How the vetting works

Per building

The checks

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  Open housing-code violations

  Every open HPD violation on the building, split by hazard class. Class C is the immediately hazardous tier: no heat, lead paint, active infestation. We weigh the count against the number of units, so a 200-unit building isn't damned for what would condemn a six-flat.

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  Tenant complaints

  Complaints tenants actually filed, over the last 12 months, with heat and hot water counted separately. It's the single most common serious complaint in New York and the clearest signal of an inattentive landlord.

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  Rodent inspections

  Results of city rodent inspections at the address over 24 months, separating inspections that found active rat signs from routine passes. Alongside them we count HPD infestation violations — written under Housing Maintenance Code § 27-2017.4, which names the pest, so roaches, rodents and bedbugs are counted separately rather than lumped together.

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  Bedbugs

  New York requires landlords to file an annual bedbug report. We read the most recent filing for the building, including re-infested units.

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  Noise

  311 noise complaints for the building over 12 and 24 months, split into neighbour noise, street noise and construction, plus every noise complaint within 150 metres. A quiet building on a loud corner is still loud. Construction is read from the complaint's descriptor rather than its type, because 311 files it under a generic “Noise” category that also holds alarms and air-conditioning units.

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  Building-code violations and vacate orders

  Open DOB and ECB violations, and any active vacate order. A vacate order is disqualifying on its own.

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  Tenants taking the landlord to court

  HPD litigation opened against the building in the last 24 months: heat cases, access warrants, tenant actions. Separately, the cases the city classifies as harassment, which tenants bring when they allege the owner is trying to force them out.

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  Evictions

  Marshal evictions executed at the building in the last 24 months, measured against the unit count.

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  Is the owner even registered?

  Owners of buildings with three or more units must register with HPD every year. No current registration often means an absentee or non-compliant owner, and it's a hard thing to discover any other way.

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  Square footage

  When a posting doesn't state a size, we estimate it from the building's residential floor area and unit count in the city's tax-lot records, scaled to the bedroom count. It assumes the units in a building resemble each other, which in a converted brownstone they often don't, so every estimate is labelled as one.

Per block

And the neighborhood

Separately from the building, we profile the streets around it and list what’s good and what to know:

• Transit

  Every MTA subway station within a 10-minute walk, which lines it serves, and how far the nearest one actually is.

• Food and eating out

  Licensed food stores within a 10-minute walk, and restaurants within five.

• Green space

  Parkland within a 10-minute walk, ignoring traffic triangles and street medians so the number means something.

• Reported crime

  NYPD complaints within 500 metres over 12 months, split into violent and property offences. A busy commercial block records far more theft than a quiet residential one, and conflating the two is misleading.

What we deliberately don’t do is reduce a neighborhood to a single score. Transit access, amenity density and reported crime all track closely with the income and racial makeup of a block, and compressing them into one grade turns a search tool into a steering tool. You get the numbers, the distances they’re measured over, and your own judgement — and no apartment is ever hidden from you because of the area it’s in.

On the map

Seeing where it actually is

Every listing is pinned on a map of its block, and you can switch the whole search to a map view to see how the prices sit across a neighborhood. The map links straight out to Google Maps, Street View and transit directions. Street View in particular tells you things a listing photo never will, like what the block actually looks like at street level. Those links are built from the building’s coordinates in the city’s address database rather than from the text of the address, so the pin lands on the real building.

Per listing

Is it a scam?

Separately from the building, we score the posting itself. The strongest single signal is a price far below what comparable units nearby actually rent for. That’s the bait in most rental scams, so we treat a suspiciously low rent as a warning rather than a bargain. We also look for the language patterns the FTC and NYC consumer-protection advisories describe: requests to wire money, keys promised in the mail, a landlord who’s conveniently overseas, deposits demanded before a viewing. Photos and copy reused across several postings count against a listing too. None of it is proof by itself. Landlords really do take jobs abroad, and now and then a cheap apartment is just cheap.

An address that doesn’t resolve to a real NYC tax lot is treated as a serious problem, both because it can’t be checked and because it’s a common shape for a fake listing.

Per price

Is it a good deal?

Each rent is placed in the distribution of comparable listings (same bedroom count, same neighborhood) and scored on where it falls. When we know square footage for both the unit and its comps, price per square foot is blended in, so more space for a higher rent reads as the good deal it is. Comps drawn from a wider area than the neighborhood are pulled toward neutral, because they’re a weaker signal, and we say so rather than pretending to more precision than we have.

Sources

Where listings come from

• Craigslist NYC4,123 listingschecked 3 hours ago

  Read through the public search interface Craigslist offers, and only the pages its robots file allows.

• Redfin7 listingschecked 2 hours ago

  Read from the rental search pages Redfin serves publicly, on the paths their robots file allows. Postings name a real street address, so the building can be checked against the city's records.

• CityRealty49 listingschecked 3 hours ago

  A New York-only listing site. Every posting names a real street address, which is what lets us pull the building's record. Their robots file allows the pages we read.

• Bouklis Group100 listingschecked 3 hours ago

  A New York brokerage publishing its own listings. Every posting names a street address and a unit number, so each one can be checked against city records. They also list outside New York; those are dropped rather than shown.

• RentHopNothing right nowchecked 3 hours ago

  Their terms do not permit automated access, so this stays off unless the owner turns restricted sources on. Postings carry real street addresses, so the building can be checked.

  Last run didn’t get through. We report that rather than show you an empty source as though it were a quiet one.

• Rent.com131 listingschecked 2 hours ago

  Listings come from the index rent.com publishes for search engines, on the paths their robots file allows. They put a bot check in front of anything faster, which we do not attempt to get around.

• Highrises.com119 listingschecked 2 hours ago

  A Move, Inc. site whose robots.txt states that automated collection is prohibited without their written permission, so this stays off unless the owner turns restricted sources on. Rows are buildings rather than individual apartments — the rent shown is the lowest in the building — but the address is real, so the building can be checked.

• StreetEasy2,673 listingschecked 4 hours ago

  Read through StreetEasy's own API rather than their pages, which robots.txt forbids. Their terms still don't permit automated access, so this stays off unless the owner turns restricted sources on. Every listing carries a street address, so the building can be checked — but they come without the posting's own description, because fetching those meant a request per listing and StreetEasy declined that rate.

We check these every six hours. A count of zero means that source isn’t giving us anything at the moment — usually because the site turns automated requests away — not that we stopped looking.

You can also bring in any single listing by pasting its URL, from a site we read or one we don’t. That’s one page you were already looking at, not a crawl — though if the site asks automated clients not to fetch that page, we don’t, and we’ll say so rather than pretend it failed.