Stuart Fish: From Co-Ops to Canine Policies, Navigating Property Management in NYC

Welcome to Go to Market, a podcast for RevOps, sales, and marketing leaders to dive deep into industry insights and best practices. Go to Market is sponsored by Fulcast, the go-to-market cloud. My name is Amy Cook, and I am so excited to introduce Stu Fish, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Petsvivo. Hi, Stu. How are you?

I'm good. I'm good. It's a pleasure to meet with you.

It's a pleasure to meet with you as well. Thank you so much for joining our podcast today. You know, Stu, just from talking with you a few times, it is absolutely clear that you are at the top of your game in the property management space. And this is a space that I I have just come to understand a little bit more from working with a couple of real estate companies, and then my husband is in the real estate business, but I've never really dived deep into property management. And I am so excited to talk with you today about the whole industry of property management and how important and how it's changing the landscape of real estate. So thank you so much for joining us.

Well, I appreciate it.

Yeah, you bet. So tell me a little bit about your background. How did you get started with property management?

Good question. I have a long background in real estate in New York. I started out as a manager within a company that was one of the leaders in New York City in converting residential property into cooperative or condominium property. There was an enormous movement that began in the mid-'80s and really flowed until about the year 2000, where several thousand buildings in New York City were converted from a former rental property to a current cooperative or condominium property. It was quite a movement in New York City because what it did is it created ownership and owners out of many people that were historically tenants. And at the end of the process, although it's still ongoing, but by around the year 2000, there were close to a million units in New York City, units of housing that became a cooperative or a condominium. Oh, interesting. It was successful. Developers made a great deal of money doing it. But probably most importantly, people who bought into the system, and I was such a person, I, owned 3 co-ops in my life. Currently I rent, but I owned 3 co-ops in my life. What you would do if you were a resident of the building is you would buy at a discount and then you would instantly have equity. And that was very appealing. So for example, you would buy your apartment for $200,000, but the apartment already had a market value of $400,000. Now, why would developers do that? They would do it because you were a rent-stabilized or rent-controlled tenant in the building who could remain there forever at your rent-stabilized or rent-controlled rent, or the developer could take $200,000 from you, sell you the apartment, and both parties would walk away happy. Developer would have $200,000, you would have a home that you owned. What it also did is it allowed people to have control over their apartment and control over their building. So buildings that became a cooperative or condominium, they suddenly were in the position to renovate the hallway that was disgusting for years in the rental property or create rules and procedures for how people would address living in the building. They would look at things like if somebody made noise, they could— they would have a mechanism to address it. If someone had pets and the pets were difficult, they could have a mechanism to address it. So the rise of co-opping in New York City was very profound. I worked for a company that converted to co-ops and condos over 150 of those buildings. Oh, wow. And particularly what I worked on was after the conversion, the management of the apartments that the tenant didn't buy, where the tenant remained as a rent-stabilized or controlled tenant. They were called non-eviction plans back then because the tenant had a right to remain without eviction if the tenant felt like, you know what, I'm happy paying $1,500 a month for my apartment. I don't need to get a mortgage. I just want to live like this. And many tenants chose that, but many smart tenants bought their apartment and resold it. I was fortunate enough to live in 3 cooperative apartments, which I bought and resold at higher prices than what I paid for them. So I did well in that marketplace. It worked for me on many levels. When I first got married, it worked for me in having a new home for me and my bride at that time. And it was a successful thing for me and a successful thing for New York City. From there, I went into day-to-day property management where I manage buildings. For the past 25 years, I've been managing individual buildings. Before, I managed the apartments in the buildings. Now I manage the building. By management, I mean I work for a New York City real estate management company where they were hired by the cooperative or the condominium to manage every aspect of their property, to manage the collection of rents, to manage the payment of bills, to manage the superintendent, to make sure that the hallways were vacuumed, to make sure that the roof was repaired, to prevent leaks from coming into the building. And take care of all the matters large and small. That's where I've spent the last 20 years of my, of my career. I've worked for a company that was very much a cutting-edge company in that field that very much put forth all the latest developments and ideas and procedures. And it's a successful business in New York and a very highly competitive business in New York.

Very interesting. I love hearing the history of how those converted. I never knew that before. That's so interesting. So how is real estate in New York right now? And I think that New York is probably similar to close to LA where I live. A lot of people to manage, a lot of regulations. How is real estate changing today?

Okay, good question. Well, for starters, prices are high. The ability of a young family or a young couple, an individual to come in and buy an apartment, becomes more and more difficult as prices rise. But at the same time, the cooperative or condominium form of ownership is very popular because it gives you a stake in the building. It gives you an ownership interest. And I think that's been a major development in New York City, the conversion of people who come here from a rental mentality to an ownership mentality. And in New York City, which was once the land of rental apartments, it's now a 50/50. Thing. About 50% of the apartments are in an ownership form, and about 50% of them are still rental. You know, New York City has become complex. It's always been complex, but it's become complex or evolved in recent years because of things like regulation. It's a very regulated business, the real estate business, the residential real estate business. Every 3 months, every 6 months, There are what they call local laws. The local laws are passed by either the city or by the state of New York, and they involve all sorts of areas. They involve things that make sense, like producing an inspection of the boiler every year and filing that inspection. That didn't exist until 10 years ago. And inspecting all the gas lines of the building. That didn't exist till about 10 years ago. To much more complicated issues. Which are currently ongoing, such as producing a report of energy consumption, filing that report, and then there being some consequence for that, for that result. For example, if you're using energy that's commensurate with the size and scope of your building, you're in a good place. But if you're using more energy than what's commensurate with the size of your building, the city intends, or the state intends, that they will be taxing that in some way by imposing costs and charges onto those building owners. Why are they doing that? It's a general consideration to reduce energy consumption, to create a more efficient way in which we heat our buildings, to force and coerce and pressure building owners in a positive way to find solutions, to be more efficient, to burn gas instead of oil, to consider alternate energy technology, to look at how the building was constructed and how to make it more efficient, put new windows in, repair the roof, seal openings, put new light fixtures in that are more LED fixtures that are more energy efficient. So, so that's one of the major ways that I see that the world has changed in this landscape, in this real estate landscape.

Oh, that's very interesting. You know, one thing also that I just recently learned was that now 70% of homeowners, including condo owners, own pets. Is that right?

That's correct. That's correct. You know, pets have always been popular. When dogs and cats became domesticated, people recognized that they could be a good companion or they could accompany you hunting. But in more recent years, and New York has a certain unique flavor to it in that way, Pets have become a family member. Pets have become a companion. This wonderful thing that you come home to and you hear your dog as you're putting the key in the door and he's happy to see you and he leaps up and you have a friend that's always loyal and reliable and always there for you. I think it was even further exacerbated by COVID. You know, COVID forced a lot of people to spend more time either among themselves, among their family. For those who are single, I think in particular among themselves. But what I saw from my vantage point is that many people went out and got a pet. They went out and got a dog or a cat. It became a companion to you when it was harder for you to see people, and it gave you some real warm-blooded contact with a loving animal, with a loving pet that would give you that, that sense of being loved and being appreciated in the world. And we saw a tremendous uptick in the number of pets that came into our buildings that we're, that we've been managing.

That's, that's very interesting. So how have you managed pets in the past? And I know that you're now Director of Strategic Partnerships at Petsvivo. What is Petsvivo doing to help with that? And how is that facilitating that pet ownership?

Well, in the past, it was done in all different ways from no regulation at all to, in some ways, overregulation. In the no-regulation days, it meant people did whatever they wanted. They brought whatever animal into the building. You saw phenomena like people had 3 or 4 dogs in a small apartment. I've run into situations where people had 5 cats in, in, in their apartment. So what, what clearly we saw a need for and what was absent in the marketplace was a system in which a building could track the pets in the building, understand who had pets, address pets that were a problem or a nuisance. As you could imagine, sometimes when someone has 3 dogs in the apartment, they just sit and yap at each other, or they yap at everyone who walks by the—

Great. I have a little yapper. His name's Rocky.

He's probably a lovely one. And I speak from this whole perspective as both a dog lover and a cat lover.

I've had both.

I've had and learned the pleasures of both. I wasn't always a cat lover, but I was married to someone who had two cats. I was forced to become a cat lover.

Right.

But it was, uh, it was a successful cat relationship, at least. We're no longer married, but, but I, I did enjoy the cat part of it. Um, but the issues arose and in some ways they worsened. More dogs, more cats really meant more issues, more problems. Under the worst scenario, about the worst thing that can happen with pets is that a dog could bite someone. Under the worst scenario, and I've had a good deal of experience with this one, I've had experience with both, but where someone has a cat, they love cats and they keep bringing in cats. And I've had the pleasure of managing property where someone had as many as 9 cats in a 1-bedroom apartment. And, you know, that presents a problem. That presents a problem for the neighbors. That presents a problem for the building. If having a pet meant that everything stayed in the apartment, it would be less of an issue. The reality is that if you have 9 cats in your apartment, your apartment's gonna smell like cats. Your hallway is likely going to smell like cats, and your neighbors are going to be offended and frustrated by what becomes a nuisance, what becomes a noxious nuisance in their life. With dogs, there are a number of different issues that can happen from the dog bite that I mentioned earlier to the dog yapping to the dogs that cry during the day, dogs that urinate in the hallway or the elevator because they're so excited about going out that they couldn't hold it in, dogs that defecate in the building, dogs that fight each other. We all know dogs and, you know, we're all familiar with dogs and some dogs are good at getting along with their fellow dogs and some dogs aren't. And there could be ugly incidents from that. So Pets Vivos, Vivo, arose as a way in which a building could review their pets, could require the registration of their pets, and could create a system in which the building understood who was in the building, what pets were in the building, and also created And this is probably the most profound part of Pets Vivo, a way in which liability could be shifted. When a building allows pets in the building, when a building allows Jane Doe with her pit bull to move into the building, that pit bull might be a lovely pit bull, might be a friendly pit bull, but there could come a time when that pit bull had an incident with someone or another dog in the building. And that becomes a situation where suddenly The building owner, for example, in a cooperative, there's an entity that's a corporation that owns the building and that you as a shareholder own shares in that corporation. So if in a cooperative, if your dog bit someone, then the cooperative likely will be a party in litigation and might have liability as to that bite. Classically, building owners that house dogs that bite people have liability. So what Pets Vivo enables the building owner to do is to create a process in which liability is shifted onto the owner of that pet and not the owner of the building. How do they do that? There's a number of different ways within the documentation, but one of the most profound ways is that the applicant owner who's applying to that building with their pet makes certain representations as to the disposition of the pet, as to its health, as to its aggressiveness, as to its past history, and really overall as to its propensity to engage in what would be dangerous behavior if it bit someone, or even disruptive behavior if it wanted to incessantly. If it was a pet that urinated in the hallway every time the dog went out for a walk. I recently was involved with the renovation of the hallways of a building that had a very free pet policy. And they had gone probably 10 years too far in doing their hallways and in putting in new carpeting. And I always felt that the building smelled of urine. And no matter how much we shampooed and even bring in professional help to do so, you could always smell it to me. And that was an example of a building that had a lot of pets, had a lot of free run of pets, but suffered a negative consequence.

So this is so fascinating and what an awesome opportunity for the liability to shift and also to have that registration for the pet parent is what it sounds like, where they're able to have all of their documents in one place, right? Because I know that when I'm working, when I'm trying to get Rocky's shots done or whatever, it's hard for me to even find them. So I think that's a cool opportunity as well, to be able to have that registration, know who's in the building. For me, if I'm living next to somebody with 9 cats, I want to know that they're being looked after by the building. And so that's an interesting technology play for a property management company to be able to require that of its tenants.

Agree. And on the extreme positive side, it's very easy for the applicant to manipulate the material, to answer the questions, to move through it. I would consider it to be extremely user-friendly. And I say that as someone who's not a master on computers, who always appreciates when something is user-friendly. My own experience can be that it can be, you know, a challenge to sometimes put together and answer 50 questions or 30 questions about something. This is well presented. It's very clear. It's very easy to do so. And what it does is it creates a record for the building, which is profound. And it creates a record also for the managing agent. We really haven't talked about that yet. From the managing agent perspective, like it or not, what happens in the building sometimes becomes the managing agent's problem, managing agent's fault sometimes, or at least in the context of where there's a bad incident, the managing agent will often be brought into that bad incident either to correct it or most profoundly as a party in litigation. Last thing that John Doe managing agent wants is to become a party in a dog bite lawsuit that alleges that somebody was badly injured because the managing agent didn't properly vet that dog or didn't advise and warn building residents that there was a dog with a dangerous propensity in the building. You know, me personally, I've had the experience of standing in an elevator in a building and having a German Shepherd bite my hand, which was just by my side, and having the owner look at me and say, oh, well, you must have been moving your hand in front of his mouth.

What?

And, and luckily it didn't break skin, but because some dogs have really strong, powerful bites, it really bruised my hand. And I remember thinking, like, the day after when I woke up with, like, literally, like, a sprained hand that it was the dog, that, you know, it was that incident that, that did it. And I was fortunate that he didn't break skin, but it was also a very inappropriate and even arrogant response to my, my, that, that somehow I caused it by standing in the aisle there. And so these things are fairly commonplace that there are incidents from my many years of property management. I managed property in the direct sense for about 20 years. 25 years, I really found that on a regular basis, there were incidents with the pets in the building. Wow.

That is, that's fascinating that that owner felt that entitled to say that to you. And also I'm so glad that we have apps like PetsVivo now that can help manage that.

So, so, so what can PetsVivo do? In that incident, the property manager could instantly, or in a relatively short time, pull out that deck of information that had been supplied by that particular owner and could look at it and could address it and could raise that issue with the owner. And even in a situation where the pet had done something dangerous, could demand that the pet be removed, or the building could be armed with some of the weaponry necessary to deal with that in a litigation sense, in the sense of having been sued as a party and then shifting that liability onto the actual perpetrator, the owner of that dog. And also have the experience of being able to address it readily in its own litigation. For example, if the building owner was trying to remove that owner because they had a dog that bit someone. And that's a very common thing. And often the first response that a cooperative board or a condominium board or a rental property owner thinks of when someone has— someone's dog has bit someone else in the building.

Interesting. Well, Stu, it is clear that you know all the ins and outs and have had an incredible experience. I thank you so much for coming to talk with us today. My last question for you is, as one of the people in New York real estate at the top of your game, What do you do to stay there? It could be anything from meditation in the morning to your favorite pizza at night.

Yeah, I'll tell you a couple of things that I do. I'm involved in the politics of my local neighborhood. I live in a neighborhood in New York City called Bay Ridge, and it's a very well-run middle-class neighborhood, and we have good leadership, and I participated in some issues involving my neighborhood. I'm a strong music enthusiast, and I live in a city where every good rock band, every great jazz artist, every great classical artist comes through New York. I see a lot of live music, and I also see a lot of live theater.

Oh, I love that.

I'm very challenged by both in that I often will turn to my long-term partner Susan, and I'll say to her, it's so great to see live music. It's so great to be here and hear it live. I have a pretty good stereo. I have a great TV. It's so much better to be live.

Absolutely right.

In theater, I see Broadway things. I actually just saw something recently, the Bobby Darin play. That was great. But I also see a lot of Off-Broadway and even Off-Off-Broadway, and I'm a member of a couple of Off-Broadway organizations where I buy the tickets and I see the series. Each year, and I see extraordinary things in theater where it's a wonderful example of low technology. People are in front of you, they're speaking, there's no amplification. You hear the dialogue, they act and emote in front of you. And that gives me a lot of pleasure and a lot of— I very much appreciate being in a place where I can experience that on a regular basis. I could go out on any day and I could find a wonderful Off-Broadway play to see because there's 30 going on at any time in New York City.

Oh, I love that. Well, you know what? If I lived in New York City, I would be there right along with you and Susan. And that's where my passion lies as well.

Come on by. We'll do a double date. We'll go out.

I love it.

I'll take you to the best pizza in New York and then we'll run over to the theater or vice versa. Then we'll catch a matinee and go to pizza afterwards.

You've got it.

I usually like to eat after the play because if I eat before the play, I can get sleepy. But if you eat after the play, then you can discuss all the wonderful things that you saw.

I love that. Well, Stu, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. It was absolutely wonderful to get to know you a little better, and hope you have a wonderful day, and congratulations on all of your success.

Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.