the letters are detailed and descriptive. And PLEASE, don’t write them all yourself. Board members are not stupid; they can see an identical style moving from one letter to the next. And they DO, increasingly, contact the references to verify the content of the letters.

Different buildings do have different personalities. Some are more focused on money, some on neighborliness. So there is no way to say how much you need to show in assets or income to be acceptable to a Board. Every building is different, and every applicant is different. What would be an acceptable financial profile in one applicant with a particular set of social and business connections might be unacceptable in another. But there is no situation in which a logical, attractive, clear and polished package does not exert significant influence. Buyers, please remember that before you explode to your agent that you will not provide ONE MORE THING! It’s an onerous process, but every co-op owner has gone through it before you.

As a seller the most important thing you can do is choose a likely candidate. Especially today, many sellers have options. Price certainly counts, but we always urge our sellers to remember that a bit less money, if it comes with a better overall profile, may be the smarter choice.

In the end, the buyer, the seller, and the agents are all working towards a common goal: closing the sale. Co-op Boards are powerful, and they can at times seem arbitrary. Over the years, thanks largely to the professionalism and expertise of agents, co-ops have developed a far broader constituency: married and single, kids and no kids, straight and gay, white and non-white. We at Warburg are proud of the work our industry does to make the Board process as clear and manageable as possible, even if we cannot control the outcome. Co-ops contain many of the stateliest and most beautiful residences in New York. They will always be in demand, so the Board process will always be a part of our business. Assembling a package is like putting a 500 piece puzzle together: frustrating, time consuming, and ultimately satisfying; I still love that “Aha” moment when it all falls into place! The outcome may be out of our hands, but if all the parties work together to shape the process we hugely improve our chances of success.

Source: http://www.warburgrealty.com/blog/?p=990