Housing cooperative

In a housing cooperative, a corporation owns the building; residents own shares allocated to their units and hold proprietary leases entitling them to occupancy. The structure's consequences run everywhere: unit financing is share-secured (UCC filings, not mortgages), the corporation's underlying mortgage and its terms are every shareholder's shared liability, boards approve transfers, and the building appears in property records as a single owner — the corporation — with unit-level activity largely invisible to parcel data.

Co-ops dominate the city's older apartment-ownership stock. For records analysis, the structure explains data shapes: one tax lot where a condo would show hundreds, transfer records that reflect share assignments rather than deeds, and building-level obligations — the underlying mortgage, ground leases where they exist — that unit buyers inherit proportionally.