NYC real-estate glossary
The NYC commercial real-estate and public-records terms that decide who owns a building and what’s about to come due — defined plainly, with the New York City context the generic dictionaries leave out.
- QEWIQualified Exterior Wall InspectorA QEWI, or Qualified Exterior Wall Inspector, is the licensed professional who inspects an NYC building's exterior walls under the city's facade safety law (FISP, also called Local Law 11) and files the resulting report with the Department of Buildings. Only a New York registered architect or licensed professional engineer with the required experience can act as one.
- SWARMPSafe With A Repair and Maintenance ProgramSWARMP stands for Safe With A Repair and Maintenance Program. It's the middle of the three grades a QEWI can give an NYC facade under FISP (Local Law 11). A SWARMP building is safe to occupy right now, but the inspector flagged conditions that will turn it UNSAFE if they aren't repaired and kept up before the next inspection cycle.
- de-MERStracing a MERS-nominee mortgage to the real lenderMERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems) is a private registry that gets named as the nominee mortgagee on a lot of U.S. mortgages, so loans can be bought and sold without recording a new assignment each time. de-MERS is the work of tracing one of those MERS-nominee mortgages back to the lender or servicer that actually holds it.
- Beneficial ownerthe real person behind an LLC-held propertyA beneficial owner is the actual person who ultimately owns or controls a property, behind whatever LLC, trust, or shell entity holds the deed. In NYC commercial real estate the deed almost always names an LLC. The beneficial owner is the human behind that LLC who really profits from the building and makes the decisions.
- OATH / ECB judgmentunpaid city violation debtAn OATH/ECB judgment is what a New York City agency violation becomes once the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (which absorbed the old Environmental Control Board) rules against the respondent, or the respondent skips the hearing. At that point the fine stops being an allegation and becomes money legally owed to the city.
- Water arrearsunpaid DEP water and sewer chargesWater arrears are unpaid water and sewer charges owed to the NYC Department of Environmental Protection. The charges attach to the property rather than the person, so they follow the building. In practice they are one of the earliest payment obligations a struggling owner lets slip.