The accidental landlord: nobody plans this job
Almost nobody who owns a two- or three-family home today set out to run a rental business. You bought the building decades ago because the rent covered the mortgage while your family lived downstairs. Or you inherited it — along with tenants you've never met, leases you've never read, and a boiler you've never seen. For years it more or less worked. Then the calls started coming at the wrong hours: the leak upstairs, the rent that's late again, the hallway light, the heat complaint in January. Somewhere along the way the building stopped being an asset and became a second job you never applied for. Our family has been in Bronx real estate since 1987, and we've sat across the kitchen table from a lot of owners at exactly this point. There is no shame in it. There is just a decision: keep carrying it, or hand it — tenants, boiler, and all — to someone whose actual job this is.
We buy occupied. The tenants become ours to handle — legally and humanely.
Here is the single most important thing on this page: you do not have to empty the building to sell it. We buy 2–4 family homes with every unit occupied, and at closing the tenants, the leases, the deposits, and every unresolved situation transfer to us. Good tenants keep their homes and get a responsive owner — our family holds buildings for the long term, and we want paying tenants to stay. Difficult situations get handled the only way they should be: through the legal process, with attorneys, correctly and humanely. What never happens is you spending another year of your life managing it. If a problem tenant or squatter is the whole reason you're reading this, we wrote a full page on exactly that.
The eviction reality in New York — and why owners quietly give up
If you've tried to resolve a non-paying tenant yourself, you already know what the textbooks don't say. In New York, only a marshal or sheriff can actually remove a tenant, and only after a judge has issued a judgment and warrant — no lock changes, no utility shutoffs, no "just this once" shortcuts, all of which expose you to serious liability. Getting to that judgment means notices served exactly right, filings done exactly right, and court dates that get adjourned and adjourned again. And here's the part that breaks people: a defective notice doesn't pause the case — it restarts the clock. One wrong date or a service error, and months of waiting evaporate while the arrears keep growing. Plenty of small owners are still carrying rent debts that have piled up for years and never got caught up. We're not telling you this to scare you; we're telling you because when we buy your building, that entire machine becomes ours to operate — with attorneys who do this constantly — and your involvement ends at the closing table.
Two- and three-families are our home turf
The 2–4 family home is the bread and butter of the neighborhoods we come from. The brick two-family rows of the Bronx, the detached three-families of Queens, the legal twos with the finished basements in Yonkers — this is the exact housing stock our family has bought, fixed, and held since 1987. That matters for your offer, because pricing a small multifamily correctly means knowing what these specific buildings rent for, what their boilers and roofs really cost, and what the block is actually doing — not what a spreadsheet in another state thinks. Our number reflects the building in front of us, and we'll show you how we got there, line by line.
The margin squeeze is real, and it's not your imagination
Even owners with good tenants are calling us lately, and the math explains why. Insurance premiums on small multifamilies have climbed hard, and some carriers have gotten picky about older buildings altogether. Heating a three-family through a New York winter costs what it costs, whether or not every unit's rent arrives. Add a roof that's due, water bills, taxes, and the repair list that never gets shorter, and buildings that comfortably carried themselves for decades are now running thin or negative. When the rent no longer covers the building and the building no longer covers your peace of mind, selling isn't giving up — it's arithmetic. If the mortgage itself has started slipping, our behind on payments page covers that road in detail — the short version is that New York's slow judicial foreclosure process leaves you far more time and equity to protect than most owners realize.
One honest caveat about regulated buildings
Some multifamily buildings in New York come with regulatory frameworks attached, and the rules are genuinely complicated — complicated enough that anyone giving you confident legal summaries on a website is doing you a disservice. We don't do that. What we can tell you is that we buy regulated and unregulated buildings alike, our attorneys and title team sort out exactly what applies to yours before anyone signs anything, and your own attorney reviews everything — that's how every New York closing works, and it's your protection as much as ours.
What the exit actually looks like
Simple, on purpose. Reach out and tell our family team about the building — units, occupancy, what's working and what isn't. We do one discreet walkthrough at a time that suits you and your tenants. Within 24 hours you have a written cash offer, with the math visible: what the building is worth, what it needs, what we can pay. No commissions, no repair demands, no waiting on a bank to approve a landlord loan. If the numbers work for you, we close on your date, the attorneys move the leases and deposits, and you hand over the keys — and the phone that rings at 2 a.m. Ready when you are: start with your address and we'll take it from there.