New York's Senate voted 60-0-2 for a condo owner's bill of rights. Albany adjourned without it.

On April 30, 2025, the New York Senate passed S5089, the Residential Condominium Owner's Bill of Rights, by a margin of 60-0-2. The vote gave the bill more bipartisan support than almost any other housing measure that session. Two Assembly versions — A5227 and A1505 — were referred to the Assembly Housing Committee on introduction and never scheduled for a hearing. Albany adjourned June 18, 2026. The bill must start over.

What S5089 would have given condo unit owners.

Under current New York law, condo unit owners hold two principal statutory inspection rights. Real Property Law §339-w entitles owners to examine the books of account for the six fiscal years preceding a request. Business Corporation Law §624 allows shareholders to inspect a range of corporate books and records on five days' written notice. Neither statute creates a right to board-meeting minutes, engineer or consultant reports, or inspection records from city agencies. Neither requires the board to give written reasons for denying a unit-owner request. And neither has an administrative enforcement mechanism: if the board declines to comply, the unit owner's sole path is a proceeding in Supreme Court or a court of competent jurisdiction, at the owner's own expense.

S5089 proposed to change several of those defaults. Under the bill, a covered condominium association would be required to make financial statements, accountant and consultant reports, municipal inspector reports, and approved board-meeting minutes available to unit owners within a reasonable time following a request. Election results, including vote tallies, would have to be posted within one business day in a location accessible to all owners. Board vacancies arising more than six months before an annual meeting would be required to be filled within 60 days. The board could not enter into contracts for extraordinary expenses without unit-owner approval, unless the expenditure was an emergency or required for refinancing purposes.

Each of these rights exists in other states' condominium statutes. Florida's Florida Statute §718.111 requires condominium associations to make all official records available for owner inspection within ten business days of a written request, and creates a rebuttable presumption that the association willfully failed to comply if the board does not produce records in that window. Virginia's Condominium Act §55.1-1945 grants unit owners the right to inspect and copy all association books and records upon five business days' written notice (ten business days for a self-managed association). None of these obligations exist in New York's Article 9-B today.

The 3,500-unit threshold: who S5089 would actually have covered.

The structural limit in S5089 is its scope clause. The bill applies to "the organizational and operating documents of a not-for-profit residential condominium association established or operating pursuant to the laws of the state and managing the common charges, elements, expenses, or profits of thirty-five hundred or more units." Three thousand five hundred units.

The typical New York City condominium has between 20 and 300 units. Even large mixed-use residential towers in Manhattan rarely exceed 400 or 500 units in a single association. A condominium association managing 3,500 or more units would represent an unusually large master-planned development. The bill text does not define whether this threshold was intended to apply to a single association managing multiple buildings, or was designed to apply to the bill's reach to only the very largest possible condominium associations in the state. What the publicly available bill language makes clear is this: by its own terms, the overwhelming majority of New York City condo buildings would not have qualified.

Two Assembly versions, neither scheduled.

The Senate bill's companion in the Assembly arrived in two distinct forms, a fact worth noting because the two bills carry meaningfully different scopes.

A5227, introduced February 12, 2025, by Assembly members Reyes, Sayegh, Jacobson, Simon, DeSTEFANO, Cruz, and Taylor, with co-sponsors Cook and Epstein, mirrors S5089's language, including the 3,500-unit threshold. It was referred to the Assembly Housing Committee on introduction and was not scheduled for a hearing before Albany adjourned.

A1505, introduced January 10, 2025, by Assembly member Rosenthal, takes a different approach: it amends both the General Business Law and the Business Corporation Law, extending a bill of rights to both condominium unit owners and cooperative shareholders, not only condo owners. The Rosenthal bill applies to "residential condominium and cooperative associations" without the same 3,500-unit scope clause that appears in the Senate version. A broader bill, then, but one that also never received a committee hearing. It was referred to the Assembly Housing Committee and remained there when the session closed.

Both Assembly bills are now expired. Any successor legislation requires re-introduction in the 2027-2028 session and must clear committee, a full chamber vote, and conference before the Governor could sign it.

The AG enforcement gap that S5089 would have addressed.

The enforcement structure S5089 proposed matters as much as the rights themselves. The bill specified that "the attorney general is authorized to enforce the provisions of this section and may, upon the attorney general's own initiative, or in response to a complaint by one or more unit owners, investigate allegations of any failure to comply." The AG would also be required to produce a handbook summarizing unit owners' rights and available enforcement procedures within six months of the bill's effective date.

Compare that to what the current framework provides. The AG's Real Estate Finance Bureau holds authority under the Martin Act and Real Property Law Article 9-B to review offering plans, pursue sponsor fraud, and address post-closing misrepresentations in the original offering plan. It does not have authority to order a board to produce meeting minutes, respond to inspection requests, or fill a board vacancy. That limitation is structural: the Real Estate Finance Bureau's jurisdiction flows from the offering-plan review process, which ends when the sponsor sells out. Governance disputes that arise after the offering plan closes fall outside that jurisdiction. As CCNYC documented in Why the NY AG Can't Help With Most Condo Governance Disputes, the incapacity is a matter of statutory architecture, not staffing or political will.

S5089, had it passed in the form the Senate approved, would have created, to our knowledge, the first explicit statutory basis for the AG to receive a governance complaint from a condo unit owner and investigate it. That is a different authority from what the Real Estate Finance Bureau holds today. The caveat remains: because of the 3,500-unit threshold, virtually no NYC condo building would have triggered that enforcement pathway.

Bottom line.

New York's Senate voted 60-0-2 for a condo owner's bill of rights. The bill's own scope clause limited its reach to associations managing 3,500 or more units, a threshold that excludes the large majority of NYC condominiums by any reasonable reading. The broader Assembly version, A1505, which would have extended rights to both condominiums and co-ops without that threshold, never received a hearing. The 2025-2026 session is closed. If either bill is re-introduced in 2027, the drafting choices that would determine whether it actually covers most NYC condo owners are the threshold language in the Senate version and the enforcement mechanism's relationship to the Real Estate Finance Bureau's existing jurisdiction. A bill of rights with no enforcement mechanism that reaches actual buildings is a statement of aspiration, not a remedy. The unit owners who most need these rights live in the buildings the current draft was written not to cover.

Primary sources: NY Senate Bill S5089 (2025-2026) · NY Assembly Bill A5227 (2025-2026) · NY Assembly Bill A1505 (2025-2026) · NY Real Property Law §339-w · NY Business Corporation Law §624

Companion resources: Why the NY AG Can't Help With Most Condo Governance Disputes · When Albany Adjourned in June, Four Co-op Reform Bills Had No Vote · New York's Condo-Reform Record: What Stalled, and What Passed · NY's Condo Ombudsman Bill Did Not Advance for the Second Consecutive Session · What NYC Condo and Co-op Owners Can Legally Demand From the Board · All regulatory gaps →