Gov. Kathy Hochul has signed a bill that will require co-op and condo boards to pay prevailing wages to their building staffers in order to receive the coveted property tax abatement. The law doesn’t go into effect on April 1, 2022, the beginning of the state’s fiscal year, but it has already produced surprises.

The initial reaction to the bill was that most buildings with non-unionized staffs would raise their pay to prevailing-wage levels in order to keep the tax abatement, which ranges from 17.5% to 28%, depending on the average assessed value of units in the building. But when Steven Hoffman, co-president of Hoffman Management, crunched the numbers at a 60-unit co-op he manages on the Upper East Side, he came to the opposite conclusion.