Beyond violations and complaints, NYC keeps public records on your building's boiler, facade, elevators, cooling towers, lead pipes, fire-safety vacates, landlord litigation, eviction patterns, stalled construction nearby, and speculation-risk status. All checkable by address.
Everyone checks the rent. Some people check the violations. Almost nobody checks these, and every one is a public record with your future building's name on it.
1. Boiler inspections. Your heat this winter depends on a machine in the basement, and the city inspects it. Across the current records, 68,872 boiler inspection reports say defects exist. Worth knowing if one of them is about your basement.
2. Facade status. Buildings over six stories get facade inspections every five years under Local Law 11, and 5,816 filings currently carry an "unsafe" status. That's what the scaffolding is about. Or what it should be about.
3. Elevator records. 26,745 elevator devices citywide sit in a status other than active. If the building has one elevator and it's on that list, your fifth-floor walk-up is unofficial.
4. Cooling tower testing. The rooftop equipment that made Legionnaires' disease a New York noun gets inspected, and 81,522 inspection records carry a violation code. Tall building? Worth a look.
5. Lead service lines. The pipe between the water main and the building: 117,561 are confirmed lead in the city's records, and another 114,473 are marked "Lead Status Unknown," the city's way of saying nobody's checked. This one isn't a joke; check it, especially with kids.
6. FDNY vacate history. Only 357 buildings carry FDNY vacate orders. The fire department emptying a building is rare and means exactly what it sounds like. Ten seconds to rule out.
7. Landlord litigation. HPD takes buildings to housing court over unresolved conditions: 239,133 case records and counting. A building with active litigation is a building where the problems outlasted every earlier step.
8. Eviction patterns. 130,241 eviction filings sit in the record, and the useful read isn't one building, it's the pattern across everything a landlord owns. A portfolio-wide eviction habit tells you the management philosophy before you meet the management.
9. Stalled construction nearby. 323,863 stalled-construction complaints on file citywide. The half-finished project next door isn't just an eyesore. It's years of your view, noise, and sidewalk shed.
10. The speculation watch list. 658 properties currently sit on the city's speculation watch list, buildings flagged for the kind of ownership churn that historically precedes displacement pressure. If your prospective building is one of the 658, you want to know before the lease, not after the sale.
Ten records, ten separate lookups the manual way. Or one search. Not all ten weigh the same, either: the five biggest red flags are the ones worth reading first. A VeriCrib report reads all of them, from 23 city sources, and tells you which ones actually matter for the building in front of you. Your first three reports are full reports, free.