Queens elected officials last week applauded Vantage, a real estate investment company that owns 88 residential buildings in the borough, for signing a three-year contract with the union representing the apartments’ superintendents.

Vantage Management Services, part of Vantage Properties, announced the deal with the union, Teamsters Local 808, that followed months of negotiations last week at an event attended by lawmakers, union officials and Vantage employees at Cafe Rubio in Flushing.

“Everyone is a winner in this agreement — Vantage, Local 808 and the thousands of residents who rely on their buildings’ workers every day,” City Councilwoman Karen Koslowitz (D-Forest Hills) said at the June 15 event.

Vantage owns and operates nearly 10,000 apartment units, many of which are rent-regulated, in about 150 buildings throughout the city, including ones in Rego Park, Corona, Sunnyside and Elmhurst.

The company has faced pressure from elected officials, including state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, to change the way it does business. Vantage agreed in February to pay $1 million to compensate harassed tenants as part of a settlement with Cuomo. The settlement came after Cuomo said at the end of January that he planned to sue Vantage to stop it from forcing tenants from their homes in order to rent the apartments to individuals who could pay for more expensive, market-price units.

The new agreement with the union was not mandated in the deal with Cuomo.

The contract Vantage inked with the union takes effect retroactively from May 1 of this year through April 30, 2013, and will provide better health coverage for 86 superintendents, officials said.

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A Queens landlord that has taken heat for the way it manages its rent-regulated apartments has agreed to its first contract with the union representing its superintendents, company officials said Tuesday.

Vantage Management Services, a part of Vantage Properties, has inked a three-year deal to give its supers from Teamsters Local 808 a raise and add health care coverage, officials said.

The new contract, which kicked in retroactively on May 1 and expires April 30, 2013, will ensure improvements for tenants and employees, because once “the buildings get better … the tenants will be treated better,” said Ozzie Lo Verme, president of the Teamsters Local 808.

The contract covers 86 supers and porters from 88 Vantage-owned buildings in Queens.

The deal comes just months after Vantage reached a $1 million settlement with state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo in February for using what Cuomo called “underhanded tactics” to evict tenants from rent-regulated apartments with the underlying goal of converting them to market-rate units.

When the Queens Chronicle did a brief, informal survey of some tenants at several apartment buildings owned by Vantage Properties last week, the biggest complaint heard was about a broken closet that needed fixing.

Reeve Topchiev, a tenant at the Saxon Hall building in Rego Park, claimed that when he called the firm, the super would “come and take a look” but not do the work.

“I’ve had closets that were broken since I moved in and they still haven’t repaired it,” Topchiev alleged. “They said they would come back once they got the parts and they never came back, they never called — nothing. They take care of their grounds and they charge us for it, but they don’t take care of your apartment.”

Company records, however, show otherwise. In fact, according to Vantage spokesman Davidson Goldin, the doors were fixed within two weeks of the day Topchiev called, Dec. 17 of last year. What the firm did not know, until notified by the Chronicle of Topchiev’s complaint this week, was that they had come off the tracks again.

Within hours, company employees were on the phone with Topchiev setting up a new appointment to fix the doors.

The difference between what the tenant said and what the records show appears to be indicative of the public relations problems that have periodically plagued Vantage since it bought up 137 apartment buildings a few years ago, most of them relatively lower-class, and began upgrading them. Eighty-nine of the properties are in Queens.

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Vantage Properties, which owns more than 80 buildings in Queens, agreed to pay $1 million to compensate harassed tenants as part of a settlement that state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced Thursday. 

The settlement comes after Cuomo said at the end of January that he planned to sue Vantage to stop it from forcing tenants from their homes in order to rent the apartment to individuals who could pay for more expensive, market-price units.

“Landlords who harass tenants harm all New York City residents by displacing long-time tenants from stable neighborhoods and exacerbating the affordable housing shortage,” Cuomo said. “In these tough economic times, the preservation of affordable housing is of the utmost important. Today’s agreement with Vantage not only preserves the rent-regulated apartments owned by them, but also sends a strong message that my office will continue to protect tenants and bring unscrupulous landlords to justice.”

As part of the settlement, Vantage will stop serving tenants with “baseless legal notices” and no longer conduct “frivolous housing court eviction proceedings,” according to Cuomo. The company also must implement new policies related to processing complaints, initiating legal proceedings, and collecting rent as part of the agreement with the attorney general’s office.

The agreement requires Vantage to pay $750,000 in damages to tenants who can demonstrate that the company unjustly vacated their apartments or were subject to frivolous housing court proceedings. The company must pay an additional $250,000 to not-for-profit organizations that provide free legal and educational services to tenants.

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‘Absolutely elated’ by A.G. probe of landlord

BY Daniel Edward Rosen
DAILY NEWS

Thursday, February 4th 2010, 10:52 AM

THE STATE attorney general’s decision to go after one of Queens’ most controversial landlords won’t deter a group of tenants from moving ahead with its own lawsuit, the tenants’ attorney said yesterday.

Rob McCreanor, a lawyer for the Immigrant Tenant Advocacy Project, is representing 21 families that are suing Vantage Properties for allegedly using illegal tactics to evict them from their rent-regulated apartments.

McCreanor said his clients are “absolutely elated” by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s decision to independently seek legal action against the private equity-backed company, which owns some 9,500 rent-regulated apartments in Queens and Manhattan.

“We think this is a tremendous success,” McCreanor said.

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State Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo announced Thursday that he intends to sue a major New York landlord that he says harassed hundreds of tenants in rent-regulated apartments in Queens and Manhattan in a systematic effort to force their departure to create vacancies for higher-paying tenants.

The landlord, Vantage Properties, routinely filed eviction notices and other legal actions against working-class and immigrant families in tenements that the company had recently acquired to generate “substantial tenant turnover,” investigators and tenant advocates said. But most of the legal notices, the attorney general said in a letter to Vantage, contained “deceptive and misleading representations.” Investigators said the majority of those notices were eventually rejected by the city’s housing courts, although the company denied that.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/nyregion/29vantage.html

http://www.ny1.com/8-queens-news-content/top_stories/112833/cuomo-takes-on-city-landlord-for-alleged-tenant-harassment

For complete details go to:

http://www.ag.ny.gov/media_center/2010/jan/jan28a_10.html

In the past week, there have been signs that this adversarial relationship may be thawing. However, the ball is in Vantage’s court to follow up on a series of promises it has recently made to tenants. They include: clear billing statements, better customer service; and reinstalling 14 live-in superintendents, who left earlier this year.

Vantage owns 80 buildings in Queens, which include 15 in Sunnyside and 12 in Woodside, according to the Queens Vantage Tenants Association. Most were bought in 2008 and since then the company has faced some harsh criticism from tenants and local politicians. 

There was a man, according to the Daily News, whose bathroom pipes were not repaired in a timely fashion– and a chunk of his upstairs ceiling came crashing down on his floor. There have been tenants alleging that their rent checks were deliberately not cashed until “after” the due date– so a late charge could be imposed. And tenants have been complaining that they can’t get the assistance they need, since the company has a “hot line” that has short business hours and is often not answered.

Vantage Properties, meanwhile, has maintained that the company has acted in a fair manner.

Nevertheless, the company is promising to make changes to the way it operates. Vantage, according to press reports, has said that it will introduce a new billing system that will make the bills clearer and easily understood. Neil Rubler, the chief executive of Vantage, was quoted in an Astoria Times article as conceding that they were “incredibly hard to understand.” Until the bills are revised, the company will not charge late fees.

But 14 apartment buildings still don’t have superintendents, according to the Queens Chronicle. And even if there are maintenance requests, tenants with live-in supers say they must go through a toll-free hotline anyway. Tenants claim that during business hours, representatives put them on hold indefinitely and if they call after 5 pm they are directed into voice mail.

Vantage said it will extend its service center hours until 7pm on Tuesday and Thursday, and increase its Saturday hours. It said it will provide complaint numbers to tenants (so they can track the progress of their concern) by the end of November.

The Department of Housing Preservation and Development gave Vantage the right to put 24-hour hotlines in place instead of supers in 14 of its buildings. This permission was rescinded two months ago.

So far none have moved back into the buildings, according to the Queens Chronicle. And Vantage claims that it can only bring them back if an apartment becomes available in a building.

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/queens/2009/10/27/2009-10-27_housing_cuts_cord_on_notsosuper_hotline.html