NYRPL § 226-b: No Right to Sublease Without Consent

This article examines section 226-b of the New York Real Property law, enacted by the New York State Legislature in 1975. Enacted to give tenants in a dwelling having four or more residential units the right to sublease or assign their apartments, subject to the landlord\u27s consent, it provides that the landlord must release the tenant from the lease if (s)he unreasonably withholds consent for such sublease or assignment. The section thus gives tenants the right to remain in occupancy or to elect to be released from their leasehold obligations. However, some courts have interpreted this section to confer upon tenants a broad statutory right to sublease their apartments upon compliance with the statute\u27s procedural notification requirements and the landlord\u27s unreasonable withholding of consent. This Note discusses the legislative intent of section 226-b, specifically addressing whether it gives a residential tenant the right to execute a valid sublease without the landlord\u27s consent if s/he complies with the statute\u27s requirements. It analyzes the right to sublease under common law as compared to the statutory right to sublease under section 226-b, and contends that the tenant has the statutory remedies of terminating or remaining in occupancy, but not of subleasing without landlord approval

An Equilibrium Analysis of Real Estate

This paper provides a unified equilibrium approach to valuing a wide variety of commercial real estate lease contracts. Using a game-theoretic variant of real options analysis, the underlying real estate asset market is modeled as a continuous-time Nash equilibrium in which developers make construction decisions under demand uncertainty. Then, using the economic notion that leasing simply represents the purchase of the use of the asset over a specified time frame, I use a contingent-claims approach to value many of the most common real estate leasing arrangements. In particular, the model provides closed-form solutions for the equilibrium valuation of leases with options to purchase, pre-leasing, gross and net leases, leases with cancellation options, ground leases, escalation clauses, lease concessions and sale-leasebacks.

Singapore's Imminent Expiration of Land Leases: From Growth and Equality to Discontent and Inequality?

Haila described Singapore as a laboratory for a social scientist given the multiple ways land is used, managed or treated as a source of public revenue. Phang explains how housing has given the bottom 50 per cent of households, wealth equating to the level advocated in Piketty's ‘ideal society’. As fixed-term leases expire, people who own apartments on public land will see their values fall to zero. Inequality will return, challenging the otherwise stable polity. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, this paper explores how and why this unique land regime was created, and expose how theoretically inconsistent policies and their ad hoc, pragmatic application has created several rent leakages to a minority of the population who continue to hold freehold land. It offers some alternative strategies better informed by land rent theory, that might be adopted to preserve the benefits enjoyed for now