Blockwise Report

Lot composition. A single tax lot: BIN 1088132, 620 West 143rd Street, 86 residential units, built 2009, Class D1 (elevator apartment), fully residential, rent-stabilized. It is the only post-war building on an otherwise pre-1930 block.

Section 1: At a Glance

Headline

This report is prepared from the complete public file on the property and its block: title, debt chain, condition, tax treatment, and the surrounding trajectory. The building itself is the easy part: a 2009 elevator property, 86 units, spotless on HPD, modestly levered, run by a long-tenured owner. The story is in two places the bricks don't show. First, the tax bill. The 421-a exemption that has carried this building since it opened is burning off on a fixed schedule, from essentially fully exempt in FY2023 to one-fifth exempt on the FY2027 tentative roll. The taxable base has gone from $14K to $6.2M in four years. That is a tax line climbing from near-zero toward roughly $900K a year as the recorded schedule runs out, around FY2028. Second, the debt. A lien search returns about $51M across four recorded instruments; the true balance is about $22.3M. The gap is a decade of consolidations rolled forward without releasing their predecessors. The block scan adds the surrounding picture: two fire-related vacate orders and rising open Class C counts on the neighboring pre-war walk-ups, all under unrelated ownership. None of it attaches to the subject, but it is part of the read on this block. What's actionable on this asset is the tax schedule, the cleanup of the debt record, and one genuine fork: whether the units deregulate when the abatement ends.

Run this on your property → Request free report

Section 2: Baseline Context

Block 2089 runs between West 142nd and West 143rd Streets in Hamilton Heights, 24 tax lots and 432 residential units across 20 distinct owners. The character is overwhelmingly pre-war: small C- and D-class walk-ups built 1910–1930, a former hotel (lot 29, 94 units, 1926), an HDFC co-op, several vacant lots an investor has been assembling along 142nd Street, and a Transit Authority parcel over the subway. The subject is the exception: the only ground-up construction on the block and, at an $7.7M assessed value, the most valuable single building on it. Transaction activity is thin and small-dollar: three arm's-length deeds totaling $3.4M over the trailing 24 months, all of them small walk-ups, against $0.25M in the prior 24. The subject has not changed hands; it has been held by its developer since it was built. This is the baseline read; future reports on this asset would lead with the delta.

Section 3: Early Distress Signals

The subject itself is clean. It carries zero open HPD violations of any class, no litigation, no vacate order, and no liens. Its only open municipal items are five DOB compliance entries: a facade (FISP) filing open since February 2022 and four elevator inspection items from 2023–24. This is the housekeeping that follows any elevator building, not condition distress. A federal-tax-lien check against the owning entity returns nothing in ACRIS, and no foreclosure or lis pendens is on record.

At the surrounding properties, the evidence of issues includes 99 open Class C violations block-wide and two active partial vacate orders, both fire-related: one unit at 3489 Broadway (lot 33) under vacate since 2014, and two units at the 3485 Broadway HDFC co-op (lot 31) from a fresh May 2026 fire. None of these owners is connected to the subject.

Properties of note:

• 601-142 Realty LLC (BBL 1-02089-0029) (94-unit former hotel, Class H6, 1926): the block's heaviest open-violation load, with 35 open Class C and 34 open Class B, and a Class C count that has climbed from 6 a year ago to 35. Principals are Jerry Wartski and the Estate of Louis Pappas. Despite the similar "601" in the name, this is not affiliated with the subject's owner: different principals, management, and back-office address; the shared "601" is simply the block's street numbering.
• Parkside Realty (lot 41), 3489 Broadway (lot 33), 3485 Broadway HDFC (lot 31): the next tier by open-violation count: 8 to 24 open Class C apiece, plus the two fire vacates noted above. Each is independently owned.
• The subject and the assembled vacant lots are the quiet parcels on an otherwise hard-used block.

3.1 Active events:

Stop-work orders and lis pendens: none found on the subject (external lookups; see Methodology & Caveats). No NYC tax lien sale on the subject or the block through the 2025-06 coverage cutoff.

Section 4: Block Trajectory Signals

4.1 Ownership churn: three arm's-length deeds, $3.4M, trailing 24 months versus one deed, $0.25M, prior; all small walk-ups, none the subject. Signal: quiet, low-dollar churn.

4.2 New-construction pipeline: one ground-up job ever on the block, the subject itself (2009). Nothing in the active pipeline. Signal: built out.

4.3 Alteration velocity: six alteration permits, ~$208K total, trailing 12 months, spread across the older buildings (routine repair). Signal: maintenance-grade.

4.4 HPD trajectory: 99 open Class C / 123 open B block-wide, rising on several walk-ups (lot 29 from 6 to 35 Class C year-over-year); the subject is clean and flat. Signal: open-violation counts rising, concentrated in specific parcels, not the subject.

4.5 Institutional capital share: one current senior position, the 2022 Customers Bank CEMA, true balance ~$22.3M; record-stated ~$51.3M before the collapse (restated in Section 5). Signal: single institutional lender, clean economic position behind a messy record.

4.6 Valuation & tax: finalized assessed value up from $6.22M (FY23) to $7.78M (FY26), with the 421-a exemption stepping down ~20 points a year and net taxable value rising from $14K to $4.67M (FY26 final) to $6.19M (FY27 tentative). Signal: a tax cliff in progress; the exemption roll-off, not assessment growth, is the driver.

Subject valuation & tax detail:

The exemption is a near-perfect 20-points-a-year phase-out; extended one more year, the recorded schedule implies full burn-off around FY2028. At the current assessed value and the ~12.5% Class 2 rate, the fully unexempt tax bill lands near $950K a year, before any further assessment growth. The dollar tax figures above are estimates at the headline rate; the net taxable values are from the finalized rolls.

Section 5: Capital Stack

The diligence mirror. A naïve lien search on 620 West 143rd returns roughly $51.3M open across four recorded instruments. That figure is wrong by design. The true current encumbrance is about $22.3M: the single 2022 Customers Bank consolidation. The record overstates by ~2.3× because two refinance cycles rolled prior notes forward without releasing them: the 2012 Sovereign Bank loan and both small "gap" notes remain unreleased in ACRIS even though the 2012 position was paid off and folded into the 2022 loan.

Full mortgage chain (CEMA-collapsed):

*The 2012 Sovereign CEMA still reads as open of record. The recorded reference chain settles its status: the January 2022 filing includes an assignment of the 2012 note and a new Customers Bank gap mortgage, both consolidated into the $22.3M CEMA. That is a refinance by assignment, not a second lien. The 2012 position is dead; it was simply never released.

Record-stated outstanding: ~$51.3M. True outstanding: ~$22.3M. The record overstates by ~$29.0M because three superseded instruments sit unreleased. That is what a lien search returns. Filing releases against the three dead instruments clears the phantom. Routine housekeeping, but it should happen before any sale, refinance, or syndication, because a payoff letter and title commitment will otherwise have to reconcile $51.3M of record to a $22.3M true balance, or the priors surface on title as ~$29M of liens to clear at closing. No secondary or mezzanine debt appears in ACRIS.

Lender note. The current holder is Customers Bank, on the January 2022 consolidation. Customers is an active institutional CRE lender. The 2022 vintage matters for one reason: ACRIS carries no loan term or maturity, but a 2022 origination on a typical multifamily term would come up for refinancing in roughly 2027–2029, the same window the 421-a exemption finishes burning off. A refinance into a materially higher tax basis is a different conversation than the one the borrower had in 2022.

Party-order verification note. On the consolidation agreements, ACRIS lists 601 Associates as the first party and the bank as the second. Read literally through the usual CEMA reversal, that would cast the owner as its own lender. It is an artifact. The paired purchase-money mortgages on the same dates record Sovereign (2012) and Customers Bank (2022) as the mortgagees, which is the real lender side. No owner-as-lender reading survives the cross-check.

Methodology: outstanding is computed from the recorded CEMA chain. Off-record payoffs would not appear; the overstatement is an of-record artifact, precisely what a counterparty's search returns.

Section 5b: Subject Activity & Condition

Permits. None in the trailing 36 months. The building is being held and operated rather than repositioned, which fits a maintained 2009 asset with no obvious capital program underway.

Condition. HPD is clean: zero open violations of any class, against a lifetime total of eight, all closed. The open items are all DOB compliance: one Facade Inspection Safety Program filing open since February 2022, and four elevator inspection items (two CAT1 from October 2023, two periodic from October 2024). These are device and paperwork obligations every elevator building carries; the facade item is the one worth clearing, as it has been open more than four years and FISP non-compliance carries escalating civil penalties. No vacate, no litigation.

311. Complaint traffic on the subject is immaterial relative to an 86-unit building and breaks down as routine heat/hot-water and noise: operational, not a habitability signal. Violations, not complaints, are the evidentiary record, and those are clean.

Section P: Policy & Program Exposure

P.1: Subject policy posture

• Rent regulation: Rent-stabilized, DHCR-registered. The stabilization exists because of the 421-a benefit. This is a 2009 building, post-1974; absent the abatement it would not be regulated at all. Unit count is registered with DHCR; the precise stabilized count is noted in caveats rather than asserted here.
• 421-a: Present and phasing out on the schedule shown in Section 4.6; the recorded schedule implies full burn-off around FY2028. This is the dominant fact about the asset.
• Deregulation fork: Because the regulation is 421-a-linked, the building's status at the abatement's expiry is genuinely two-sided. If the original leases carried the required deregulation riders, units can begin leaving stabilization as the benefit ends, pushing the building toward the free market, which in Manhattan is the strong segment. If they did not, the units stay stabilized and the asset takes the full tax burden against frozen regulated rents. Which path applies turns on the lease riders and the program vintage; it is the single most important diligence question on the property and is not resolvable from public data.
• J-51: Not applicable. J-51 addresses rehabilitation of pre-1974 stock; this is new construction.
• Rent freeze (2026–27): While the units are stabilized, the Rent Guidelines Board's 0% renewal adjustment for leases commencing October 2026 through September 2027 applies to them, holding regulated rent growth flat through at least September 2027.
• AEP: Not a candidate; the violation profile is far below the Alternative Enforcement threshold.
• Fix-the-City: Favorable. The initiative targets long-standing Class C concentration; the subject is clean even as several neighbors carry heavy Class C counts.
• FY27 stabilized tax recalc: DOF's revised cap-rate treatment for majority-stabilized buildings exists, but it is second-order here: the subject's tax trajectory is governed by the 421-a roll-off, not the cap-rate adjustment.

Section 6: What This Means for the Property

This is a sound, well-run building attached to a balance sheet and a tax schedule that are both about to look very different from how they looked in 2022. The economics, not the physical asset, are where the next few years are decided. On the tax side, the 421-a exemption is two years from fully burning off, taking the bill from a rounding error toward roughly $900K-plus a year; that increase is contractual and already visible on the rolls, not a forecast. On the debt side, the true position is a clean ~$22.3M, but the record shows ~$51.3M, and that gap is exactly what a new lender or a buyer's title search surfaces first. It has to be cleared before any capital event, and the 2022 loan's likely refinance window lands right on top of the tax cliff. Underneath both sits the regulatory fork: a 421-a building that may deregulate toward Manhattan's strong free market, or may stay stabilized into a 0% rent-growth environment with a full tax load. The surrounding block shows elevated open-violation counts and two fire vacates under unrelated ownership; no financial-distress markers (no lis pendens, foreclosure, or tax-sale activity) appear on the block's record. It is context for the subject, not exposure, beyond the comparable-sales backdrop. What moves value here is administrative and financial: the abatement schedule, the lien cleanup, and the rider question, handled before the next refinance, not after.

Action items

1. Housekeeping: file releases. Three superseded instruments (the 2012 Sovereign mortgage and CEMA, and the 2022 gap note) sit unreleased; a title search shows ~$51.3M against a ~$22.3M true position. File the releases before any financing event.
2. Model the tax cliff explicitly. The exemption is stepping down ~20 points a year, with the recorded schedule implying zero by FY2028; underwrite the building at a near-full-freight tax line (~$900K+/yr), not the current bill.
3. Resolve the deregulation question. Pull the original 421-a leases and riders to determine whether units deregulate at expiry. This single answer swings the value thesis from "free-market upside" to "fully stabilized into a freeze."
4. Refinance planning. The 2022 Customers Bank loan's maturity is not on record; confirm it from the note. If it falls in the 2027–2029 window, it collides with the tax cliff; sequence accordingly, and clear the ~$29M phantom first.
5. Clear the facade (FISP) item. Open since February 2022; FISP non-compliance accrues penalties.
6. Monitor the block, not the building. The named neighbor at 601-142 Realty (BBL 1-02089-0029) shows a rising open-violation count under unrelated ownership; relevant only as exit-comp backdrop, not as exposure.