You (Private) Dick!

Landlords are going to great lengths to challenge their rent-regulated tenants:

Bill Golodner idled his sport utility vehicle beside the curb a few doors down. He clipped a surveillance camera to the steering wheel and brought the house into focus. He ran a rough paw over his shaved head, switched on a camera concealed behind the third buttonhole of his dress shirt, then slipped out into the chill morning, heading for the front door.

Philip Marlowe, if he were around, might be doing rent-fraud cases, too.

These are busy times for private investigators in the real estate racket in New York City. Market-rate rents are in the exosphere. Denizens of the city’s 1.1 million rent-regulated apartments have dug in, and landlords are shelling out serious money in search of grounds to dislodge rent-law violators and get a chance to push up rents when an apartment turns over to a new tenant.

At the confluence of those crosswinds, a private eye can flourish. Investigators like Mr. Golodner sweep up whatever incriminating evidence can be used by building owners and their lawyers to show scofflaw tenants the wisdom of, say, relocation.

Mr. Golodner and his partner, Bruce Frankel, both former New York City police detectives, say their firm has handled close to 500 real estate cases in the past year. They mine public records, plumb the depths of the World Wide Web, plant hidden cameras — trawling for proof of illegal subletting, income-limit violations and the improper use of apartments for businesses, even prostitution and drug dealing.

Then again, sometimes you don’t need to hire a private dick to discover the truth:

Take the tenant who seemed to be allowing her Manhattan apartment to be used for illicit business. The owner of the building answered an ad for what Mr. Frankel and Mr. Golodner call a massage. Unexpectedly, he found himself in a building he owned. When Mr. Frankel and Mr. Golodner investigated, they say the found the tenant of record was paying $800 a month but living in Westchester County, while collecting $2,700 a month from the woman in the apartment selling her services.

Some people’s luck . . .

And then there’s the use of private investigators as leading indicator of housing prices:

Another private investigator, Nick Himonidis, founder of NGH Associates in Roslyn Heights, N.Y., recalled a case in which a tenant was operating an architectural office out of a rent-regulated apartment: three architects, support staff, cleaning crews. Two investigators from Mr. Himonidis’s office made an appointment, talked to the architects and asked for a tour of the office. They captured the whole thing on hidden cameras.

“As a percentage of our business, our work for landlords as clients has probably gone from 5 percent to closer to 20 percent in the last 24 months,” said Mr. Himonidis, who believes the rise in rents has made an owner more likely to call in an investigator. “It simply might not have made economic sense 5 or 10 years ago. And now it does.”