The NYC Council passed legislation earlier this year requiring the NYC Dept of Finance (DOF) to give property owners amnesty as to outstanding judgments entered in the Environmental Control Board (ECB). If the requirements are met, the property owner is free from default penalties and interest. Here are the requirements:

• The ECB judgment was filed prior to 6/12/2016.
• The owner resolves the judgment between 9/12/2016 and 12/12/2016.
• All judgments listed on the Department of Finance's website for the property are resolved, including monetary fines and all work required to clear the violations that resulted in a judgment.

For more information see the NYC DOF's amnesty page.
​

It's easy to understand how to steal a car or a diamond ring. But a house? That's a little harder to wrap one's head around. Yet every day we see or hear reports of con artists attempting to steal people’s homes and properties. This is a particularly bad problem in Brooklyn because real estate prices make the crime very attractive. Most of the victims are elderly, or out-of-town members of a deceased owner’s family.
 
Today's New York Law Journal reports that one Carl Smith of Brooklyn has just been sentenced to prison time for stealing multiple properties. Let's look at what he did, and how you can protect yourself from scams like this.
 
According to Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson, “This defendant shamefully stole houses and other property from their rightful owners by using forged documents, engaging in deceit and committing outright fraud. He did so solely to exploit the lucrative real estate market in Brooklyn,”
 
Smith, 50 years old, stole a Fort Greene Brownstone at 139 Vanderbilt Avenue, between Myrtle and Park Avenues by forging, back-dating and filing a fraudulent deed. He looked up the prior owner and found her death record. All of that is public information. Smith did the same thing with two Bedford-Stuyvesant properties at 45 Lewis Avenue and 64 Hart Street. He actually sold one of the properties twice, to two different buyers.
 
All this happened in 2011 and 2013, but Smith had done this before. In 2003 he used the same techniques to steal another Bed-Stuy property at 543 Lexington Avenue. He couldn't evict the tenants, though, and he was never prosecuted.
 
Smith finally got caught because he couldn't produce clear title histories when he attempted to close on the fraudulent sales. To make matters worse, he pretended to be an attorney for the owners.
 
Smith was convicted of grand larceny, criminal possession of forged instruments and unlawful practice of law. The judge sentenced him nine to eighteen years in prison.
 
So how can you protect yourself from scams like this? Sign up for New York City's free Recorded Document Notification Program. Once you sign up, you will get an email any time someone files a deed or other document against your property. If the filing is genuine, you don't have to do anything more. But if the filing is fraudulent, you can take action before any damage is done.


You can access the Document Notification Program on our firm's website, www.LevyNau.com. Click on the Links tab and scroll down to the Safeguard Your Property Title button.
 
As always, come in, call of click for help or more information. We’re here for you.

A disturbing decision was just issued by the Appellate Division of New York’s Supreme Court. In an effort to return an already-evicted tenant to his apartment, the court held, in effect, that the landlord was required to lend the tenant money at zero interest.

The case, Lafayette Boynton Housing Corp. v. Pickett, involved a disabled man subsisting on social security. He had lived in his Bronx apartment for some 30 years. In 2011 the landlord started eviction proceedings for non-payment of rent. At that time the tenant owed $5,200 in arrears.

Over the next two years the tenant and his legal aid attorney he convinced a housing court judge to stay the warrant of eviction seven different times, based on promises to pay the arrears. By the time the tenant paid any arrears, however, he owed even more, because he was not paying his current rent each month. So the arrears kept climbing higher, and the promises to pay kept coming.

Finally, in 2013 the housing court refused to give the tenant any more chances, and the eviction went forward. A full month after the tenant was out of the apartment, he got additional public assistance and grant money and paid the judgment amount to the landlord. The full amount at that time, including the landlord’s legal fees, was $14,000.

Based on that payment, the housing court ordered the landlord to take the tenant back and to reinstate him into his old apartment. The Appellate Division upheld the lower court, noting that the tenant had made a good faith attempt to cure the arrears, and that it wasn’t the tenant’s fault that couldn’t pay up on time. It is not clear from the decision whose fault the judges thought it was.

Justice David Saxe, in a written dissenting opinion, said that the court’s majority decision “forces landlords to serve as de facto no-interest lenders to low-income tenants.” Justice Saxe also suggested that the housing court’s decision to give the tenant relief even after the warrant of eviction was executed went beyond the authority given by the applicable law (Section 749(3) of the Real Property Actions and Proceedings Law, which only allows relief from eviction “for good cause shown” before the warrant of eviction is executed.)

Maybe this decision was inevitable. Anyone and everyone would want to help an elderly disabled person living on social security. But there is great danger in letting emotion go too far in applying the law. The law is supposed to be objective and impartial. Emotion is never objective or impartial. Do we want a society where rules are applied evenly and predictably? Or do we want a society where rules depend on how our judges, executives and police feel when they get up in the morning? All I can do is ask the question.

The New York State Department of Financial Services (www.dfs.ny.gov) has a useful timeline showing what you can expect if you go into foreclosure and do nothing, and when you can expect it all to happen. Here is the timeline:


When you fall behind on your mortgage payments, you can expect most lenders to react quickly. Here is a general time line of what may occur following your first late payment and ending in foreclosure. This is taken from the Department of Financial Service’s website, but has been modified to reflect our real-world experience in hundreds of foreclosure cases over the last ten years in New York.


1st month:

• You miss a mortgage payment.
  

2nd month:

• A late charge is assessed on payment. The loan servicer (the company that processes your mortgage payments) will send you a notice or otherwise attempt to make contact with you.
  

2 to 3  months:

• If your mortgage is for a home you live in, the lender or loan servicer must send you a pre-foreclosure notice at least 90 days before commencing foreclosure. This 90-day window gives you a chance to work with your lender to find an alternative to foreclosure. The notice must tell you how much you must pay to bring the loan current.  It must also give you the names and phone numbers of at least five government-approved non-profit counseling agencies in your area.
  

3 to 4 months:

• The loan servicer must send a "demand" or "default" letter stating that you have violated the terms of your mortgage. You will be given 30 days to pay the delinquent amount and the late charges.
  

4 to 5 months:

• The servicer will begin the legal process of foreclosure. This may include sending the loan to its foreclosure department, hiring an attorney to sue you, and recording a formal notice of foreclosure or “lis pendens” with the court and serving you with notice of the action through a “summons and complaint.” These proceedings can take 7-9 months.
  

6 to 12 months:

• Once a summons and complaint has been served on you and the lender files proof of service with the court, the court is required to schedule a settlement conference within 60 days. This is an opportunity for you to meet face to face with your lender or lender’s representative to reach a resolution of the case. You should try to meet with a housing counselor or attorney prior to the conference. You should bring proof of income such as your two most recent pay stubs and most recent tax return to the conference.
  
• You will also have to respond to the summons and complaint. If you do not respond, the court will issue judgment by default, appoint a referee to calculate what you owe, and schedule a foreclosure sale. If you do respond, you have a chance to present any legal arguments you might have.
  

12 to 24 months:

• If the court issues judgment against you, a foreclosure auction sale will be scheduled. The sale usually occurs at least 4 months after the court ruling. A notice of sale is published in a newspaper once a week for at least 4 weeks prior to the sale date.
  

If you do nothing, the foreclosure process in New York City currently takes about 18 to 24 months, depending on which county you are in, from the date of the first missed payment to the sale of your home.

Foreclosure sales in New York are by public auction, usually at the county courthouse. The home is sold to the highest bidder and anyone, including the lender, may bid. Once payment is made and the sale is complete the winning bidder takes ownership of the property. At that point, once a sale is complete, you have no right of redemption.  You lose your house forever, and eventually the new owner will evict you if you are still living there.

It is possible to do all this without an attorney, but getting legal advice is always a good idea in these circumstances. Court personnel generally are helpful, but they won’t give you legal advice.

A client recently asked about getting access to a deceased aunt’s safe deposit box. Our client thought his late aunt might have left a will, and that the will might be in the safe deposit box.

This is a question that comes up regularly. Not surprisingly, there is a legal process for this. If the court has already appointed you as administrator of the estate, the Letters of Administration issued by the court give you all the authority you need to open the deceased person’s safe deposit box.

Before you even file a Petition for Administration, however, you need to determine if there is a will. If there is, then you won’t be filing a Petition for Administration. Instead, the Executor named in the will must file a Petition for Probate.

So how do you go about accessing a safe deposit box to even find out if it contains a will? The answer is contained in Section 2003 of the Surrogate’s Court Procedure Act. This law provides the procedure. You must file a Petition to Examine Safe Deposit Box and pay a small filing fee ($20). In this petition you identify who you are, where you live and what your relation to the deceased person was. You list who else has a possible interest in the estate. You identify the location of the safe deposit box and you name the papers you believe might be inside, such as a will, insurance policies or the deed to a burial plot.

If the court accepts your petition, you get an order allowing you to inspect the contents of the safe deposit box, in the presence of a bank officer. If you find a will inside, the bank must mail it to the court. Insurance policies will be sent to the named beneficiaries. The court gets informed of the burial plot, and issues an order about how to handle that. Anything else in the box gets inventoried. Nothing else is removed until the court appoints an Executor (if there is a will) or an Administrator (if there isn’t).

It is possible to do all this without an attorney, but getting legal advice is always a good idea in these circumstances. Court personnel generally are helpful, but they won’t give you legal advice.

For more information about this topic or anything else concerning wills and estates, ask us. We’re here to help.

Wells Fargo, a big player in the mortgage market, has some free resources on its website that home buyers might find useful. Here is a link to a nice loan application checklist. You can use it to gather materials needed for any mortgage application - not just for Wells Fargo. There are other checklists available as well here.

This post isn't about law, but it is about real estate - and since most of my legal practice has some connection to real estate, it's fair game.

Brookynites tend to identify any attached house on any block in neighborhoods such as Park Slope, Bedford-Stuyvesant or Cobble Hill as a "brownstone". A recent post atwww.BrickUnderground.com explained some nuances behind that overly used term, and pointed to a nice document at the Landmarks Preservation Commission that gives lots of interesting details on the most prevalent architectural styles one finds in "Brownstone Brooklyn.

Here is a link to the document:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/lpc/downloads/pdf/pubs/rowhouse.pdf.

And a link to the article at Brick Underground:
http://www.brickunderground.com/blog/2014/09/brooklyn_brownstone_intel