Recently, we used a technique to increase the size of a development site by “forcing” a co-op to sell its building, which had significant unused transferable development rights and sat on a relatively large land parcel.

This mechanism was possible because for 22 years, I was the president of Landmark Owners Corp, a 200 unit cooperative apartment building at 300 East 59^th Street. This experience taught me the ins and outs of how coops work and provided insights as to how to get coops to make decisions.

For those of you who may not know, in a Co-op, unlike a condominium where each owner actually has fee ownership of their walls, floors and their apartment unit, a co-op “owner” is a shareholder in a corporation that owns the building. The individuals own stock, not real estate. That corporation then issues a “proprietary lease” to the buyer of the shares and that lease entitles the shareholder to occupy a particular apartment unit.

The co-op corporation has a set of rules called “Bylaws” which determine how the corporations Board of Directors runs the building. Generally, the Bylaws contain a provision that says a “supermajority” of the shareholders can force the corporation to sell the building. This supermajority percentage is set by the Bylaws and generally ranges from 60 percent to 75 percent.

In the case where we created a sale, we were dealing with the president of a co-op that was the original sponsor of the conversion from rental to co-op, lived in the building and had no interest in selling. So we had to get to the shareholder. But how? These stockholders are not listed in a public data base. This is where the knowledge of the innerworkings of a co-op became valuable. We identified virtually all of the shareholders and sent them offers directly based upon what their share of the purchase price would be. These prices were more than 2x what the individual apartments were worth. And by purchasing their shares directly, they avoided double taxation.

We got a supermajority of shareholders to agree to a sale, forcing those that didn’t want to sell to capitulate. This story just goes to show that knowledge is power!

In New York City real estate, where legislative initiatives and zoning dictate what can and can’t be built, understanding the rules isn’t enough—you need to know how to leverage them. That’s where BKREA’s Policy & Zoning SWAT Team comes in. We help property owners and developers navigate zoning, maximize buildable potential, and unlock hidden value in their assets.

The Policy & Zoning SWAT Team specializes in turning complex zoning challenges into opportunities by identifying what can be built, how to optimize for the highest return, and what strategies will create the most value for investors, owners, and developers.

All of these objectives and the formation of the BKREA Policy & Zoning SWAT Team are designed around what has always been our top priority for 40 years: maximizing sale prices for our seller clients. For that entire time, we have always only represented sellers and have done so exclusively. Our objective has always been to create a level playing field for all buyers, but we remain completely agnostic with respect to who the buyer is. Our goal has always been to secure the highest possible price for our sellers.