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Co-op Maintenance Fees in 2012: A Snapshot of Manhattan Averages

Frank Lovece in Board Operations on March 29, 2013

Manhattan

March 29, 2013

In his two previous reports, he compiled comparative data from The New York Times' weekly sales-report column, "On the Market," to devise a statistical analysis and chart the average maintenance fee per square foot in Manhattan co-ops. This year, he used for-sale ads, which provides an even larger data set.

What did he find? Among other things, the highest and lowest average maintenance fees were, respectively, $1.91 in Midtown East and, surprisingly, 73 cents in trendy Soho and the Lower East Side. "That’s because the apartments [from those two neighborhoods] that made it onto the list tend to be very big," Wolgast, a former board president of The Pinehurst co-op in Manhattan, who teaches journalism and digital media at Kansas State University, explains in his analysis. "Thousands of square feet big. When apartments are so large, the rate per square foot ends up being smaller."

No report is perfect, of course, and Wolgast's analysis forthrightly points out its limitations. As Stephen Vernon, President of Manhattan's NaBors Apartments co-op, pointed out in response to the 2010 report, "The accuracy of claims in a real estate listing is not well founded and this is not the source on which to base informative studies," adding that, "We know nothing about the buildings upon which the maintenance charge is based."

While Wolgast gives a $1.17 per square foot median for 2012, for example, the real-estate appraisal company Miller Samuel reported average maintenance in third-quarter 2011 as $1.53 (with the average condo common charge and real estate tax together averaging $1.40). The following year, Miller Samuel said the average Manhattan maintenance fee per square foot rose to $1.70, with the condo figure rising to $1.57. A report by Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate found that average monthly maintenance in third-quarter 2012 was $1.62 per square foot up 6.6 percent from $1.52 in third-quarter 2011 — a figure that matches Miller Samuels' almost to the penny.

Still, the Wolgast chart and analysis, available here in PDF (click on box above), offers a neighborhood breakdown not readily available elsewhere.

"I started doing this when somebody in my building said we have the most expensive maintenance in Manhattan," Wolgast tells Habitat. "That wasn't true, but people have these feelings. And as a board president, I'd be asked, 'I live in such-and-such neighborhood, what should my maintenance be?' I'd say I don't know since I don't know what the underlying mortgage is, are you paying for a new elevator, are you saving for a capital project?" His reports, he says, are meant primarily to address that neighborhood-by-neighborhood question. "If you can only afford a certain amount per square foot, you might want to look at this to consider what neighborhoods to focus on. Of course, that said, there are a range of prices in each neighborhood. If you have your heart set on any particular neighborhood, a high average doesn't mean you shouldn't buy. This just gives you some idea," he says, "of what to expect."

 

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