About

Why this exists

I built this because of my own apartment.

I did what everybody does before signing: walked the block, checked the listing photos, asked the broker whether the building was well run. He said it was. There was no way to check, and nothing I found later was secret. The complaints were filed. The violations were on record. The previous tenants knew. All of it existed somewhere, and none of it existed anywhere I would have thought to look before I signed a two-year lease.

What followed was the ordinary New York version: things that took weeks to fix, calls that went unanswered, and the slow realisation that being reasonable was not going to work because nothing on the other end depended on it. There was no consequence for ignoring me. That is the part that stays with you: not the cold apartment, but the discovery that a landlord’s reputation costs them nothing because nobody keeps it.

Restaurants have reviews. Contractors have reviews. Employers have reviews. The single largest cheque most New Yorkers write every month goes to a company that has never been reviewed by anyone. This is that missing page.

What this is

Reviews of New York 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 cover Manhattan below Harlem, plus Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Downtown Brooklyn, DUMBO and Boerum Hill, going deep in a few places rather than thin everywhere, 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.

Who runs it

One New York renter, working on this outside a day job. Not a company, not funded by anyone, not a front for a tenant organisation or a landlord group.

I publish anonymously, and it is fair to want to know why. This site names specific companies and says specific things about how they operate. The people who run those companies own buildings, sit on boards, and know other landlords. I also still rent an apartment from one of them. That asymmetry is the same reason the reviews here are anonymous, and it would be strange to offer tenants a protection I was not willing to rely on myself.

What that costs is a name to hold accountable, so everything is built to be checkable without one: every figure carries its source and the date it was pulled, the rating is a plain average you can recompute from the reviews on the page, and the rankings explain their own limitations. Judge it on whether the numbers hold up.

Write to me. A person reads all of it.