A co-op is not real property

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The same material, read aloud and told more loosely than it is written. Nothing is said in it that this page does not also say.

That same recording, with the writing lit line by line as it plays and the sections listed beside it, is on its own page.

What the owner of a co-op actually owns

Two things, and neither of them is land.

A co-operative apartment corporation owns the building. A resident owns shares of stock in that corporation, allocated to a particular unit, together with a proprietary lease of the unit that the shares entitle them to. The deed to the building names the corporation. It does not name the resident, and no deed ever will.

So a search of the land records for a person's name returns nothing against the apartment they have lived in for thirty years. That is not a gap in the index. The index is answering correctly.

Docketing reaches real property, and the statute says so

CPLR 5203(a)¹ is written about one kind of property, and it names it in the first line.

No transfer of an interest of the judgment debtor in real property is effective against the judgment creditor from the time the judgment is docketed with the clerk of the county in which the property is located. That is the whole of the automatic lien, and it does not extend past the words it uses.

For personal property the mechanism is different and later. Under CPLR 5202(a)² the creditor's rights in an interest of the debtor in personal property arise where the creditor has delivered an execution to a sheriff, and they are superior to a transferee only from that point, with an exception for a transferee who acquired for fair consideration beforehand. CPLR 5232(a)³ then requires the sheriff to levy by serving a copy of the execution on the garnishee.

Against a co-op, the garnishee is the corporation. Which means the step that binds the asset is a service on a managing agent rather than a filing in a register, and nothing about it is searchable by anybody.

The register does hold co-ops, and it does not hold your judgment

This is the part that misleads, because a search of ACRIS for a co-op address does return documents.

New York City's own guidance says what they are. The register records interests in personal property that is not real estate or real property, such as shares of a co-operative showing ownership and mortgages, and fixture filings.

UCC 9-501(a)(1)⁴(C) is why they are there: where the collateral is a cooperative interest, the financing statement is filed in the office designated for recording a mortgage on the related real property, rather than with the secretary of state where almost everything else goes. Subsection (c) makes that office the county clerk, except in Bronx, Kings, New York and Queens, where it is the city register.

So the lender who financed the purchase of the shares is in the register, and so is the transfer of the shares. The judgment creditor is not, and will not be, however the judgment is docketed.

Fifty years, not five

A co-op financing statement runs on a clock ten times longer than the one the rest of article 9 uses.

UCC 9-515⁵ makes an ordinary financing statement effective for five years. A financing statement covering a cooperative interest is effective for 50 years after the date of filing of the initial financing statement, if a cooperative addendum is filed with it or before it lapses.

UCC 9-502(a)(4)⁶ says what that addendum has to carry: the number or other designation of the unit, and its street address. Which is also what makes a co-op filing findable by address at all, since there is no block and lot for an apartment.

The practical consequence runs the other way from the usual one. A UCC filing from 1998 against equipment is long dead and counting it is an error. A co-operative addendum filed in 1998 is live until 2048, and dismissing it as stale is the error instead.

What it changes about the rest of the register

Two rules that the land records teach reach co-ops anyway by their own terms, and both were amended to do it.

EPTL 6-2.2⁷ creates a tenancy by the entirety where property is conveyed to a married couple. Since 1 January 1996 the same subsection reaches the shares of stock of a co-operative apartment corporation allocated to a unit, together with the appurtenant proprietary lease. So the strongest form of co-ownership, the one a creditor of one spouse likes least, applies to co-ops as well as to houses.

CPLR 5206(a)⁸ exempts a principal residence from a money judgment to a stated figure in value, and paragraph 2 of that subsection lists shares of stock in a cooperative apartment corporation among the property types it covers. A co-op is not real property for the lien, and is a homestead for the exemption.

How to read one off a register

Three things are findable, and the order matters because the first one is a negative.

Search the debtor's name in the land records and treat an empty result as uninformative rather than as an answer. For a co-op resident it is the expected result, and it says nothing about what they own.

Then search by the building's address for financing statements and co-operative addenda. Those carry the unit number and the street address under UCC 9-502(a)(4), and they name a debtor, which is how a co-op resident's name appears in a register at all.

Then check the date against 50 years rather than five, and look for the addendum, because the longer clock depends on it having been filed.

What this does not cover

Whether a particular apartment is a co-op, a condominium or a rental, which decides everything above and is not always obvious from an address.

A condominium unit is real property and has its own tax lot, so a judgment docketed against its owner behaves the way the rest of the library describes. A co-op does not. Buildings converted between the two exist, and the conversion is a fact about the building rather than about the resident. Beyond that, a proprietary lease usually requires board consent for a transfer, and a co-operative corporation commonly holds a lien on the shares for unpaid maintenance, neither of which is in any public index.

Nobody writing this is a lawyer, and none of it is advice. How to reach a co-operative interest, and in what order, is a question for counsel with the execution and the lease in front of them. What a page can do is narrower. It can tell you that an empty land records search against a Manhattan resident is very often correct, and that the document naming them is filed under the building's address rather than their own.