New Jersey wrote its conversion rules while conversions were under way.

The statute came first, and the tenant protections came in stages.

New Jersey's Condominium Act dates to 1969 and defines a condominium as units held under a master deed together with an undivided interest in the common elements. The state wrote no separate cooperative act, and cooperatives are recognized through the conversion statute, the Planned Real Estate Development Full Disclosure Act, and a recording statute. A 1975 law that took effect in February 1976 set the core regime of notice, a full plan of conversion, and a purchase right. A sitting tenant holds ninety days in which to buy the unit or the shares before anyone else may, and moving expenses are compensated.

Senior and disabled tenants gained an indefinite protected tenancy in July 1981, which is a status of its own and not a stay of eviction. A 1978 law addressed Atlantic City alone, where the Legislature found that casino driven land values were pushing landlords to convert or demolish residential apartments. Cooperative proprietary leases gained a recording system of their own in 1987, running parallel to deed recording for condominiums. The Legislature returned to the question in 1991, finding that eviction for conversion was adding to homelessness and to the loss of affordable housing.

Hudson County's own planning record states that the county lost a large number of affordable units to condominium and cooperative conversion during the 1980s. A second and larger wave of supply followed, and the county added almost 11,000 housing units between 1990 and 2000. Most of them were new condominiums, or older industrial and apartment buildings converted, in Jersey City, Hoboken, West New York and Union City.

Public counts of the state's cooperative and condominium stock are thin.

No government source publishes a current statewide or county level count of New Jersey's cooperative units against its condominium units. The Census Bureau's household survey no longer asks about cooperative or condominium status at all, so its tenure tables collapse both forms into ownership.

A condominium buyer takes a deed and an ordinary mortgage, and a cooperative buyer's loan is secured by shares in the building's corporation and a proprietary lease. Fannie Mae will buy a cooperative share loan only where the unit is a principal residence or a second home, never an investment property. Academic work on the neighboring New York City market has found condominiums selling for more than comparable cooperatives, a gap its authors called an enduring puzzle. That work covers New York City sales between 1984 and 2002, and it carries no New Jersey figure of its own.

Hudson County is currently the only New Jersey county named as a qualified county under the 1991 tenant protection law, a status tied to population and density. The administrative code carrying that designation is current through July 2024. A separate 2020 law lets a dense municipality with rent control ban the conversion of an affordable rental unit by ordinance, and names no county itself.

A conversion is registered with the Department of Community Affairs.

An owner converting a building to condominium or cooperative form registers the offering with the Bureau of Homeowner Protection at the Department of Community Affairs. Where a registration is not required, the route is a letter of exemption, which the bureau determines within thirty days. The tenant protections set out above run alongside that registration, and a converting owner satisfies both. New Jersey's conversion and eviction statutes, together with your building's own documents, are what your counsel reads to answer the questions particular to it. The New Jersey law page answers the narrower legal questions, and what a conversion raises in tax is set out on the tax page.

Buildings Hutton has converted in New Jersey.

Cooperative buildings in New Jersey are among those Hutton has converted. Each one appears, with the years it spans, in the case studies filtered to New Jersey.