Is your co-op or condo board staying virtual?

You’ve all spent a year and a half on Zoom, Teams, Meet or some alternative thereof. Whether for your regular work, for networking, for seeing family and friend, or for your various volunteer work, you’ve all spent many hours in virtual meetings. The question becomes, when do you go back to business as usual? Will all meetings go back to business as usual, or will some remain virtual?

For cooperative and condominium boards, whether the meetings will continue virtually or go back to in-person could depend on the type of meeting. There are five types of co-op and condo board meetings:

1. Monthly board meetings: These are the meetings where most board decisions are made. In the monthly board meeting, boards decide on budgets, needed repairs, hiring or switching vendors, various options or alternative solutions to the building’s needs. Monthly meetings are typically attended by the entire board and the property manager. We also recommend that the superintendent attends for at least the first portion of the meeting where the building is discussed. We also recommend that boards make decisions via email in between meetings, which is often not the case.

2. Interviews with buyers: These are the meetings where the admission committee, often 2-3 board members or another volunteer, interviews prospect buyers and subletters. For co-ops, this is the interview that is scary and a frequent topic of real estate agents and their clients, as well as industry publications. This is the interview that many fear and think that they are going to flunk and be rejected. Although the board can reject anyone except for the usual discriminatory reasons, a reasonable board has already pre-screened the buyers and subletters on paper and is unlikely wasting their time interviewing someone that they wouldn’t accept. Then there are of course those boards that are less reasonable😊

3. Annual meetings: These meetings are required to be held, you guessed it, annually as part of New York’s Business Corporation Law (BCL). One of the major components of this meeting is for owners and shareholders to nominate and vote for board members. Traditionally, annual meetings were required to be held in person and could not be held all-virtual. In 2019 and 2020, the BCL was amended to allow for all virtual meetings, but these amendments had an expiration date. Amendments S-1182 and S-7278 to the BCL, if passed into law, will allow for 100% virtual annual meetings for both co-ops and condos.

4. Special meetings: These meetings are most common in condos where any capital improvements above a certain amount, need to be approved by owners. In co-ops, the capital improvement limits are less common. Special meetings can be called by the board or owners and shareholders. However, if called by the owners or shareholders, the group requesting the meeting needs majority in order to call the meeting. This means getting signatures from (typically) 67% or 75% of their neighbors, which is not an easy endeavor.

For other best practices for co-op and condo boards, get our FREE Policies and Procedures Checklist emailed straight to your inbox. At The Folson Group, our goal is to inspire you to run your building like a business. We enable and inspire co-op or condo board engagements to be filled with a feeling of accomplishment, excitement, meaning, happiness, and increased probability of success.

Email us at info@thefolsongroup.com or call us at (917) 648-8154 to see how we can help your co-op or condo board today.