New York landlords are losing months of rental income – and sometimes entire eviction cases – because of a widespread misunderstanding about how to calculate the required notice periods under state law. The predicate notice requirements for eviction proceedings in New York are among the most technically demanding in the country, and errors can be costly. According to Alexander Paykin, a New York real estate attorney and founder of Paykin Law, the most common mistake is not a missed deadline or wrong dollar amount, but a fundamental misunderstanding of how notice periods are measured in holdover cases.
Under New York law, tenants who have lived in a unit for less than a year are entitled to 30 days’ notice before a holdover proceeding can begin. Tenants with one year of occupancy or a one-year lease are entitled to 60 days, and those with two or more years are entitled to 90 days. However, these notice periods are not measured in calendar days but in lease periods. “What it means is one, two, or three periods of your lease,” Paykin explains. For example, if a lease starts on the first of the month and ends on the last day, serving a notice on July 31st means the 30-day period is August. But serving on August 1st means August does not count, and the next period starts September 1st, adding an entire month to the process.
Landlords who serve a notice on August 10th, count 90 calendar days forward, and file on November 12th have almost certainly served a defective notice. “I’ve regularly seen people serve their notice on the 10th, wait three months or 90 days, commence an action on the 12th, and then have it dismissed for failure of the predicate notice to give adequate time,” Paykin says. The error is common because many landlords download templates online, fill in names and dates, and believe they have handled the procedural requirements. By the time they realize the mistake, months of rental income are lost.
The typical pattern involves a landlord serving a notice they believe is correct, waiting through what they think is the required period, and then consulting an attorney to file the court petition. The attorney reviews the notice and finds it defective. The landlord must then serve a corrected notice and wait through the full notice period again before the court case can begin. This can result in three months of lost rental income before even scheduling a court date. Worse, if the defective notice is not caught before filing, a tenant’s attorney may not raise the defect immediately but instead seek adjournments and wait until trial to spring the issue. “The thing gets to trial, and at trial, defense counsel goes, ‘Judge, look at their attached notice. It’s defective.’ And the landlord loses a trial, and has to start the entire thing over again, having lost a year of rental income,” Paykin notes.
The procedural complexity disproportionately disadvantages landlords who attempt to navigate evictions without legal representation. Tenants in New York City increasingly have access to free or low-cost legal aid, while smaller landlords try to manage proceedings themselves to avoid legal fees. However, a single defective notice costs more in lost rent than most landlords would spend on legal representation for the entire proceeding. “There’s no way a landlord should be doing this themselves and not hiring a landlord-tenant attorney,” Paykin says. “At least not in New York. Our process is slow and painful.”
For the broader rental market, the prevalence of defective notices has real consequences. Landlords who cannot efficiently remove non-paying or holdover tenants face extended periods of lost income, compounding financial pressure on already-stressed rent-stabilized portfolios. Paykin emphasizes that early legal involvement at the notice stage prevents the most costly errors. “When you come to me on the 11th, I’m going to say, ‘Well, now I can prepare the notice correctly, serve it before the end of this month. Then you’ll have to wait three more months, and then and only then will I get to even start a case in court,'” Paykin says. That timeline is frustrating but correct, and far less costly than discovering a defective notice at trial.
Alexander Paykin, Esq., is a New York real estate and commercial attorney and founder of Paykin Law. The firm handles real estate transactions, litigation, foreclosure, and landlord-tenant matters across the New York metro area.
