Attn. New Yorkers: How To Research Apartments Before Signing A Lease
Looking for an apartment? If you live in New York City, there's an easy way to avoid buildings with lousy track records (peeling lead paint, chronic rodent problems, fixtures that never get fixed, and the like).
First, you'll need the street address of the building in question. (You don't need the zip code.) Go to the Department of Housing Preservation & Development home page. In the right column, enter the address of the building. That should lead you to a page with a lavender column on the left.
Click All Open Violations. There you'll see names of the building owner and management. Beneath that info, in bold, is the number of all open violations, along with a breakdown of class "A" (non-hazardous), "B" (hazardous), and "C" (immediately hazardous) violations. Scroll down and you'll see descriptions of the complaints. For example: "nuisance consisting of vermin mice in the entire apartment located at apt e9" or "remove the encumbrance obstructing egress from fire escapes a/c protruding from window at 3rd story balcony" (i.e. an air conditioner is blocking the fire escape).
Most buildings have open complaints, especially if they're large, so the mere presence of mice shouldn't be a deal breaker. As a rule of thumb, the way to rank a given building is to take the number of open violations and divide it by the number of apartments ("A Units"), which you'll find listed in a horizontal graph at the top of the page).
More than 5 violations per unit: slumlord; avoid
Fewer than 3 violations per unit: average/good
1 violation or less per unit: excellent
As for residents of other cities, check with your equivalent of the NYC housing department to see if their records are online. If they are, please let us know and we'll post about other city's records in the future.
Link: NYC Department of Housing Preservation & Development
(Photo: Stuck in Customs)
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Comments:
Thank you for this post!!!!! I am moving soon and that was my biggest fear of finding a place in Brooklyn and is infested with unwanted tenants.
Mice would be a bonus.. it would give my cat something to do!
@madanthony: It seems like a good idea That is until you wake up in the middle of the night to a cat standing on top of you beaming with pride about the dead mouse he's now carrying around...
There's another great apartment history site for New Yorkers, www.streeteasy.com.
It has some great features like listing the school district you're in, what grocery stores are close by, etc. But the crown jewel of this site is that it displays the prices that apartments have been listed for, going back at least a couple years if data is available. So basically, you can see apartments being listed for $2000 a year ago, slowly decreasing to $1900, $1800, and the $1700 it is today.
This is a must look for anyone looking to get a good deal money-wise.
Boston keeps a searchable list of Certified Rental properties (i.e. those that have undergone a rental inspection), not as extensive or useful as NYC's. But have I missed a wonderful database somewhere??
Also, we've found the Mass Tenant's Rights and Responsibilities here [www.mass.gov] to be useful and much easier to digest than reading the corresponding MGL.
I never bothered reading up on Tenant laws until I moved to this state, and I kinda wish I had at some point. Good stuff to know once you finally decide on a place to live.
@Adrienne Willis: I lucked out extremely on both of my Brooklyn apartments...granted I was paying about 800-900 a month for rent in a shared apartment. My last one was 4th Ave in Brooklyn....all the benefits of Park Slope without super insane Park Slope prices.
My building has 108 violations over 20 units. It is beyond slumlord. The problem with 311/that city agency is they only inspect during the day, when I'm at work, making them useless. Otherwise I could double the number of violations in my unit alone.
Interesting stuff... I don't know if it's a "squeaky wheel" issue or a crazy tenant who refuses to be satisfied. Just on a whim I looked up my cousin's building in Manhattan (the only Manhattan apartment building with which I'm familiar) and for 58 units there are 22 complaints... so it falls into the "excellent" category to begin with (on Central Park West I'd hope so.) Then I noted that 15 of the 22 were from ONE UNIT. Crazy. I'm sure I'd just LOVE to provide some sort of service to that particular tenant.
@FoxBearDog: In Chicago you DEFINITELY have mice. You live on the prairie! (Well, on a prairie swamp, same diff.)
I am okay with mice living in my basement as long as I never, ever see them or evidence of them. You can bet if you live in the midwest there are mice drinking the condensation off your plumbing pipes or off the watermain coming into your house. As long as that's all they do, we're cool.
Any suggestions for something like this for people moving to chicago?
@sponica: I am in Bay Ridge now and I love it, so much cheaper and you get way more, beautiful neighborhoods, shops, restaurants, water, Verrazzano bridge, express buses to the city. I dont know why I didnt move there sooner. I would just like to get further up into the 90's. I loved Prospect Heights but it was way to expensive for me and I dont do the whole "roommate" thing.
That building in the pic is probably easily a $3,000/mo apartment in NY. LOL.
Is there anything like this for the Baltimore Area? Please let there beeeee.
I saved the HPD violation list late last year. Good thing because none of it is there anymore and none of the violations have been cured. What's up with that? The Department of Buildings has building info too including all the fines levied against landlords and usually never paid.
Mice would be a deal breaker for the wife, I know that there are probably rats/mice under most buildings but she doesn't want to be reminded of that.
This would have been very helpful about a month ago, we just moved apartments here in Chicago last weekend.
So....many.....BOXES!!!!