One of the most fascinating parts of being a real estate lawyer is negotiating the selling of rights to a rent regulated tenancy to a landlord.  These deals have seen tenants made into multi-millionaires and landlords given the ability to build high rise buildings after such buyouts. Now, this symbiosis of dreaming dreams and making them come true is under threat by existing case law and new laws already enacted and politically promised.

Under these threats, in the New York City real estate industry, both from landlords who seek to free their apartments from regulation and from tenants who wish to cash out the value of their apartments’ potential unregulated value, there is pressure to reach deals rapidly, before, if as promised in recent campaigns, the reasons for the deal are rendered obsolete.