One ridiculous thing about property records is that while signatures are required, legibly printed names of people who sign are not.
Maybe this is something that only bothers reporters but pleases industry people who wish to remain anonymous. For me, it is a pet peeve that came up as I researched the tax lien sale that led to foreclosure for Filmore Brown’s home at 227 East 89th Street in East Flatbush.
When I looked up the sale, for example, I found the buyer — BKLYN BH MAZAL 123 LLC of 147-63 71st Avenue — signed the deed like this:
Most signatures on property records are far more illegible than that, but it still wasn’t clear enough for me to guess at the spelling. Fortunately, the person signed more clearly elsewhere in the document:
Did that say Malka Lap? Malka Laz? I did some Googling. The most promising search result I found was for Malka Lax:
“Malka Lax is a real estate investor and operator based in New York City, NY-NJ-CT,” one obscure website reported. “Recent mortgage relationships include Broadview Funding LLC.”
I knew I had the right person because property records showed Broadview Capital, aka Broadview Funding, had provided the $717,000 mortgage to the buyer of Filmore Brown’s home at 227 East 89th Street. The borrower’s address was 5 Rovna Court in Monroe, New York.
It turns out that I would have saved myself some sleuthing by first checking the mortgage document, where Malka Lax’s name was not only signed clearly but printed:
In this case, I was able to pin down the name. However, I still don’t understand why some transaction documents require a signature but not a typed or at least printed name identifying the signer.
This transaction was of interest to me because the foreclosure became a case study in the inequity of the lien sale. To be clear, no one has accused the buyer of doing anything illegal.
According to Filmore Brown’s attorney, Alice Nicholson, LLCs with BH Mazal in the name have been buying a lot of properties at foreclosure auctions triggered by the city’s lien sale. The LLC’s Queens address had also been on the city’s tax lien list. So was 1040 40th Street in Borough Park, Brooklyn, which BH Host Mazal LLC bought for $873,000 on Christmas Eve, 2024. On that deal, Moshe Y. Nussenzweig signed for the buyer.
Brown sued Bank of New York Mellon and several other defendants on Sept. 15 in Brooklyn, challenging the loss of his three-family home, which he claims is worth $900,000 but was sold in an improper tax foreclosure proceeding for $735,000. His suit alleges that the buyer did not exist as a legal entity until six weeks after the auction and improperly received the property through an unauthorized bid assignment without proper notice to the plaintiff.
Another interesting thing I learned (from lien sale expert Jennifer Polovetsky) was that even if Brown loses his legal case to undo the sale of his home, he could bring an action to recover all of the $735,000 from the sale except for the $5,567 lien, which stemmed from an unpaid water bill.
What we’re thinking about: “NYC HPD violations are the biggest scam in the history of municipal governance, and that’s saying something.”
That one-sentence response to my column on the “worst landlords” list came from an owner of rent-stabilized buildings in Upper Manhattan.
I asked him to elaborate.
“That would be a War and Peace,” he replied.
Tenants complain about landlords’ not fixing HPD violations. But landlords complain about tenants’ weaponizing them. Do you have war stories to share? Email them to eengquist@therealdeal.com.
A thing we’ve learned: Lenders are accelerating the resolution of distressed assets. That was Marcus & Millichap’s takeaway from the National Multifamily Housing Council’s annual conference.
“Many financial institutions have begun acting on overdue loans rather than extending loan terms and allowing investors to retain assets facing headwinds,” the commercial brokerage wrote. The recent shift away from ‘extend and pretend’ practices marks a notable change in lender behavior compared with the past several years.”
For some, this is good news.
“Investors generally viewed this shift as positive, as it is expected to bring a wave of troubled assets to market at discounted prices and lower cost bases,” the firm wrote.
Elsewhere…
The New York Apartment Association’s Kenny Burgos and Small Property Owners of New York’s Ann Korchak will get to pound on the Mamdani association — albeit without the mayor present — at a panel discussion Tuesday hosted by the Manhattan Institute.
Joining them at the by-invitation-only event will be Brad Hargreaves, a senior fellow at the free-market think tank but better known to real estate people as the founder of co-living startup Common. (Read his 2020 interview with The Real Deal, conducted shortly after his company raised $50 million in a Series D funding round, here.)
Hargreaves stepped down as Common’s CEO in 2022. Two years later, the company filed for bankruptcy and was liquidated. But he still follows housing policy closely, as evidenced by his commentary last week on the U.S. Senate’s ruination of its own pro-housing bill with a provision to end mass production of build-to-rent homes.
I’m going to skip the March 24 event, which I’m sure will be interesting but geared to people who haven’t heard Burgos and Korchak speak dozens of times about Mamdani’s promised rent freeze, “rental ripoff” hearings, support of the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, and hiring of radical tenant activist Cea Weaver — who calls A&E Real Estate CEO Douglas Eisenberg a “slumlord” but has never tried to operate rent-stabilized housing herself.
Closing time
Residential: The largest residential sale on Tuesday was $5 million for a 1,944-square-foot condominium unit at 39 West 23rd Street in Flatiron. Ian Slater, Eduardo Martinez and Michael Koeneke with Compass had the listing.
Commercial: The largest commercial sale was $33.5 million for a 6,200-square-foot retail property at 103 North Fourth Street in North Williamsburg. Jeff Sutton’s Wharton Properties sold the property to Tokyo-based Efficiency Capital Advisors. Sutton had purchased the property for $31.3 million in March 2021.
New to the Market: The highest price for a residential property hitting the market was $15.3 million for a pre-war co-op at 1165 Fifth Avenue in Carnegie Hill. Anne Prosser and Greg Garwood with Brown Harris Stevens have the listing.
Breaking Ground: The largest new building permits were for a combined 119,766 square feet at 631-633 Bergen Avenue in the Melrose section of the Bronx. Combined, the two buildings will have 195 units. Nikolai Katz filed the permits on behalf of Joel Steinmetz.
— Matthew Elo