Need to find a record of a lien against a NYC co-op apartment

Hi,

Can anyone recommend a website where I can search for or obtain information about a lien that was filed against a co-op apartment in NYC? I went to ACRIS but did not find anything very useful there. Before paying a lawyer, I wanted to have as much information as possible.

Thank you

Gosh, I hope this isn't true, Robert.

I called an online place and the customer service rep looked up liens on the property and found one but it was not ours. We went to a big shot lawyer on Park Avenue in the early 90s and had this lien filed, paying $275 an hour of course. So I expect that the lien was filed. The customer service rep said that liens on co-op apartments are sometimes filed and are not public and listed with ACRIS. I am just trying to do some legwork in the hopes that we can avoid a few $400/hour hours that the lawyer now charges. I'm hoping to pay 5K or less for this lien to be handled successfully.

So if anyone has suggestions of where to look next for this lien, I am all ears.

I just dealt with something similar in Texas. It turns out that our 1983 filing was "so long ago" that it was not in the online data base. We knew the document did exist, it just was not visible online.

I had to pay a local lawyer to literally drive over the the county records office and find the paper document.

Do you have any records of your dealings from the '90's? My dad had no idea where he had put the important deed/title documents and it would have sped things up if he had them.

kmk, I have the original promissory note from the late 80s, and I have the name and contact for the lawyer in NYC who took care of it. When I went to the Acris website, it seemed to me that the time frame would have enabled us to find it, but I can check that again. Worse comes to worst, we will hire the lawyer to take care of it. We used him for our wills and I always felt incredibly ripped off by him. Perhaps because he gave us a 'break' on the fee in exchange for taking my husband's 'seminal' artwork.

Wow, I am reading online that a property lien expires after ten years. And here we thought we were being nice not forcing this woman to pay back a loan. Now her estate may not have to pay either because we didn't know the lien could expire. And I don't understand why our lawyer who filed the lien in 1994 did not mention that to us at the time.

I feel the exact same way I did when we moved out here with a 4 year old and discovered there was no full day kindergarten. It never occurred to me to ask the question. I thought all kindergarten was full day. And now I can't believe that a lien expires, and we never thought to ask the question. I was really counting on it to send my kids to college.

A lien filing is a notice of a debt/obligation. I could be wrong, and the underlying documents would need to be reviewed, but the debt itself (evidenced by the promissory note) does not expire simply because the lien filing lapsed. Instead, the situation sounds like a question of who is first in line to recover against the estate for debts it owes. Note this is not legal advice and it sounds like it would be well worth it to consult a lawyer.

UCC financing statements need to be renewed every five years not ten. All the UCC does is put other lenders on notice of the lien, it does not "create" the lien. The underlying debt docuements reates the lien via the granting clause, but if there's no UCC filing an intervenng lender may jump the unfiled lien bynfilmg his lienand the unfiled lien may be relegated to general unsecured creditor status by a court which is not good.

I see, thanks so much to both of you.

The plot thickens. The lien that supposedly was filed in 1994 was based on a promissory note written in 1987, which enabled the recipient to purchase a co-op in SOHO that is now worth 15 times the purchase price. It is an on-demand note. Now both the recipient of the money (person signing the note) and the lender are deceased. Ownership of the apartment is changing, either because it will be sold, or it was signed over to relatives. The person who inherited the promissory note (my husband) wants to collect from the estate. I did more research and am finding that debts expire, or the ability to sue in court in order to collect a debt expires. In the case of NY, it seems that it expires after 6 years. This makes me wonder how a lawyer filed a lien with a promissory note that was 7 years old.

We have sent an email to the lawyer who filed the lien for my husband's father. It was my husband's attorney for a different matter and so there is more of a connection than simply finding a promissory note after a relative passes away. My husband's father asked for my husband's help, used my husband's lawyer, told us to make certain we did not forget this matter, and now is rolling over in his grave.

Ouch. Sorry, LisaT.

Here is the latest... The lawyer called us back and said that it was probably his partner at the time who filed the UCC. He also said it expires 20 years after the date of the filing. So it has been 21 years. He said we could contact or go to the county office where my FILs will was filed and see if it is listed among the assets of the estate. I will see if the county records office (the county is 1000 miles away) has an online database. Robert, I don't know how to answer your questions because I don't understand them completely. I simply know that if this is an enforceable note, the estate owes us over 125K, and I would like to collect.