Tax Cert Petitions are due Monday, October 24, 2022. If you haven’t settled your property tax protest – such as when the Tax Commission made no offer, hasn’t yet made a determination, or you rejected the offer – then your tax cert attorney typically files a petition in Supreme Court. The petition preserves your challenge to the 2022/23 tax year, which lets you fight it again at next year’s hearing. If you don’t file the 2022/23 petition, then at next year’s hearing you can only ask for reductions for the 2023/24 tax year and you lose the right to challenge 2022/23.
Co-op/Condo Tax Abatement. The NYC Department of Finance has revoked 2022/23 abatements for certain large residential co-ops and condos that failed to timely file the new Prevailing Wage Affidavit. See Cooperative and Condominium Tax Abatement (nyc.gov)
New Law: Supplemental Storefront Registration due February 15th annually
Beware of potential future commercial vacancy tax in New York City.
On October 18, 2022, NYC Mayor Eric Adams signed into law the City Council’s Int. No. 383-A. The law creates what we deem the Supplement to the Supplemental Storefront Registration (SSSR).
For practical purposes, owners already reported June 30th vacancy on the August 15th Supplemental Storefront Registration. The new law doesn’t change that. Owners also still file the regular Storefront Registration by June 1st. See storefront-registry (nyc.gov)
What’s new? Owners previously reported December 31st vacancies on the June 1st Storefront Registration – this filing now gets moved up 3.5 months to February 15th. Essentially, all the law did was accelerate reporting of 12/31 vacancies by 3.5 months. And now owners have one more filing to remember to complete. This law is effective April 1, 2023, so the first SSSR filing will be due 2/15/2024.
The law only requires supplemental storefront registration if the premises was vacant on 12/31 or 6/30. There is no affirmative duty to file to report non-vacancy. Many owners will forget to file, and those stores will be deemed occupied. Failure to file and report vacancy is subject to penalties.
Thankfully, the original version of this law dropped the proposed requirement that owners must update the city on vacancies in real-time, which would have been a logistical nightmare: “if the vacancy or change of ownership occurs from June 1 through December 31, the supplemental registration shall be filed within 60 days.”
Remember, back in 2019 pre-COVID, the City Council invented the Storefront Registration under the pretext that it wanted to study the perceived retail vacancy blight. This study is the precursor to the Council potentially proposing future commercial rent control or a commercial vacancy tax.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact your trusted Rosenberg & Estis, P.C. attorney, or Benjamin Williams who authored the above.