Individual Apartment Improvement (IAI)

An Individual Apartment Improvement is work done inside a single regulated apartment — a renovated kitchen or bathroom, new appliances, new flooring — that lets the landlord raise that unit’s legal regulated rent. It is the apartment-level counterpart to a building-wide MCI.

Post-HSTPA, IAIs are tightly constrained: there is a dollar ceiling on the total improvement cost that can be recovered (commonly cited as a fixed cap over a rolling multi-year window), the resulting increase is amortized rather than added in full, and the surcharge expires after roughly three decades instead of permanently inflating the rent base. Urbero enforces both the dollar ceiling and the HSTPA expiry at the moment an adjustment is recorded.

IAIs are a frequent source of overcharge disputes precisely because the rules changed so much in 2019. The safe posture is to treat every IAI as bounded by both a cost ceiling and an expiry date.