Not quite a house sale — and the differences are where sellers get stuck
On paper, selling a condo or a townhouse looks like selling any home. In practice, each comes with its own snags. Condos add a managing agent, a board, monthly common charges, and a stack of building paperwork between you and the closing table. Townhouses and rowhouses — the backbone of Brooklyn and Bronx blocks — skip the board but bring their own realities: shared party walls, century-old systems, and buyers whose lenders flinch at anything original. We buy both, we've seen every version of both, and the rest of this page walks through exactly how.
Condos: the board, the package, and the right of first refusal
Here's the part of a condo sale nobody warns you about. Even after you find a buyer, most New York condos hold a right of first refusal — before your sale can close, the board gets the chance to purchase the unit on the same terms. Boards almost never exercise it, but the waiver still has to be formally applied for, which means an application package, questionnaires, processing fees, and a managing agent working on their own schedule. Retail buyers get impatient during that stretch; deals wobble.
When we're the buyer, that paperwork becomes our job. We prepare the package, chase the managing agent, obtain the ROFR waiver, and keep you posted in plain English about where things stand. It's a timeline item we manage — a few weeks of process, not a cliff your sale might fall off.
Behind on common charges? That resolves at the closing table
Common-charge arrears snowball quietly. A rough year, a few missed months, then late fees, then a letter from the board's attorney, and eventually a lien on the unit. Owners often assume the arrears lock them in — that they can't sell until they catch up. The truth is the opposite: selling is usually how the arrears get resolved. The payoff comes out of your proceeds at closing, exactly like a mortgage payoff, and you see every figure on the settlement statement before you sign. If you're juggling the mortgage too, our page on falling behind on payments covers how the two payoffs stack together. And if the board has announced a special assessment — a new roof, facade work, an elevator — we price it into our offer and close before it becomes your problem to finance.
Townhouses and rowhouses: party walls, old bones, simple closings
Townhouses are, in one way, the easy case: no board, no waiver, no managing agent — structurally the most straightforward closings we do. What they have instead is age. A shared party wall with the neighbor, knob-and-tube wiring or a fuse box, a boiler older than the owner, brick that needs pointing, and the kind of layered renovations a century of families leaves behind. None of it slows us down. We buy townhouses exactly as they stand — including ones that need major work — and because there's no lender demanding repairs before funding, the closing stays as simple as the ownership.
When the unit is dated and every buyer wants move-in-ready
This is the quiet heartbreak of condo and townhouse listings. The home is solid, the location is good — but the kitchen is original, the bathrooms are tired, and today's retail buyers scroll past anything that isn't renovated and photographed like a magazine. So the listing sits, the price drops, and the feedback stings. Renovating first means fronting tens of thousands of dollars and months of contractor chaos, often inside a building with strict alteration rules. Our offer skips all of it: we budget the renovation ourselves, show you that budget line by line, and buy the unit as-is. No staging, no lockbox, no strangers critiquing your grandmother's wallpaper.
Estate condos: a special case we know well
A large share of the condos we buy come through estates — a parent's unit in Queens or up in Westchester, with heirs scattered across the country and common charges accruing every month the estate deliberates. We coordinate the probate side with the building side: payoff letters, the waiver application, remote notarized signings for every heir, and a full cleanout after closing — take what matters to the family, leave the rest. Our inherited-property page walks through the Surrogate's Court process in plain English if that's where you are.
A straight word about co-ops
You'll notice this page says condo, not co-op — that's deliberate. In a co-op, the board approves the buyer, not just the sale, and that extra layer changes what any cash buyer can honestly promise. Sometimes our offer genuinely is the right answer for a co-op; sometimes a patient listing through our family's licensed brokerage will clearly net you more. Call us, tell us about the building, and we'll tell you straight which one you're looking at. We'd rather lose a deal than earn one by overpromising.
Start with a real number
Whether it's a fourth-floor condo with arrears or a rowhouse that hasn't changed since 1975, the first step is the same: tell us about the property and get a written, no-obligation cash offer with the math shown. If listing it would put more in your pocket, we'll say so — then help you do that instead. Either way, you decide at your own pace, with real numbers in hand.