Landlord Can't Amend Prior Year's Rent Registration to Change Apartment Status

Landlord asked the DHCR in September 2014 for permission to amend a 2013 apartment registration. Landlord claimed that the apartment was incorrectly registered as rent stabilized and should be changed to permanently exempt based on renovation and new installations following a vacancy. The DRA denied landlord’s request. Landlord appealed and lost. Rent Stabilization Code amendments in 2014 permit a landlord to seek an order amending a registration filed in a prior year based on ministerial errors. Before 2014, the DHCR had routinely permitted landlords to file amended registrations at any time and for any year. The DHCR came to recognize that this led to unsupervised inclusion of registration amendments that corrupted the purpose of the DHCR’s registration database as a contemporaneously created history of rents. Permitting unlimited registration amendments also facilitated potential fraudulent contact by landlords seeking to evade their obligations. In this case landlord was seeking to obtain a jurisdictional determination by way of registration amendment.

412 East 9th Street Realty LLC: DHCR Adm. Rev. Docket No. CX410031RO (6/30/16) [3-pg. doc.]