Five public-record warning signs separate a normal old building from a problem one: Class C violations left open past their deadline, recent vacate orders, a landlord's eviction pattern, a complaint history that outruns the fixes, and open tenant litigation. Every one is checkable by address before you sign — here's how to read each, and where each goes deep.
Most NYC renters don't find out about a building's history until something goes wrong. The data is public — it's just scattered across a dozen city portals nobody has time to visit. Here are the five signals worth checking before you hand over a security deposit, worst first — each a quick read on its own, and each with a full breakdown a click away.
1. Class C violations that have aged past their deadline
Class C is HPD's most serious category — immediately hazardous conditions like no heat, no hot water, a gas leak, or broken locks. The landlord generally gets 24 hours to fix one (lead-based paint and window guards are the two exceptions, at 21 days). But the useful question isn't how many — it's how long. A Class C fixed last month is a building where things break and get repaired; a Class C open past its deadline for a year is a building telling you how the lease will go.
Read for: any Class C still open well past its cure deadline. One is a heads-up; a stack of aged-open ones is a pattern. Full breakdown of Class A, B, and C — and why the open date beats the count.
2. Recent vacate orders
A vacate order is what HPD, DOB, or FDNY issues when conditions make a building — or part of one — unsafe to occupy. It's the single worst line a building file can carry: the city ordering people out of their homes. Even a partial vacate (one unit, one floor) is worth understanding, and even a rescinded one tells you how bad things once got.
Read for: any vacate in the building's history, especially structural, fire, or "illegal occupancy" reasons. What a vacate order actually means — full vs. partial, and why a lifted one still counts.
3. The landlord's eviction pattern
City-marshal eviction records are public and tied to addresses — and the useful read isn't this one building, it's the pattern across everything the landlord owns. A single eviction has a dozen possible causes; a portfolio-wide habit of them is a management philosophy, visible before you ever meet the management.
Read for: executed evictions clustered across the owner's other buildings, not just this address. The five signals on a landlord's record, worst first — evictions, enforcement programs, harassment findings, liens, registration.
4. A complaint history that outruns the fixes
311 complaints are noisier than violations — anyone can file one, and not all get substantiated. But a building that generates complaints faster than it resolves them is a building whose residents are raising problems nobody's closing. The tell is the ratio: 80 complaints against 4 closed violations reads very differently than 20 against 18.
Read for: repeat complaints in the same category — especially heat — that never translate into fixed conditions. Look up any building's complaint history by address.
5. Open tenant litigation
When conditions get bad enough, tenants take the landlord to housing court — an HP Action to force repairs — and those cases are on file. Open litigation means the problems in a building outlasted every earlier step: the complaint, the violation, the deadline. It's several escalations past "there's a flag on the file."
Read for: active or recent cases tenants brought against the building. Litigation sits on the owner's record alongside the harder findings; here's how that whole record reads, and the full seven-step building check puts litigation in its place among the rest.
How to check all five in one search
Each of these signals lives in a different city database, in a different format, behind a different search box. You can do the whole check by hand — the step-by-step guide walks through it — or run one VeriCrib report and get every flag on any NYC address, read and weighed, in one place.
The information advantage landlords have always had? You can have it too. You just have to look. Your first three reports are full reports, free.