How the rankings are built
Where the numbers come from
Two public datasets, refreshed weekly, and nothing else. Open housing-code violations come from NYC Housing Preservation & Development. Complaint counts and how long they took to close come from NYC 311. Buildings are matched to management companies through HPD’s own registration records, and to apartment counts through the Department of City Planning’s PLUTO file.
None of it is our assessment of anyone. Every list restates a public record, which is why the headings say what was recorded rather than who is worst.
Per apartment, never totals
The largest company in Manhattan will always have the most violations in total, which tells you only that it is large. Every figure is divided by the number of apartments in the portfolio. Forty open violations is a catastrophe in a walk-up and unremarkable in a tower.
Minimum sample
A company needs at least five buildings and fifty apartments to appear on a violations list, and at least ten complaints in the past year to appear on the response-time list. A list topped by a single bad two-apartment building is one anybody can honestly dismiss, and it should be.
Lists built from tenant reviews have a second threshold: five reviews for a company to be ranked, and ten qualifying companies before the list is published at all. Until then the page says so and shows nothing. A top ten drawn from a handful of reviews would say more about who happened to write than about who manages badly.
What these numbers cannot tell you
Open violations carry no time decay. HPD leaves Class A paperwork open for years, so a company that bought a building in 2024 can be carrying a predecessor’s record. The number is real; the inference that they caused it is not always.
HPD inspects when somebody complains. A clean record is the absence of a known problem, not proof of a well-run building — and tenants who fear their landlord complain less.
Response time is the City’s, not the landlord’s. 311 records when a complaint was closed, which depends on the agency as well as the owner.
Ownership is as of the latest registration. A building sold last month may still be filed under its previous manager.
Regeneration and archives
Each edition is generated once a month and stored as it was published. Archived editions never change, so a figure cited from one stays where it was cited — the current data will have moved on, and the archive says so.
Corrections
If the City’s record is wrong, HPD is where it gets corrected, and the change reaches us at the next weekly refresh. If we have attributed a building to the wrong company, tell us and we will fix it. We do not remove companies from these lists on request, and there is no way to pay to be left off one.