The Extreme Lengths People Go to Get Past the Co-op Board

Rescheduling a co-op board interview can give the appearance of being difficult, so James Armstrong, a real-estate agent at Corcoran, generally advises his clients to keep the date if at all humanly possible. Case in point: A few years ago, a celebrity couple he was representing wanted to buy in a particularly selective Greenwich Village building. The husband joined the Zoom — it was still the early days of COVID — interview-ready in a pressed collared shirt. The wife, an actor, logged on from her trailer, mid-shoot, wearing a skintight superhero suit. “Boots, gloves, cape — the works,” Armstrong recalls. She was working 16-hour days on a Marvel production, but the board was not in the habit of rescheduling. They spent the next half-hour talking about any possible renovations the couple had in mind and whether or not the they intended to get additional pets — then a loud alarm went off calling the wife back to set, Armstrong says: “She leapt up and said, ‘We love the place, we’ll be amazing neighbors — now I’ve got to get the fuck out of here!’” The husband, and most of the board, looked as though they’d seen a ghost. “They were miraculously approved,” Amstrong says.

Buying a decent apartment in New York is a bloodsport, and co-ops make up around 70 percent of the current market. (They’re also, for better or for worse, some of the last good deals out there.) So let’s say you find that two-bedroom, two-bath on a decently high floor with reasonable maintenance fees and an affordable price tag? Well, there will be a group of strangers there, standing in your way, waiting to pore over your finances, interviewing you to sniff out whether or not you’re a party boy or a midnight powerlifter. It’s a marriage proposal and a cavity search all at once. So it’s no surprise that some buyers go a little crazy trying to win the board’s approval. And being that it’s New York, there is a fairly robust cottage industry of people ready to help — for a fee, of course.

Like Christian Bari, who runs what he calls a “white-glove service” for buyers and their agents navigating their unwieldy co-op application package. Beyond the sweaty feeling of having your bank accounts reviewed, the process of assembling all that paperwork is tedious — there are account numbers to redact, potentially hundreds of pages of financial information to collate, reference letters to collect, and many, many forms to fill out. “There’s a lot involved,” he says. For somewhere around $1,000, Bari will do all of that while also, he says, making you look like a Boy Scout. “I had one client recently where the friend who was writing the reference letter was mentioning parties and gatherings,” he tells me. “We had to kibosh it.” For another recent client, the board’s questions about his employer’s stock vesting schedule had Bari, the client, his agent, and the listing agent go through four rounds of revisions to ensure their response nailed a just-right level of obsequiousness. “The funny thing about boards is like you treat them with kid gloves,” he says. “You don’t say, ‘I can’t wait to be a part of your building.’ You say, ‘If accepted …’ You tiptoe around everything.”

Then there’s the pet question. Elena Gretch, founder of the high-end pet-training service It’s a Dog’s Life, says with conservative co-ops where the boards are old school and have an average age of probably around 73, it isn’t enough that Gideon the Afghan hound is well behaved — he also needs to be a “value add.” That means training clients’ dogs not to bark when the buzzer rings and having them at least give the appearance of hypoallergenic-ness, sure, but also building a résumé: Maybe they moonlight as a therapy animal at Memorial Sloan Kettering. “We campaign for this dog,” she says. “‘This dog does commercials, this dog goes to the library for children.” If hundreds — even thousands — of dollars spent on training somehow fails? As a last resort (or perhaps path of least resistance), some buyers have simply drugged their anxious and sort of inbred French bulldogs to get through the board meeting without a peep: Per The Wall Street Journal, one couple looking to buy a $2 million Kips Bay apartment resorted to Xanax and Zoloft, though getting the dosing right for their terrier was apparently tricky (“We don’t want him to show up passed out,” the broker recalled them saying).

So, you’ve signed up for DeleteMe to wipe your internet history, hired a consultant to handle the application’s busywork and make you look great on paper, and, miraculously, managed to get the board to approvingly pet your dog. Hopefully none of these expenses have cut too deeply into the savings the board requires you’ll have after closing on your apartment. Sydney Blumstein, a broker at Corcoran, tells me that when one of her clients, a manager at a music-streaming platform, was applying for an $800,000 one-bedroom in Greenwich Village, she was a little short with the board’s requisite amount. So she turned to her much more successful friend, who gave her a $100,000, zero-interest loan, to give the board peace of mind that she would be able to cover her monthlies if she wound up unemployed for several years. “You do this whole performance art to get into a building, and they’re never going to check your finances after,” Blumstein says. They did, however, check on the buyer’s friend and their relationship. “The board was like, ‘How does she know this guy? Is he her lover?’” Blumstein says. “He had to write a whole letter saying, ‘We’ve been friends for 20 years. I implicitly trust and support this person, and I’m giving her $100,000 so her journey into your co-op is easier.’”

If this all sounds over the top, well, it is. But when it comes to winning over your (higher powered) future neighbors, the golden rule still applies. That, and try to seem as uninteresting as possible. “Dress conservatively during the interview, answer the questions politely, and that’s it,” says Bari, the application whisperer. (Blumstein told me about a fashion-designer client with hot-pink hair and a penchant for “funky” tops who wore a mousy-brown wig and brown dress to her board interview.) “Boring,” Bari says, “is good.”