New York City has some amazing real-estate bargains — as long as you don’t look too closely. For instance, a 25-unit apartment building is listed for sale on 135th Street in Harlem. The structure, containing recently renovated one- and two-bedroom apartments, is located near City College and major subway lines.
You can buy the entire building for $2 million.
On the other hand, if you don’t want to own 25 apartments and just one will do, you can buy a single apartment on the same block.
That one unit, a co-op, will set you back half a million.
Why such a discrepancy in the pricing of these two properties? It’s not that you get a discount for buying in bulk. The answer is that 24 of the 25 units in the $2 million building are rent-regulated.
And that means that, under a 2019 New York state law, the current rent is essentially fixed, forever. Aside from a small yearly increase set by a politically controlled municipal board — which can be as low as zero — the building owner will have no power to raise rents, even after the current tenants die or move out.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Seth Barron is managing editor of The American Mind. Adapted from City Journal online.
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