It has never mattered more to know what your building is worth
There was a stretch, not long ago, when a New York owner could go years without thinking hard about value. The building cash-flowed, the tenants stayed, the tax bill arrived, and the number on paper only mattered if you were selling or refinancing. That period is over, and it is not coming back soon.
Four things changed at once, and they compound.
Rates and the money markets move on a weekly basis now. The spread between what a buyer could pay six months ago and what the same buyer can pay today is not a rounding error, it is often the difference between a deal and no deal. A valuation you were given two years ago is not stale, it is wrong. Debt costs drive buyer math more than any feature of your building does, and if you do not know where they sit this month, you do not know where you sit.
The legislative environment is openly hostile to owners. Each session brings another layer on top of rent regulation, eviction procedure, and what an owner may recover on a unit. Whatever you think of the politics, the practical effect on value is not debatable: the range of things you are permitted to do with your own asset has narrowed, and every narrowing gets priced in by the people bidding on it. Two buildings with identical rent rolls can be worth materially different amounts based purely on their regulatory status.
The courts cannot keep up. Housing Court delays that used to be measured in weeks are now measured in quarters, and a nonpaying unit is not just lost rent, it is lost rent plus legal spend plus an indefinite timeline. Buyers underwrite that risk explicitly now. Sellers who have not adjusted for it are quoting a price from a market that no longer exists.
And management has become institutional. Compliance filings, local law inspections, energy benchmarking, insurance underwriting that now asks questions it never used to ask. Running a small portfolio takes the kind of infrastructure that used to be reserved for large ones. For some owners that is a reason to build the infrastructure. For others it is the honest reason to sell. Both are legitimate answers, and you cannot pick between them without knowing the number.
Here is what I would actually recommend. Know three things about your building at all times: what it would trade for today, what regulations currently govern it and which proposals would change that, and what the buyers in your specific submarket are looking for right now. Not the market generally - your blocks, your unit count, your regulatory profile. That information is cheap to get and expensive to be without.
None of this means you should sell. Plenty of owners I speak with should hold, and I tell them so. But holding as a decision is a very different thing from holding because you never checked. In an uncertain market the owners who do well are not the ones who guess right, they are the ones who are not guessing.
If you own in Brooklyn, Queens or Manhattan and you want a straight read on where you stand, I am happy to meet in person and walk through the several options in front of you as a property owner in an uncertain time. There is no cost to it and no obligation attached to the answer. Sometimes the conversation ends with a plan to sell. More often it ends with an owner who simply knows more than they did that morning, which is worth the hour on its own.