Processing and Recording a Condominium-within-a-Condominium

New York State Attorney General’s Office

The new condominium, which is a condo-within-a condo, must be approved by the state attorney general’s office.

New York City Department of Buildings

The subdivision of the condo must be approved by the Department of Buildings.

DOF Tax Map Unit

Due to current IT functionality, the condo-within-a-condo cannot be directly reflected on the tax map. The new lots resulting from the creation of the condo will be processed as an apportionment of the original condo. But the Department of Finance’s Tax Map Unit will annotate on the tax map that there is a condo-within-a-condo and provide a special label, such as “CC,” plus the existing condo number.

All condo applications require a minimum of two condominium lots. Condo-within-a-Condo applications require an existing condominium to have three lots to meet the minimum total of two condominium lots.

Applicants for a condo-within-a-condo should submit a letter indicating that they are requesting a condo-within-a-condo when requesting tentative lots and submitting their application package. Instructions for submitting an application for a condo amendment are available here: Condominium Amendment and Approval Process.

DOF Property Tax System

The transaction will be processed as a condo amendment, with lots created from the original condo. The unit allocation factors of the new lots will be the same as those generated by the condo-within-a-condo structure. (The original unit allocation factor flows through to the new lots on an allocated basis.)

Any special charges of the new condo will be handled by the condo. Any external agency charges will be assigned directly to the tax lot incurring the charge.

Land Records Process:

Below are the steps that will be taken by the Department of Finance’s Land Records Division to ensure that the public is aware of this new type of condominium recording.

First, the current condominium owner or sponsor applies for new lots with the Tax Map Unit to create the new condo within the existing condo. Once approvals from the state attorney general and DOF Tax Map Unit are received, the condo-within-a-condo will be recorded as normal in ACRIS. When this condominium is created, the parent condo lot will remain (and not be dropped) so that it can serve as an FKA (formerly known as) lot as described below.

• Once the required approvals from the attorney general and the DOF Tax Map Unit have been received, the new condominium declaration will be recorded under a new document type: “Declaration of Condo-in-Condo.”
• When the “Declaration of Condo-in-Condo” document type is set up, a description will be added to the ACRIS document-types list indicating the circumstances in which a specialized condo declaration is appropriate. 
• All new lots in the new condo and the FKA lot (the lot that was amended for the additional lots) must be included on the cover page. This will ensure that the new condo will be indexed against the FKA lot. When a user conducts a property search, the FKA lot will be part of the search. 
• When creating the cover page, a user should indicate the cross-reference recording information from the original condominium. A user conducting a property search will be able to review the original recording.
• DOF’s Land Records Division will add remarks indicating the purpose of the new condominium with the special circumstances recording. These remarks will be automated and will be added to the records once the document is recorded.
• The daily “Recorded Condo Declarations and Amendments” report generated from ACRIS will be modified to include any newly recorded specialized condo declaration recordings, allowing the DOF Tax Map Unit to use this report as the trigger for activating the new condominium units.