At a minimum a reminder letter can be sent to all residents strongly encouraging them to carry insurance. Cooperative and condominiums have a number of ways to limit this exposure. While most residents do wisely carry insurance, there are still many who don’t and this presents a liability to every apartment building. It may also force the building to file a claim with their own insurance carrier which requires the building to cover the deductible usually $2,500 to $5,000 and will result in higher premiums. While this scenario is unusual, typical events such as fires and flooding that trigger the same issues for board scan drag coops and a condo’s into time consuming, possibly fund sucking legal battles. It also meant that the cooperative avoided having the make hard choices about using funds to cover the remediation of the common space in the short-term and that they would not be distracted by legal discussions in the following months and a loss of revenue by a sponsor potentially protesting being compelled to clean a common space. However, without the insurance in place, it was clear that a lengthy and costly legal process would ensue.
It was fortunate that the sponsor was able to ultimately compel their homeowner’s insurance company to cover the remediation whose costs exceeded $50,000. After the situation was triaged, the board rightful moved to hold the owner of the unit, the building sponsor in this case, responsible for a cleanup of the common space cavity between the two apartments. Wilson’s person was seeping through the ceiling of the below apartment. The board of directors only became aware of this after management was notified that Ms. On May 14, 2011, Kimberly Wilson, an elderly resident in a cooperative apartment building, died of natural causes in her sleep. Good Housekeeping: Homeowners Insurance By: Dan Miller - Choice New York