Plaintiff, Margaret Nadler, is suing defendant, Carmine Limited, for assertedly unlawfully removing her from her residence, overcharging her, and maintaining her apartment in a substandard condition.

Defendant now moves for partial summary judgment dismissing plaintiff's first cause of action (for a judgment declaring that the apartment is subject to rent stabilization law) and second cause of action (for injunctive relief requiring defendant to give plaintiff a rent-stabilized lease at a stabilized rent). The motion is denied.

Plaintiff resides in an apartment at One Christopher Street in Manhattan. Defendant is the building's current owner and plaintiff's landlord. In March 2022, defendant sent plaintiff a 90-day notice, demanding that plaintiff pay a monthly rent of $6,995 for a lease-renewal-term commencing on July 1, 2022, and ending on June 20, 2023. The notice also demanded that plaintiff vacate by June 30, 2022, unless she accepted the renewal offer. (NYSEF No. 1 at 1-3.)

On June 30, 2022, plaintiff initiated this action against defendant, alleging that the removal notice was improper, that defendant overcharged her for rent, and that defendant maintained the apartment in poor condition. (NYSEF No. 1 at 2-3.)

This court granted defendant's initial motion for partial summary judgment (mot seq 001) dismissing the first three causes of action. (See Nadler v Carmine Ltd., 2023 NY Slip Op 50850(U), *1 [Sup Ct, NY County 2023].) The Appellate Division, First Department, modified the ruling, reversing the decision to dismiss the first and second causes of action but affirming the dismissal of the third cause of action. (See Nadler v Carmine Ltd., 231 AD3d 485, 486 [1st Dept 2024].)

Defendant now moves again for partial summary judgment on the first and second causes of action.

The issue before the court is whether defendant may file a second motion for partial summary judgment. For the court to allow a successive motion, the motion may not repeat the same facts as the first, and it must be based on information unavailable when the first motion was filed.

Successive motions for summary judgment are disfavored—and ordinarily should be denied—when based on evidence available at the time of the first motion. (See e.g. Elizon Master Participation Trust I v. Ali, 237 AD3d 580, 581 [1st Dept 2025]; Bullaro v. Ledo, Inc., 234 AD3d 433, 433 [1st Dept 2025].)

In its first partial-summary-judgment motion defendant contended that the rent increase challenged by plaintiff was lawful because the apartment had been deregulated in 2003. To support its contention, defendant presented the Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR) rent-registration-history report, the rent amounts paid by former tenants, and orders issued by the New York City Rent Guidelines Board (RGB). The First Department, in modifying this court's prior order, held that the documents and information relied on by defendant was insufficient to meet its prima facie burden to establish that the apartment had been legally deregulated. (See Nadler, 231 AD3d at 486.)

With respect to the DHCR rent registration, the First Department held that the report set forth merely the owner's statements about the rental history, which cannot be considered a true indicator of rent deregulation. (Id.) The First Department further held that rent payments by former tenants indicates what those tenants actually paid, not what they should have paid, and therefore is insufficient to show whether that the apartment is deregulated. (Id.) And the RGB orders, the First Department explained, do not explain the jump in monthly rent from 1993 to 1994. The DHCR registration did indicate that the rent increase was based partly on improvements to the apartment. But, according to the Court, defendant failed to provide any evidence about improvements to the apartment. (Id.)

In support of its successive partial-summary-judgment motion for partial summary judgment, defendant argues again that the apartment was deregulated by virtue of permissible increases in the legally regulated rent in 1994, and therefore is not subject to rent stabilization. Defendant relies on [*2]an attorney affirmation, representing that the apartment's monthly rent exceeded the then-applicable deregulation threshold of $2,000 in 2003,^[FN1] before plaintiff took possession of the apartment. (NYSEF No. 49 at 3.) This affirmation, however, merely reiterates representations made by Phillips on motion sequence 001 (see NYSCEF No. 3 at 2), rather than presenting newly available evidence. (See Bullaro, 234 AD3d at 433.)

Defendant also submits an affidavit from its assistant secretary, Edward Adler. Adler averred that the legal regulated rent was permitted because of individual improvements made to the apartment in May 1993; and he attached various checks and invoices to attempt to document those improvements. Adler also represented that the previous owner of the apartment had performed major capital improvements in 1995 and obtained major-capital-improvement orders from DHCR, which permitted a $15.60-per-month increase in the apartment's legally regulated rent. (NYSEF No. 50 at 3.)

Adler's affidavit does offer new information about the apartment's improvements in 1993, 1995, and 1997 (NYSEF No. 50 at 2-3). But that information was available before the defendant filed its first motion in 2023, and could have been provided on that motion. Defendant does not explain why that information was not submitted in support of motion sequence 001. Given that absence of an explanation, the court concludes that the new information introduced through the Adler affidavit does not provide a basis to consider defendant's second partial-summary-judgment motion. (See Priester, 228 AD3d at 594.)

Accordingly, it is

ORDERED that defendant's motion for partial summary judgment dismissing plaintiff's first and second causes of action is denied.