About
Renting in New York, you learn the most important things about a building after you’ve signed for it. This is an attempt to move some of that knowledge earlier.
What this is
Reviews of Manhattan buildings and the companies that manage them, written by the people who lived there. Free to read, free to write, no account, no ads. We start with one neighborhood because a review site with thin coverage everywhere is useless to everyone.
How the rating is calculated
A building’s rating is the straight average of every published review of it — no weighting, no secret adjustments, no promoted listings. The distribution bars show what the average is hiding: a 3.0 made of fives and ones is a very different building from a 3.0 made of threes.
A landlord’s rating averages every review written while they owned the building, across their whole portfolio. When a building changes hands, the old reviews stay with the old owner. That is deliberate: otherwise an operator could clear their record by moving a deed into a new company.
What a rating can’t tell you
Reviews are opinions, and people are more moved to write after something goes wrong than after a quiet year. A building with four reviews tells you much less than one with forty. Read the reviews themselves, look at how long the writers lived there, and weigh the specific accounts more heavily than the number at the top.
Anonymity, and why
Reviews are anonymous because a tenant still living in a building cannot safely criticise the person who decides whether their lease is renewed. We don’t require an account, and we don’t store your IP address — only a one-way cryptographic hash of it, which lets us stop spam and cannot be turned back into you.
The cost of anonymity is that anyone can write anything, so: submissions are screened for personal information and abuse, every review can be reported, and landlords can respond publicly to anything written about them. A landlord’s reply sits beside the review permanently.
Where the building data comes from
Addresses are verified against the City of New York’s own address records, so buildings that don’t exist can’t be added. Ownership information comes from public records and from tenants, and it can be wrong or out of date — if it is, tell us and we’ll correct it.
Independence
Rate My Landlord is an independent project, not affiliated with any landlord, management company, brokerage, or government agency. Nobody pays to appear here, nobody pays to be removed, and there are no ads. If that ever changes, it will say so on this page.