Residential Community Governance
Condominium boards, cooperative boards, HOAs, and the managing-agent industry that operates them. A large sector with limited governance-specific regulatory oversight — and the founding test case for TASFGA's planned accountability loop.
Why this is Focus 1
The barber who cuts your hair needs a state license. The firm managing a $200M residential building and a $15M annual budget does not. There is no complaint registry, no disciplinary body, no continuing-education requirement, no bonding mandate, no financial-disclosure standard. More than one million New Yorkers live in co-op and condo housing — some 450,000 occupied co-op units and 318,000 condo units, per the NYC Comptroller — under governance structures with few accountability mechanisms short of Supreme Court litigation, which is prohibitively expensive, years long, and out of reach for most owners.
Documented gaps
- No managing-agent licensure in New York (or most states)
- Martin Act oversight is tied to the offering phase; ongoing board governance falls outside it
- 311 has no category for board misconduct
- AG's Real Estate Finance Bureau: a small bureau relative to the size of the sector it oversees
- Local Law 11 capital-assessment practices escape documentation
- Multiple legislative attempts to create an ombudsman have failed in recent years
What TASFGA aims to build here
- Standards (planned) — model fiduciary, disclosure, election, and procurement standards for condominium and cooperative governance.
- Accreditation (proposed) — a proposed TASFGA credential for managing agents that would bind participants to a public Code of Conduct.
- Model legislation (planned) — statutory language for state-level managing-agent licensure and ombudsman programs.
- Scorecards (planned) — per-firm managing-agent ratings, per-building governance files, legislative tracking.
In-field reporting
Our on-the-record documentation of failure modes is published at condoscoopsnyc.org — building-by-building, firm-by-firm, gap-by-gap. That work is the proof-of-concept for every other area of focus.