Besides secondhand smoke and loud neighbors, assessments are among the biggest downers of co-op and condo life.
So we were intrigued when an Upper East Side co-op dweller tipped us off to this strategy for keeping costs under control: Pay the super a portion of any money he or she saves for the building.
“We first started it about 20 years ago,” says this co-op owner, “when the building was doing a lot of valuation of service providers and you didn’t know if the team you had working on your building was good or whether they were there because they were the sponsor’s brother.”
Wouldn’t a financial stake in the outcome encourage corner-cutting?
“Stuff like that is pretty transparent—you can’t keep your job that long if you put in a rotten boiler," says our source.
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