NYC Rental Check

Behind the records

Sources, methods & limitations

NYC Rental Check is an independent renter tool, unaffiliated with government agencies or listing platforms. All external data queries run on the server.

Where can I search?

NYC building reports cover Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens (including Long Island City / LIC), the Bronx and Staten Island. You can also look up public municipal code cases by address in Jersey City, including Journal Square. Hoboken also offers New Jersey DCA housing inspection history and individual violation records. Available records differ by city, as explained on each page.

Hoboken · NJ DCA

Search public registered properties, previous inspections and individual violations from the state Bureau of Housing Inspection. Each search automatically reads currently published source data without SDL login. This excludes a complete municipal enforcement history. Historical Cited status does not establish an issue remains unresolved today; re-inspections are not added together. Source and method checked: 2026-11-11.

NJ DCA Bureau of Housing Inspection ↗

How do records update?

NYC building reports automatically query official sources, with some requests briefly cached, typically for about five minutes. Each source has its own publishing schedule. Jersey City cases and Hoboken state inspections request current public records with each search; no manual upload of individual records is required. Retrieval time is not the event date and does not guarantee every recent change has been entered by the government.

Similar-building comparisons use a dated baseline snapshot, which is not currently recalculated on a schedule. It is updated separately from individual-building queries. The site does not maintain a complete historical archive for Jersey City or Hoboken.

Jersey City · Journal Square

Address search of public Code Cases from the official Civic Access portal. Includes closed cases; case counts are not confirmed violation counts. State DCA and other municipalities are excluded. Requests current data with pagination; historical completeness and update latency are not guaranteed by the source. Interface checked: 2026-11-11.

Jersey City Civic Access ↗

Official data sources

Address and building matching

Select a complete address from the suggestions. BBL identifies a tax lot, BIN a physical building, HPD BuildingID an HPD building, and RegistrationID a registration. These identifiers are not interchangeable. HPD matches use an exact BIN and lot, or a complete address on the lot. Multiple candidates remain separate choices. Contacts join only by RegistrationID.

Violation counts and charts

Open counts include only records where violationstatus = Open. Classes A, B and C are counted separately; additional classes remain in the total. The ring and headline use aggregates across all records, independent of record pagination.

The 24-month window includes the current New York calendar month and the preceding 23 months. Monthly and category counts use novissueddate, the notice issue date, including records that were later closed. Records without an issue date do not enter these time-window charts. The current month is partial.

The keyword table assigns the first matching category: heat & hot water, pests, mold, leaks & plumbing, lead paint, doors & windows, electric & gas, paint & plaster, or other. Lead paint takes precedence over general paint. Each record belongs to one category; unmatched text goes into other. The rules have not been validated against a manually labeled sample. Original English descriptions remain available.

Property details and comparison

The header prefers legalclassa from HPD Buildings: the legal Class A residential unit count for the individual building. If unavailable, it shows the PLUTO tax-lot total explicitly labeled as a fallback. Year built and floors come from PLUTO by BBL. Missing fields are labeled as not provided. Registration expiration uses HPD’s registrationenddate.

Similar-building comparison: method & limitations

The reference population contains Active HPD buildings with at least 3 legal Class A residential units and an HPD registration valid on the baseline date. Each HPD buildingid counts once. Buildings without violation records remain as zero. Buildings sharing a tax lot retain their own unit and violation counts.

The primary metric counts all violations by inspectiondate within the baseline’s fixed window, including subsequently closed records, divided by this building’s legalclassa. Following the specified reference-date convention, the window starts on the first day of the month two years before the baseline date and ends on the baseline day: an extra partial month beyond a strict rolling 24 months. The card states the exact dates. Its scope differs from the notice-date monthly chart. A secondary metric stores current open violations per unit.

Groups combine unit counts of 3–5, 6–19, 20–49, 50–99 or 100+ with construction years before 1940, 1940–1979, 1980–1999 or 2000 and later. When an intersection has fewer than 300 buildings or year built is unknown, the size-only group is used. PLUTO supplies construction year by BBL; PLUTO unit counts are never used for this comparison.

The static file stores group counts, zero shares and P1–P99 for both metrics. Quantiles use the empirical inverse distribution and are rounded upward to six decimal places. Only thresholds strictly below the target rate count toward its conservative, integer percentile approximation; ties do not count as lower. Zero violations use the group’s zero share instead. The card is hidden for a missing or invalid table, unknown or fewer than 3 HPD units, no eligible registration or no matching group. Upstream failures still show errors and retry.

  • Violations come from inspections, which are often triggered by complaints. Reporting, inspection access and enforcement affect counts; no records do not establish current housing conditions.
  • HPD units are registered legal units and may differ from actual use or lag behind changes.
  • Year built comes from PLUTO at tax-lot level; different buildings on the same lot may share one recorded year.
  • The baseline and live records may update at different times. The reference covers eligible registered HPD buildings and does not represent every NYC residence.

View the grouped baseline ↗

Name comparison and fees

Name comparison checks registered contact names or companies, then the existing New York State license endpoint. Results describe name matches in datasets. They do not establish anyone’s identity or authority to rent or collect money. No match is not a judgment about a person.

The fee card lists three rules for ordinary residential rentals, each with an official source and a verification date. Special housing types may have different provisions; read the linked scope. The complaint link opens NYC DCWP’s official entry point.

Freshness and limitations

Data groups load and report errors independently. Failures, timeouts, rate limits and malformed responses never become zero records. A successful empty list is distinct from an error. Public data can be cached for about five minutes, and metadata for an hour. The query date is not the source refresh date. Missing refresh timestamps are not inferred.

These records describe a building and cannot establish an individual apartment’s current condition. Open status does not establish whether repairs have occurred; public records may lag or be incomplete. Owner names come from the latest registration and are not a verification of title.

Privacy and visual assets

No account is required. We record visitor IP addresses, times, pages and submitted address/name queries to understand usage and troubleshoot issues. Records are stored on our managed server, are accessible only to project administrators and have no automatic deletion period. Address and name queries are also sent to the relevant official data services; providers may retain necessary access logs. The URL determines the language; no language preference is stored locally.

The airshaft hero artwork was supplied with this project; no verified photographer attribution is available. The miniature is an original generated brand illustration, not a model of the queried address. Neither image depicts the property being checked. The previous street photos have been removed.