Somebody has told your board the building is already halfway there. The word that usually comes with that is condop, and it arrives with a comfortable implication: the rules here are relaxed, sales go through easily, so there is nothing much left to convert. Boards have put off this decision for years on the strength of it. What settles the question is the paperwork in your own files, which says in plain terms what each shareholder holds.
FAQ · Ownership Structure
What Is a "Condop," and Is It the Same as Converting to a Condo?
A condop is a co-op with condo-like rules layered on top; the shares never become a deed. Here's the actual difference.
Written by Jack Boyajian, President Updated September 2026
What do you hold today?
Shares and a lease. A cooperative is a corporation that holds title to the property and leases the apartments to the people who own its stock, so a shareholder signs a subscription for shares and receives a proprietary lease on a specific unit, with conditions attached to its use and to the right to sublease. What you bought was stock in a corporation, and stock is not real estate. House rules can be written any way a community likes without changing that sentence at all.
Condop is not a form of ownership that New York law recognizes. No statute or regulation of the state defines the word, and the law here knows two forms, the cooperative and the condominium. What people use it to describe is a building whose commercial space, the ground-floor stores, was organized as one or more condominium units, with the residential floors above still held by a cooperative corporation that owns one of those units itself. A residential shareholder in a building arranged that way holds what every other New York co-op shareholder holds: stock in the corporation and a proprietary lease on the apartment.
What does a conversion actually change?
The instrument. In a condominium each owner holds a deed to their own unit together with an undivided interest in the common areas, and that deed is real estate: your own mortgage, your own tax bill, your own asset. Getting there runs through your shareholders, who approve a plan that distributes to each of them their pro-rata share of the corporation's assets, which is their apartment. No relaxation of the house rules performs that step.
Why does the difference show up in the price?
Because the market treats the two forms differently and always has. A condominium buyer has hundreds of financing options; brokers and buyers understand the form and are readier to transact in it. A co-op purchaser meets limited mortgage opportunities and co-op lending guidelines, pays maintenance that carries a portion of the building's underlying mortgage, and lives with restrictions on selling and renting. Converting reaches all of it at once: values, financing at better rates and fees, more owners who live in their units, funding for capital projects and reserves, and an end to your shareholders carrying the liability of a group mortgage and a neighbor's unpaid taxes.
Is this work Hutton does?
We do one transaction: the conversion of an existing cooperative into individually deeded condominium units, run end to end in house. We are the only national co-op to condo conversion specialist, with completed conversions nationwide. More than 5,000 units have come through it. We do not restructure buildings into arrangements that stop short of a deed, because a deed is the thing that carries the value.
How does your board find out which it has?
By reading its own documents, which is where this always ends. Your bylaws, your proprietary lease and your current financial statements say what your shareholders own, what a conversion would require of them, and what the building's obligations are. Whether the commercial space is in fact organized as a condominium unit, and what that arrangement does to the cooperative's own governing documents, is answered by your recorded declaration, your proprietary lease and your bylaws, read by counsel, and not by the general statutes.
We will read all three for you and tell your board plainly what it is holding, at no cost and no obligation to the corporation or its members. If the answer is that your building converted long ago, we will say so and you have lost an afternoon. If the answer is that your shareholders still own stock, your board has a decision in front of it that the vocabulary had been hiding.
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