How to check a landlord in New York before you sign
You have found the apartment. The question nobody answers on a listing is who you would be renting it from, and whether the heat works in February. Here is how to find out in about five minutes, using records the City publishes and reviews from people who lived there.
Start with the address
40,386 buildings and 12,384 management companies, free, no account.
1. Find out who actually owns it
The name on a listing is usually the broker, not the landlord. Buildings with three or more apartments have to register with the City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, and that registration names the managing agent. Search an address here and it is on the page, along with every other building the same company runs, which is often the more useful number.
2. Read the housing-code record
A City inspector visits when somebody complains, and what they find becomes a violation on the record: class A for the cosmetic, class B for the hazardous, class C for the immediately hazardous, which is the category covering no heat, no hot water, lead and vermin. What matters is the count per apartment rather than the raw number, because forty violations is a catastrophe in a walk-up and unremarkable in a tower.
Look at the three-year record too, not only what is open today. Roughly half the buildings with nothing outstanding have had something in the past three years, and a landlord who fixed forty-seven problems is a different proposition from one who never had any.
3. Check how fast repairs actually get closed
311 records both the complaint and the day it was closed, so the median time to close is a real measure of whether anyone picks up the phone. Across the buildings on this site that median is five days. Somewhere well past that is the thing you will be living with in January.
4. Read what tenants wrote
None of the above tells you whether the super is reliable, whether the radiators clank, or whether you got your deposit back. Only somebody who lived there can. Reviews here are written by renters, are anonymous, and are not filtered by whether they flatter the landlord.
Where StreetEasy fits
StreetEasy is where most New Yorkers find the apartment, and it is good at that. What it does not have is landlord or building reviews from tenants: its own discussion board has people asking where to find them. Its blog points readers at the City’s records, which is the right advice and a slow afternoon if you do it by hand across several buildings.
The two work together rather than against each other. Find the listing there, paste the address here, and you will have the owner, the violation record, the repair times and any tenant reviews on one page.
Doing it yourself, for free
Everything here comes from public sources and you can check any of it without us. HPD Online holds the registration and violations, NYC Open Data holds the 311 record, and both are free. We pull the same data, keep it current, and put it on one page per building so you are not cross-referencing four sites for every apartment you are considering.