Fifteen years ago, Tina Larsson and her husband Mark lived in a New York City co-op that raised its maintenance fees about 5% every year.
There was no inflation. They were both Wall Street analysts. They read financial statements for multi-billion-dollar companies for a living, and the number didn’t make sense to them.
So they did what most people don’t. They didn’t complain in the lobby. They didn’t move. They organized a coup.
Four neighbors ran as a slate, gathered enough proxies to control the vote, and dropped a letter under every door the night before the annual meeting. The next evening they walked in with the majority already in hand. Three years later the building had saved $340,000, about 10% of its annual operating budget, and Tina and Mark had a business that didn’t exist before they invented it.
The interesting part isn’t the drama. It’s what they found when they finally got the books, and what they didn’t find. This is a story about the gap between what everyone in a community has quietly accepted as normal and what the numbers actually say when somebody pulls them.
What a Co-op Board Actually Is
For anyone outside New York, a co-op is what apartment ownership looks like in the city. You own shares in a building corporation and you’re allocated an apartment. About 66 million Americans live under some version of this structure, whether it’s called a co-op, a condo association, or an HOA.
The community can’t vote on everything, so it elects a board of five to nine owners who make decisions for everyone. The building runs like a nonprofit: expenses go up, the board passes them on. Tina compares it to a government. Costs rise, the taxpayer pays.
Which is exactly why a 5% annual increase with flat inflation was a signal. Either the underlying costs were rising that fast, or nobody was managing them.
Tina is careful to say she was an outsider, and outsiders find it easy to criticize. “When you go to a restaurant, it’s always easy to look at the waitress and say, they could have done that quicker.” She knew very little about how many costs go into running a building. What she had was a feeling that something wasn’t right, and no data to prove it.
Three Options
Jana asked what was at stake. Tina laid out the three moves available to anyone in her position.
Do nothing, and keep accepting 5% a year.
Run one person for the board. Tina has consulted for boards for over a decade now and she never recommends this. “Then you have one person, and everybody else is going to vote your ideas down. You’re never going to have a say by being one person.”
Or run a full coup. Recruit a slate, collect proxies, and win the majority of seats so you can actually change how the building is run.
Most people who spot a problem in an organization pick the middle option. It feels proportionate. One seat, one voice, work from the inside. Tina’s experience is that it’s the option most likely to burn you out and change nothing, because a single dissenter on a seven-person board is a rounding error. If the problem is structural, you need the structure.
Why Secrecy
The existing board had been in place a long time. Communication, Tina says diplomatically, “was not their strength.” The board was planning a hallway renovation across twenty-two floors with roughly half a million dollars in mind and no budget for it. There were three outstanding lawsuits. And the fees kept climbing.
Tina is a strategist by temperament. She pulled a spreadsheet from a New York listings site with every apartment and floor in the building. The five original conspirators went through it name by name: I know this person, I can approach this one, and these seven are the board, so leave them alone. They met in Tina and Mark’s apartment. Everything stayed quiet until the night before the annual meeting.
Then they hand-delivered a letter under every door. By mistake, one went under a board member’s door too.
The letter named the three lawsuits, the rising expenses, and the unfunded hallway project, and made the argument that the building had more urgent needs, like the elevators, than cosmetics it couldn’t pay for. Tina’s read on why it landed: three concrete points, and almost every owner could connect to at least one of them.
Jana pressed on the secrecy. Why wait until the last night? Weren’t they worried that wasn’t enough time to persuade anyone?
They weren’t trying to persuade anyone that night. The persuasion had already happened, one neighbor at a time. “We had spoken to individual neighbors. The letter was our last move. We had enough proxies when we walked in the next day to vote for whoever we wanted.”
A proxy is a power of attorney for a vote. The letter wasn’t the campaign. The letter was the announcement that the campaign was over.
Twenty-Two Hours
The incumbent board had about twenty-two hours. They spent them in an emergency session at their attorney’s office. The annual meeting that night was in person and, in Tina’s words, very argumentative. The attorney went through the proxies one by one. This signature is illegible. This one is invalid.
“We said, no, no, no. We’re allowed to view and witness the election. These are good.”
It took three days for the result to come through. Mark got the call: all of you are in. One of the five had backed out at the last minute, so they were four. Out of seven seats, that was still a majority.
Jana asked whether Tina worried about what life in the building would look like if they lost. She’d have to see these people in the elevator every day.
“Yes, but that’s not the nature of me. I just assume this is the plan, this is what we’re going to do, and this is going to work.”
That answer sounds like bravado. It isn’t. She and Mark had a 600-square-foot terrace in Manhattan and no intention of leaving. Moving was the one option she never put on the table, which meant the only path to a better building was through the board. When you’ve already decided you’re staying, the social risk of a failed coup is real but it’s not disqualifying. You were going to live with these neighbors either way.
“Why Would I Sign for You? I Don’t Know You.”
Collecting proxies was not easy. New Yorkers often don’t know their neighbors, and at the time Tina and Mark were just two more apartment dwellers.
Tina remembers one woman vividly. Asked to sign a proxy, she said: why would I sign that for you? I don’t know you.
Fair. Tina moved on. The second year, when they ran again, the same woman signed without hesitation. Fifteen years later, Tina talks to her every day, and the woman’s question has become: where do I sign, what do I do, how can I help?
Wes Towers built a whole episode around the same fact from the sales side: people don’t buy uncertainty. Nobody hands you their vote because your argument is good. They hand it to you because they trust you, and trust is built by doing the thing once and letting people watch. The first year you’re asking for faith. Every year after, you’re asking for a signature.
Not everyone came around. One board member from the old regime still doesn’t say hello in the lobby. Head down, keep walking. Tina accepts that as the cost.
What They Found
Once the new board was in, Tina, who couldn’t sit on the board herself because Mark held their apartment’s seat, ran the finance committee. They went through every expense and every service contract. A doorman building over seven stories in New York has more than 150 cost lines split across the owners. They read all of them.
Then they did what analysts do. They built a benchmark. They went to open houses in comparable buildings and posed as buyers so they could get their hands on other buildings’ financial statements. Tina whispers this part. Real estate agents don’t love it. But it’s exactly how she’d evaluated companies for two decades: you don’t know if a number is high until you know what the number is next door.
Then they asked the question that every organization resists: why are we doing it this way? The answer, over and over, was “that’s how it’s always been done.” Which is not a reason.
The savings came from everywhere and nowhere in particular. A marble-polishing contract for the lobby, around $30,000 a year, for work a full-time staff could do. Cancelled. Seventeen stories of stairwells lit twenty-four hours a day on old fixtures. Over two hundred fixtures in the common areas swapped to LEDs on motion sensors. Nine extra storage bins squeezed into unused space and rented out, which in Manhattan is real money. Renegotiated service contracts.
None of it was dramatic. All of it compounded.
No Fraud. Something Worse.
Jana asked the question everyone asks: what was behind the waste? Neglect, fraud, contracts handed to friends?
“We thought there would be fraud. There was no fraud. And in most cases we don’t find fraud with our clients either.”
What they found instead is a structural problem that applies far beyond apartment buildings.
Boards are volunteers. They do this in their spare time, with very little technical knowledge of how a building runs. Many of them have never made a large financial decision on someone else’s behalf. Then they make multi-million-dollar decisions for their neighbors and hand execution to a property manager, who is running too many buildings with too many tasks to give any one board the support it needs.
Nobody is stealing. Nobody is negligent, exactly. The system is just built out of people who don’t have the time, the training, or the data, doing their best with a default setting of “the way it’s always been.” Howard Schultz’s Starbucks drifted the same way, through a long series of individually reasonable decisions rather than any single bad one. Waste rarely announces itself. It accumulates in the gaps between good intentions and accountability.
Tina’s line for the fix: a Fortune 500 company hires consultants to find these inefficiencies. A co-op or condo doesn’t have that budget, and until 2014, nobody specialized in it.
The Compounding Nobody Sees
The first year saved about $19,000. Not much, and it took a long time. Two hundred light fixtures had to be planned, funded, approved, and installed before the next Con Edison bill dropped from “this big to this little.”
The second year was bigger. The third bigger still. It wasn’t until they sat down after year three and totaled it that they realized what they had: $340,000, roughly 10% of the building’s annual operating budget.
Then the part that matters more than the headline number. For seven consecutive years, there was no maintenance increase. None. And in that time the savings funded two required façade repairs (New York requires inspection every five years for buildings over six stories), a gym built into unused basement space, the storage bins, and the lighting upgrade. All paid for out of money the building had been spending on nothing.
Tina hears from board members who say it’s bad practice not to raise fees, because buildings need upgrades. Her answer: yes, the building needs upgrades. That’s still not a reason to waste money.
She thinks about it the way she thinks about a portfolio. Savings compound like returns. Expenses compound like losses. An insurance premium that rises 9% rises 9% whether you’re paying $50,000 or $100,000, so every dollar you fail to cut this year costs you more every year after. It’s the Short Cycle Trap applied to a building: the board that sacrifices the decade for the quiet quarter never sees the bill, because it arrives as a hundred small increases instead of one big one.
From Eye Rolls to a Business
Tina used to introduce herself at networking events as a financial advisor. In New York, that gets an eye roll. Everyone’s a financial advisor.
So she changed one sentence. “Hi, I’m Tina Larsson, and I helped my co-op save $340,000.”
Suddenly everyone had a board to introduce her to.
She went home and told Mark, who had lived the same three years from the president’s chair and saw the problem from a different angle. He agreed she was onto something. They asked a few people in the industry. They said it was a great idea. In 2014, they started The Folson Group.
The business grew the way the savings did: one adjacent problem at a time. They began with cost reduction on a contingency basis, cutting operating expenses and the cost of capital projects. Then a board came to them with too many projects and no bids and asked them to manage everything, from boiler to roof. That became an owner’s representative practice for construction. Then their board clients started saying, we hate our property manager, help us find a better one. Because they’d already seen every manager’s strengths and weaknesses from the inside, they could. That became a search service.
Their own building’s savings crossed $2 million cumulatively before they stopped counting.
Running a Home Like a Business
Jana played contrarian. If you run a building like a business, aren’t you always cutting, always squeezing, always optimizing at the expense of the people who live there?
Tina has heard it. Her answer has two parts.
First, they never ask a board to cut corners. When someone accused her of nickel-and-diming a mom-and-pop vendor, her response was that she’s making sure the building uses less electricity, so it pays the utility less, not the small shop. The savings almost always come from the big counterparties: utilities, telecom, the water department, insurance companies, all pricing on autopilot because that’s how it’s always been done, or from infrastructure that needs upgrading so the building consumes less.
The exception proves the rule. Two client buildings, a couple of blocks apart, same size, same exterminator. One paid $250 a visit. The other paid $500. Tina called. That must have been a mistake, the vendor said. New contract.
Second, and more seriously: the alternative to running a building like a business isn’t a warmer, more human building. It’s Surfside. The 2021 condo collapse in Florida is the case Tina points to as the opposite of everything she’s working toward. Deferred decisions, deferred maintenance, a board that couldn’t get its owners to agree to spend, and a building that eventually made the decision for them.
A home is a home. The building it sits in is a business. Refusing to treat it like one doesn’t protect the residents. It exposes them.
The Principle: I Saw Something That Didn’t Look Right
Jana asked Tina to name the one thing that drove the whole decision.
“I saw something that I didn’t think was right. And there was just an inkling, a feeling. And I said, we have to do something about this.”
That’s the honest version. Tina read financial statements and proxies all day for a living, and she still didn’t have enough information about her own building to prove anything. Not because she couldn’t understand it. Because it wasn’t available to her. The coup wasn’t the result of the analysis. The coup was how she got access to run the analysis at all.
Her submission form puts the principle more formally: trust data over assumptions, and over what everyone else has simply accepted as normal. Every owner in the building believed maintenance fees were just expensive, full stop. Nobody had pulled the numbers to check.
Jana asked whether she’d considered the worst case. Getting onto the board and finding nothing wrong.
“Not really. We said, even if we only save ten thousand dollars, isn’t it worth it?”
That’s the whole decision in one sentence. She didn’t need certainty that the waste was there. She needed the downside of looking to be small enough that looking was obviously correct. Ten thousand dollars would have justified the effort. She found thirty-four times that. Indecision has a cost too, and it usually shows up as a fee increase nobody remembers approving.
What to Take From a Board Coup
Most readers will never take over a co-op board. Almost all of them belong to some organization that has quietly accepted a number as normal without anyone checking it.
Tina’s playbook translates.
Don’t run one person. If the problem is structural, one dissenting voice on a committee, a board, or a leadership team gets voted down and burned out. Build a slate.
Do the persuasion privately, then announce. The letter under the door was not the campaign. It was the last move of a campaign that had already been won one conversation at a time.
Get access before you build the case. Tina couldn’t prove anything from outside. The first objective was the books, not the savings.
Benchmark against the building next door. A number in isolation is just a number. Against three comparable buildings, it’s a verdict.
Ask “why are we doing it this way?” and refuse “that’s how it’s always been done” as an answer.
Expect structure, not villains. The waste is almost never fraud. It’s volunteers without time or data, and vendors pricing on autopilot.
And set the bar for action low enough that you’ll act. Even if you only save ten thousand dollars, isn’t it worth it?
Tina wrote the blueprint for her own coup into her book, Living the High Life, along with the stories from clients since. The one board member who still won’t say hello in the lobby is in there too, with her name changed. Fifteen years, seven years of flat fees, a gym in the basement, and a company that didn’t exist before two analysts decided a 5% increase didn’t make sense.
Nobody had pulled the numbers. So they did.
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Key Takeaways
A feeling is enough to start, not enough to finish. Tina had a hunch and no data. The coup wasn’t the product of analysis; it was the way she got access to do the analysis. Sequence matters: access first, case second.
One seat changes nothing. A single dissenter on a board gets voted down. If the problem is structural, run a slate and take the majority, or don’t bother.
Win the campaign before you announce it. Proxies were collected one neighbor at a time. The letter under every door the night before was the announcement, not the argument.
Benchmark or you’re guessing. Tina posed as a buyer at open houses to get comparable buildings’ financials. A number is only high or low relative to the building next door.
Expect structure, not fraud. The waste came from volunteers without time or expertise, an overstretched property manager, and large vendors pricing on autopilot. Nobody was stealing. That’s harder to fix than theft, because there’s no one to fire.
Savings compound like returns and expenses compound like losses. $19,000 in year one became $340,000 by year three and seven years of flat fees, because every dollar cut stopped growing at the vendor’s rate of increase.
Set the bar for acting low. “Even if we only save ten thousand dollars, isn’t it worth it?” made the decision obvious. The upside turned out to be thirty-four times that.
About Our Guest
Tina Larsson is the co-founder of The Folson Group, a New York City consultancy that helps co-op, condo, and HOA boards reduce operating costs, manage capital projects, and find better-fitting property managers. A former Wall Street analyst with two decades in financial services, she and her husband and business partner Mark reorganized their own co-op board fifteen years ago and saved the building $340,000 in three years, an experience that became the foundation for the firm they launched in 2014. She is the author of Living the High Life: How Smart Co-op and Condo Owners Protect Themselves and Their Investment, which includes a blueprint for organizing your own board takeover, and holds a LEED Green Associate designation.
Connect with Tina: TheFolsonGroup.com · LinkedIn · Living the High Life
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Tina Larsson? Tina Larsson is a former Wall Street analyst and co-founder of The Folson Group, a New York City firm that helps co-op, condo, and HOA boards cut costs, manage capital projects, and select property managers. She organized a board takeover in her own co-op fifteen years ago that produced $340,000 in savings over three years, and she wrote about it in Living the High Life.
How do you take over an HOA or co-op board? Tina’s approach: recruit a slate large enough to win a majority of seats, not a single candidate; identify which owners to approach and which to avoid; collect proxies (a power of attorney for a vote) through private one-on-one conversations; and only go public, in her case with a letter under every door, once you already have the votes. Build the campaign on two or three concrete issues that touch owners’ wallets directly.
Why do HOA and co-op fees keep going up? In Tina’s experience it’s rarely fraud. Boards are volunteers with limited time and technical knowledge making large financial decisions, property managers are stretched across too many buildings, and large vendors such as utilities, telecom, and insurers raise prices year after year because no one challenges them. Costs compound, and “that’s how it’s always been done” substitutes for analysis.
How much money can a co-op or condo save by reviewing its expenses? Tina’s building saved $340,000 in the first three years, about 10% of its annual operating budget, and went seven years without a fee increase while funding façade repairs, a gym, and a lighting upgrade from savings. Results vary by building; the savings came from more than 150 individual cost lines, including cancelled contracts, LED lighting on motion sensors, renegotiated service agreements, and rented storage space.
What does “trust data over assumptions” mean in practice? It means refusing to accept a number as normal just because everyone around you has. Tina’s building believed high maintenance fees were simply a fact of New York life. Nobody had benchmarked them against comparable buildings. Pulling the actual expense lines and comparing them to neighbors turned a shared assumption into a measurable problem.
Is it a mistake to never raise HOA or maintenance fees? Tina says buildings do need upgrades, and fees sometimes must rise. But that’s a separate question from waste. Her building funded required repairs and new amenities for seven years without an increase because it eliminated spending that produced nothing. Raise fees for investment, not to cover money the building shouldn’t have been spending.
