NEW YORK CITY

Are New York City elevator inspectors being arbitrary in finding violations, or is something even more troublesome going on?

"My super will say, 'The [elevator]inspector was here today,' and we go through the process with our service company to get costs on fixing the violations and deciding how to do this most cost-effectively," says Grant Varga, a longtime board member at the 13-story prewar co-op 12 West 67th Street, near Central Park. "Then, a couple of months later, a different inspector will come here and we get more violations. Why didn't the first inspector catch what the second one called violations?" he asks.

Veteran managing agent Gerard J. Picaso, president of Gerard J.Picaso Inc., who is unaffiliated with Varga's building, has had the same experience. "You do the work, and then another inspector says, 'Here's a bunch of other stuff that's wrong.' You go, 'Wait a minute. We just fixed a bunch of things.' But another guy looks at it from a different angle and you're back to doing more work."

Einstein is quoted as having said that if he had one hour to save the world he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution. Co-op and condo board and homeowner-association counsel often do not hear of the existence of a new rule until we are being asked how to enforce it. In response, good counsel will ask for a history on the rule and how it came into existence. My first question is usually, "What was the problem that required you to pass this rule?"

We often hear of boards enforcing a variety of rules restricting pets, leasing, guests, commercial vehicles and more. Many times these restrictions are proper and the board is within its rights to enforce them. However, sometimes it is discovered that a long-standing restriction doesn't really exist. How does it happen that some boards are enforcing phantom rules?

Q. My condominium in Brooklyn has two unit-owners who don't pay their monthly charges. One seems to be having financial problems, but we're not sure about the other. Our property manager told us that we need to file a lien against the units, but I heard from somebody else that this could be very expensive and we still might not get paid. We are not a big condo, so we don't want to waste money, but we also can't afford to have some unit-owners who are not paying. What should we do?

Every day, hundreds of bills intended for the city's condos and co-ops arrive at the back offices of property management firms. Delivered in unassuming envelopes, they request payment for goods and services as varied as the buildings themselves. From the price of a new light bulb to a plumber's fee to the staggering cost of a new roof, the demands that the bills set forth must all be met to keep the wheels turning. Yet while management firms employ a complex processing system to ensure that vendors are paid correctly, the room for error is vast.

In fall 2013, New York City intends to begin making public how well — or not — buildings scored on the recently mandated energy benchmarking required by Local Law 84 of 2009. Not only will buyers, sellers and, really, any interested party be able to see how you stack up, but Fannie Mae, the federal agency that provides a secondary market for underlying financing, will also be studying the energy performance data. One can easily imagine a time, in the not too distant future, when your energy performance will play a significant role in your ability to obtain financing.

Homeowners rose in tax revolt again in 2012, yet politicians still failed to act to solve inequities hurting co-ops and condominiums. A board may have helped drive a resident to suicide. No-smoking rules, digitized offering plans and automated water-meter readers all made the news. And good boards and bad have their say and their day in some of the year's most interesting utterances.

You already have a privacy policy at your co-op or condo, whether you know it or not. The board president knows who's allowed to access security video. So do the managing agent and the super. More or less. I mean, it's not exact or anything. They just sort of know.

And that's dangerous — because as building professionals and others discussed in Part 1 of this story, unwritten de facto policies by their very nature are prone to misremembering, misinterpretation and on-the-fly changes. Writing down the unwritten rules helps avoid such problems and provides clarity and fairness. But how do you create a written privacy policy? Turns out, it's not so hard.

UPDATED March 22, 2013 — Following an interagency raid by investigations who took files and computers from five local heating-oil business, two lawsuits have been filed by real-estate concerns charging that the companies have been selling oil diluted with waste product. Authorities and the plaintiffs claim such tainted fuel oil has been delivered for years to both commercial and residential buildings.

Along with taxes and, for co-ops, the underlying mortgage, energy costs are possibly the single biggest non-discretionary budget item. You have to heat your cooperative or condominium in cold weather, keep the lights on in common areas and power everything from smoke alarms to garage gates to swimming-pool filters. There aren't a lot of corners you can cut here — but that doesn't mean there's no way to save money. Our latest Teachable Moments column offers some tested, real-world strategies by three longtime property managers who have found it doesn't take a lot of energy to save on energy.