BrickUnderground

When you're buying new construction, it pays to pay attention to the fine print in the offering plan. But sometimes you also need a translator.

We asked real estate lawyer and coopandcondo.com blogger Ron Gitter to elaborate on the Special Risks section of an offering plan, a topic he touches on in his Condo Buyer's Tool Kit.  What sorts of things are listed as Special Risks--and what do they mean?

Being one of the two or three people actually working this morning in New York City, Gitter promptly emailed us some telling examples of the genre.

My first place in New York was a shared shag-carpeted room in an SRO hotel, the top six floors of which NYU had taken over to house transfer students like me in "on-campus" housing 25 blocks from campus. During my 20s I continued to pay my apartment dues along with my student loans, graduating from shares paid for in cash to being an actual named tenant on a lease.  Housing was always a struggle, though with one brief exception, things never got quite as bad as this guy, who sent the NYT City Room blog a picture of how he spent his first nine months in New York: Sleeping diagonally across the floor of someone else's closet.

New York City apartments tend to be small and poorly ventilated, which means strong odors can stick around for a long time...and we New Yorkers are particularly prone to smelling like last night’s latkes or the everyday olfactory signature of our own apartments.

Foodwise, some of worst offenders include sulfur-rich vegetables like garlic, onions, cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts and asparagus, as well as cooked fish.  These aromas plus a host of others, from incense to plain old mustiness, can be held by fabric for a long time and are slowly released like a time-released capsule, causing you to smell like your apartment, explains Dr. Andrew Kielbania, chief scientist of chemical technology company BioNeutral Group in Newark. N.J.