How StreetSpy grades NYC buildings

StreetSpy grades every residential building in New York City from A to F under methodology version 2026.10.3: each building starts at 100 points and loses points for open HPD violations, 311 housing complaints, bedbug reports, executed evictions, housing litigation and open DOB violations, most of them scaled per 10 units.

Every grade on StreetSpy is computed from public records with a fixed set of rules. Nothing is estimated or inferred. This page lists every source we use, every deduction we apply, and the exact thresholds, so anyone can reproduce a grade from the city's own data. The grade states the public record; it is not a judgment about any person.

Coverage

StreetSpy covers every residential tax lot in New York City, about 767,000 buildings, using the NYC Department of City Planning PLUTO file as the master list. Each building is identified by its borough, block and lot. When you search an address, NYC GeoSearch matches it to a tax lot, and every record on the report is keyed to that lot.

Data sources

Only the first six sources feed the grade. The rest appear on the report as records in their own right (watchlists, liens, rodent inspections, elevator, boiler and facade filings, energy grade) and never change the score. Each section of a report shows the date its data is current through.

All records are refreshed from NYC Open Data daily. Open-violation counts are checked against the city's full dataset every night and reconciled whenever they drift, and at least monthly.

HPD violations are current through October 23, 2026. On October 26, 2026 our count of open violations (2,877,063) was checked against the city's (2,877,102); they differed by 39. The last full reconciliation against HPD's complete dataset ran on October 7, 2026 and corrected 11,697 records.

• NYC HPD Housing Maintenance Code Violations. Open and closed violations, classes A, B and C, and the rent-impairing flag.
• NYC 311 Service Requests. Housing complaint types only: heat and hot water, unsanitary conditions, plumbing, paint and plaster, door and window, elevator, rodent, electric, water leak, appliance, flooring and stairs, safety, mold, general, residential noise, and similar.
• HPD Bedbug Reporting. Annual filings by owners: infested, treated and re-infested units. The filings are self-reported by owners; HPD does not inspect to confirm them. A report shows each year as filed (with what the owner reported, including 0 infested units) or as no filing on record.
• NYC Marshal Evictions (via DOI). Executed residential evictions.
• HPD Housing Litigations. Cases HPD brought against owners, including harassment findings.
• DOB Violations. Open and closed Department of Buildings violations. Local Law violations issued before 2000 (mostly old filing-requirement violations DOB never closed) are named as such on the report and in the grade table.
• HPD Multiple Dwelling Registrations and Registration Contacts. Owner, head officer, managing agent and site manager on file.
• NYC DOF tax bills (via the JustFix Who Owns What API). Rent-stabilized unit counts (2007 and the latest bill) and 421-a / J-51 abatement start years.
• HPD Alternative Enforcement Program list. Buildings selected for the city's intensive enforcement program, by round, with discharge dates.
• HPD Speculation Watch List. Sales of rent-regulated buildings the city flags for speculative pricing.
• HPD Order to Repair / Vacate Orders. Vacate orders with effective and rescind dates and units affected.
• DOF Tax Lien Sale Lists. Lots listed for the city's tax or water lien sale.
• DOHMH Rodent Inspections. Health Department rat inspections of the lot, last 3 years.
• DOB NOW Elevator Safety Compliance, Boiler filings and Facades (FISP) Compliance Filings. Registered elevator devices and last inspection, boiler defects, and the latest facade safety status.
• DOB Local Law 33 building energy grades. Posted energy letter grade and ENERGY STAR score for buildings over 25,000 sq ft.
• HPD Buildings Subject to HPD Jurisdiction. Building identification numbers and legal unit counts for a lot.
• DOB NOW Job Filings. Construction permits in the building and within 150 feet.
• MTA Subway Stations. Stations within 1.5 miles.
• NYC Dept. of City Planning PLUTO. The list of residential tax lots, unit counts and lot attributes.
• FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer. Flood zone designation.
• NYC GeoSearch. Matching a typed address to a tax lot.

Dataset links: NYC HPD Housing Maintenance Code Violations, NYC HPD Property Registration, NYC 311 Service Requests, NYC Marshal Evictions (DOI), NYC HPD Housing Litigations, NYC DOB Violations, NYC HPD Bedbug Reporting, NYC DOF tax bills via JustFix / NY DHCR.

The score

Every building starts at 100 points. We subtract points in six categories. Each category has a cap, so one bad category cannot by itself push a building below a certain floor, and the deductions are scaled per 10 units so a 200-unit building is not punished for having more apartments than a 6-unit building. For the per-unit math the denominator is never below 3 units, which keeps very small buildings from swinging wildly on a single record.

Open HPD violations (up to 45 points, plus 5)

Each open violation is weighted by class: C counts 3, B counts 2, A counts 1. The weighted total is divided by the number of units and scaled to 10 units. If any open violation is flagged rent-impairing by HPD, 5 additional points come off.

• Class C, immediately hazardous. Examples: no heat, lead paint, rodents.
• Class B, hazardous. Conditions HPD considers hazardous but not immediately so.
• Class A, non-hazardous. Conditions that violate the code but do not threaten health or safety.
• Class I, HPD orders. Orders HPD issues, such as lead paint or heat orders, that are not a hazard class. They count in a building's open total and open per 10 units, not in the grade.

Rent-impairing is a classification HPD gives a specific list of violations under NY Multiple Dwelling Law section 302-a. A report states how many open violations carry that classification; it does not say what a tenant may do about them. The statute is on the NY Senate's site (nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MDW/302-A) and NY Courts explains how tenants ask Housing Court for repairs (nycourts.gov/new-york-city-housing-court). Consult a housing attorney or call 311 before acting on it.

Next to the open violation count, each report shows how many HPD violations were closed in the last 90 days and the median number of days from issue to close for violations closed in the last 12 months. Both use HPD's own dates: the issue date of the violation and its current status date, which for a closed violation is the date HPD recorded it closed (HPD's dataset carries no separate certification date we use). A violation HPD has not closed does not count, however long ago the owner certified the repair. When nothing was closed in 12 months the report says so in one sentence. Repair velocity does not change the grade.

311 housing complaints (up to 20 points)

We count 311 service requests in housing complaint types only, filed in the last 12 months, scaled per 10 units. Complaints about street conditions, parking or businesses are excluded.

Bedbug infestations (up to 15 points)

Owners of multiple dwellings must file an annual bedbug report with HPD. We look at the last three reporting years. Any reported infestation deducts 8 points. If any unit was re-infested, the deduction is 12. If 10% or more of units were reported infested, the deduction is 15.

Executed evictions (up to 10 points)

Residential evictions executed by a city marshal in the last three years, as published by the Department of Investigation, scaled per 10 units.

Housing litigation (up to 10 points)

Any open case HPD has brought against the owner deducts 5 points. A finding of tenant harassment deducts 10.

Open DOB violations (up to 5 points)

Open Department of Buildings violations, scaled per 10 units.

Letter grades

• A: 90 to 100 (Excellent)
• B: 78 to 89 (Good)
• C: 64 to 77 (Fair)
• D: 50 to 63 (Poor)
• F: Below 50 (Severe)

The chips under the grade

Under each grade, five chips say what the letter is made of. Each one links to its section of the report and carries the date that section's records are current through. The chips add no score of their own: every status comes from the grade above, and the grade did not change when they were added.

• Repairs. The open HPD violations category of the grade (weighted by class, per 10 units). It reads "Grade capped at F" when the density cap set the grade.
• Heat and hot water. Heat and hot water complaints to 311 in the last 12 months. The grade's only rule for them is the heat cap, so the chip reads "Grade capped at C" when the cap set the grade and shows the plain count otherwise.
• Pests. The bedbug category of the grade: infested units in the owner's annual bedbug filings, last 3 reporting years. Rodent inspections are on the report but are not in the grade, so they are not in this chip.
• Safety. The open DOB violations category of the grade (construction, elevators, facade, illegal work, per 10 units).
• Registration. Not part of the grade. The building's HPD registration status, in the same words as the owner section: through the end date on file, renewal not yet in the city's data, expired, or not on file.

Status words for a category of the grade: Clear means it took no points off. Low, Medium and High mean it took off under a third, under two thirds, or at least two thirds of that category's maximum points (the same levels the bars in "How this grade is calculated" on each report use). A building that is not graded, or a lot we could not match to the city's records, shows counts or "Not on file" instead.

Tenant reviews, rent reports and the Verified tenant badge never change the grade or any chip. They are tenants' accounts, shown in their own section, and the grade is built only from city records.

What the grade is and is not

• Nothing is estimated or inferred. Every deduction traces to a record you can open on the report.
• A building with no records keeps all 100 points. The absence of records is not proof of good conditions, only an absence of complaints and violations on file.
• A building that cannot be matched to a tax lot is shown as "Not graded."
• One- and two-family homes are not registered with HPD and are not routinely inspected. When such a lot has no HPD registration, no violation ever recorded, and nothing in the 311, bedbug, eviction, litigation or DOB records, it is shown as "Not graded" rather than given an A. An empty record for a house is not the same as a clean record for an apartment building.
• Heat cap (added Oct 14, 2026): a building with at least one heat or hot water complaint per unit to 311 in the last 12 months, and at least 10 in total, cannot grade above C whatever else is on file. No heat is the most common reason renters regret a lease, and the 311 factor alone could not say so.
• Density cap (added Oct 19, 2026): A building with 100 or more open HPD violations per 10 units is graded F regardless of other records, because that density means about ten open violations per apartment. The count is the same open-violations-per-10-units figure the worst-buildings ranking uses, every class included. The density cap applies only to recently active buildings; a building with no HPD violation issued in the last 24 months and no 311 housing complaint in the last 12 months keeps its regular grade.
• The worst-building lists include only recently active buildings (at least one HPD violation issued in the last 24 months or one 311 housing complaint in the last 12), so a backlog of old violations that HPD never closed does not rank a building on its own.
• The grade reflects records currently on file. HPD closes violations only after an owner certifies the repair and, in many cases, after a reinspection. A backlog HPD has not closed can keep a grade low even after work was done.
• The grade is not a prediction of how a building will be managed in the future, and it is not legal advice.

Checking one apartment

The grade covers the whole tax lot. Every report also has an apartment check: enter the unit number (4B, 12F, PH) and StreetSpy pulls the records filed against that apartment alone. It does not change the building's grade.

• HPD violations the inspector wrote up for that apartment: every open one, class C first, then the closed ones, with class, dates, HPD's violation id and the room, wall or window the inspector's text names. The count and the list are the same rows.
• "What to look at in this apartment": one line per open violation, grouped by the room its text names. Only what the record says; a room numbered "1st room from north" is never given a name.
• Executed marshal evictions recorded for that apartment since 2017.
• Rents and reviews tenants reported for that apartment on StreetSpy, labeled as tenant reports.
• Whether the rent is likely to be capped at renewal (rent stabilization or Good Cause Eviction), from the building's tax-bill stabilization count, size, age and owner portfolio, with the current Rent Guidelines Board rates. Only the unit's DHCR rent history can confirm stabilization; the check links to the free request.

HPD records the apartment as the inspector typed it, so labels are matched loosely: "4B", "4-B", "Apt 4B" and "#4B" all compare equal, and a row filed another way says how ("filed as 4-B"). A violation recorded without an apartment number is building-wide and appears only on the building report.

How landlord totals are counted

This is how the landlord ranking and every landlord page add up a portfolio.

• Grouped by head officer. Large owners usually hold each building through its own LLC. HPD property registrations name a head officer behind each owner entity, so StreetSpy groups buildings by the head officer named on every HPD registration, however many companies hold them. The head officer may be an owner, a principal or an employee who signs the filings.
• Every registered building counts. A landlord's total includes every building registered with that head officer, not only the buildings that would qualify for a watchlist. The totals on a landlord page are the sum of the buildings listed on it.
• A floor of 3 buildings and 50 units. The landlord ranking lists portfolios of at least 3 buildings and 50 units, ranked by open HPD violations per 10 units, so a single small building cannot top the city.
• Public owners, NYCHA, condos and co-ops. Government-owned lots, including NYCHA, and condominiums and co-ops are grouped by the owner entity rather than by a head officer, because their registrations name an agency official or a volunteer board officer, not a landlord. They are left out of the worst-building and heat lists.
• Open violations as of the data date. Counts are open HPD violations on the date shown on the page. There is no deduplication beyond HPD's own: if HPD records two violations for the same condition, both count.
• Servicers and receivers. Mortgage servicers and court-appointed receivers can appear as head officers. When a lender or a receiver takes control of a building, the registration may name that firm's officer, so a total can include buildings the firm manages for a period rather than owns.
• Name and business address. A head officer is grouped by name and by the business address on the registration's head officer contact, both normalized (case, punctuation, middle initials, Jr. and Sr., street words such as Street and St, and suite numbers are ignored; the ZIP code is kept). The same name at two different business addresses is shown as two separate groups, each linking to the other, unless the registrations share a strong link: the same owner entity (a company, not an individual owner), or a business address that appears on both groups' registrations as the owner's or the head officer's. A registration with no business address for its head officer joins a group only through one of those links.
• Names as filed. Names are taken verbatim from the registrations. Two different people with the same name and the same business address are still grouped together, and one person who files from two unrelated addresses appears twice. If a grouping is wrong, report it on the corrections page.

Found a grouping that is wrong? Report it.

City program owners (HDFC)

A Housing Development Fund Corporation (HDFC) is a nonprofit owner set up under a city housing program. Some HDFCs are limited-equity co-ops owned by their residents; others hold rental buildings for the city, for example under Third Party Transfer, where a nonprofit takes over a building from an owner who did not pay taxes or keep it up. StreetSpy treats the two differently.

• HDFC co-ops are treated like any co-op. When PLUTO classes the building as a co-op (C6, C8, D0 or D4), or the owner name on the HPD registration or in PLUTO says cooperative, co-op, owners corp or tenants corp, the building is a co-op. It is left out of the worst and best building lists, the neighborhood lists, the heat list and the rentals-only map filter, and the report labels it a co-op.
• HDFC rentals stay ranked, with a label. Every other HDFC building is a rental. Its tenants live with the conditions on the record, so it is graded and ranked like any rental. It carries the label "City program owner (HDFC)" in every list and on its report, so a reader knows the owner is a nonprofit under a city program rather than a private landlord.
• Landlord totals. An HDFC co-op is grouped by its own entity on landlord pages, like any co-op, because the head officer on its registration is a shareholder on the board. A landlord whose buildings are mostly held by HDFCs carries the same label in the landlord ranking.
• What we cannot see. The city does not publish a list of which HDFCs are co-ops. A co-op whose PLUTO class and owner names say nothing of it is counted as a rental. If you know a building is an HDFC co-op, report it on the corrections page.

Known limitations

• Ownership is grouped by the head officer named on HPD registrations (name and business address), or by the owner entity when there is none (see How landlord totals are counted). Related companies with no head officer in common appear as separate owners.
• Condominiums and co-ops are graded as a whole tax lot. Individual units are not graded.
• Some city records are keyed to the tax lot rather than a specific building, so a lot with several buildings shows combined records.
• 311 complaints are unverified reports by members of the public. They indicate that someone complained, not that the city confirmed the condition.
• Our data lags the city's own publishing schedule. We pull daily, but each agency publishes on its own cadence, and some datasets update weekly or monthly.

Versioning

This is version 2026.10.3 of the methodology. When we change a threshold, a cap, or a source, we increment the version and note the change here, so a grade can always be traced to the rules that produced it. Changes: 2026.10.1 (Oct 13): one- and two-family lots with nothing on file are "Not graded" instead of A. 2026.10.2 (Oct 14): heat cap; public housing (NYCHA) is "Not graded" because HPD does not inspect it. 2026.10.3 (Oct 19): density cap; 100 or more open HPD violations per 10 units is an F for recently active buildings, and the worst-building lists include only recently active buildings. Oct 25, 2026 (the lists, not the grade): buildings owned by a Housing Development Fund Corporation that PLUTO or an owner name marks as a co-op are left out of the rental lists like any co-op, and every other HDFC building is labeled "City program owner (HDFC)" (see City program owners). Oct 25, wording only (scores and thresholds unchanged, so no new version): the F label now reads Severe, so the five labels are Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor and Severe; reports add repair velocity, which does not change the grade.

Common questions

How does StreetSpy grade a building?

Every building starts at 100 points. Points come off in six categories: open HPD violations weighted by class (up to 45, plus 5 if any is rent-impairing), 311 housing complaints in the last 12 months (20), bedbug infestations in the last 3 reporting years (15), executed evictions in the last 3 years (10), HPD housing litigation (10) and open DOB violations (5). Most categories are scaled per 10 units. A is 90 to 100, B 78 to 89, C 64 to 77, D 50 to 63 and F below 50. This is methodology version 2026.10.3.

Where does the data come from?

Only public records: NYC HPD violations, registrations, litigation and bedbug reports, NYC 311 service requests, DOB violations, NYC Marshal evictions published by the Department of Investigation, and rent-stabilized unit counts from Department of Finance tax bills. All records are refreshed from NYC Open Data daily.

What do HPD violation classes A, B and C mean?

Class C is immediately hazardous (for example no heat, lead paint or rodents), class B is hazardous, and class A is non-hazardous: conditions that violate the code but do not threaten health or safety. In the grade a class C violation counts 3, a B counts 2 and an A counts 1. Class I records are orders HPD issues, such as lead paint or heat orders, rather than a hazard class; they are part of the open total and open per 10 units but carry no points in the grade.

Does a building with no records get an A?

A building with no records keeps all 100 points, but the absence of records is not proof of good conditions. One- and two-family homes with no HPD registration and nothing in any record are shown as "Not graded" rather than given an A, and so is public housing (NYCHA), because HPD does not inspect it.

What is the heat cap?

A building with at least one heat or hot water complaint per unit to 311 in the last 12 months, and at least 10 in total, cannot grade above C whatever else is on file.

What is the density cap?

A building with 100 or more open HPD violations per 10 units is graded F regardless of other records, because that density means about ten open violations per apartment. The density cap applies only to recently active buildings; a building with no HPD violation issued in the last 24 months and no 311 housing complaint in the last 12 months keeps its regular grade.

Which buildings can appear on the worst-building lists?

The worst-building lists include only recently active buildings (at least one HPD violation issued in the last 24 months or one 311 housing complaint in the last 12), so a backlog of old violations that HPD never closed does not rank a building on its own.

Can I check one apartment instead of the whole building?

Yes. Enter the unit number on any report and StreetSpy shows the HPD violations written up for that apartment, executed marshal evictions recorded for it since 2017, and rents and reviews tenants reported for it. It does not change the building's grade.

How are landlord totals counted?

Buildings are grouped by the head officer named on HPD property registrations, every registered building counts, and the ranking lists portfolios of at least 3 buildings and 50 units by open violations per 10 units. Government lots, NYCHA, condos and co-ops are grouped by the owner entity.

Is the grade a judgment about the landlord?

No. The grade states the public record; it is not a judgment about any person, a prediction of how a building will be managed, or legal advice.

What if a record is wrong?

If a record is attached to the wrong building or a lot appears twice, use the corrections page. If you disagree with a city record itself, that page links to where to dispute it with the agency.

Found an error?

If a record is attached to the wrong building or a lot appears twice, see Corrections. If you disagree with a city record itself, that page also links to where to dispute it with the agency.