What should we send you?
Your plan includes the daily filing lists, and you have not chosen any yet. New York City publishes these every weekday — pick the ones worth your morning. You can change this whenever you like under Notifications, and nothing is ever sent that you have not asked for.
Picks a sensible set to start from. Change anything below before you save.
New York City property intelligence
Know the block
before it becomes
your block.
The city already knows this building — the Department of Finance's assessed value and how much of the building the zoning would allow today, what the Department of Buildings has permitted and cited on it, what housing inspectors have found inside it, the complaints and 311 reports on its block, and every site the EPA holds on record around it. Nineteen sections in seconds, every count compared with the city, as a PDF you can forward. 100% coverage of New York City, every address, today.
Matched to the right plan and price — or told honestly that the free check is all you need.
Read a full sample report → every section, a real address, the actual PDF
The corpus behind every report
One record, every reader
The two sides of a sale read it most closely — and four more read it their own way.
If you sell property
You get asked what the block is like
And answering it in your own words is the part of the job with the most downside. A report you forward is records with the caveats attached, so the characterization is the city's and not yours.
- Know what the city already holds on the building, before you write an offer.New York issues no single document at sale the way New York City and Cleveland do. What it has instead is a deep record on every building: every permit filed against the lot and which were actually issued, and violations from two agencies that mean different things. The report reads all of that. What the building is lawfully allowed to be used as is a separate Department of Buildings record, asked of them directly — named in the glossary rather than promised here.
- Walk in already knowing the rest.What the city has filed on these streets — permits, violations and 311, by year
- Hand it over instead of characterizing. Nothing is scored, no school is rated, and the census section describes buildings rather than the people in them. That is a deliberate design decision about your exposure, not an omission.
- One account for the desk. Plans carry seats and share an allowance, and the owner of the plan can see every report run against it, and by whom.
If you are buying
You get one look before you commit
An open house tells you about the kitchen. The expensive surprises are on the block and in the building's file, and most of them are a matter of public record if you know which record to ask for.
- The obligations that come with it.An open violation transfers with the building. New York files them from two agencies against the building rather than the lot, so a lot with several buildings on it carries several records, and the report keeps them apart rather than adding them into one number.
- What your tax bill will actually be.The Department of Finance's assessed value for the tax lot, split into land and the improvement above it, with the year built, the year of the most recent alteration on record, the unit count and the floor area.
- Ten years of the surrounding blocks. NYPD complaints and 311 reports by year, permits and violations on the lot itself, the schools within reach, the flood zone a lender uses, and the EPA's record for every regulated site on the surrounding blocks. — so a number means something.
- The flood map a lender uses. The federal zone and the panel it came off, quoted as FEMA publishes it. New York has coastline on four of its five boroughs and the zone is the first thing an insurance application asks about.
And four more, reading the same record their own way
Renting a place
Rent stabilisation exists here in law and not as a register anyone publishes, so the report makes no finding about it rather than guessing from the year built. What it does have is the housing maintenance record: every violation inside the building, graded A non-hazardous through C immediately hazardous, and I for no heat or no hot water, which the city treats as its own emergency category.
Owning or managing buildings
Every permit the Department of Buildings has filed on your lot and every violation it has issued against the building, the housing violations graded by how serious the city judged them, and what your block reported to 311 — the two registers kept apart, because a building can be clean on one and heavy on the other.
Investing and developing
The pipeline of what is proposed, approved and under construction nearby, zoning and height limits, and the gap between assessed and market value.
Advising and arguing
The parcel’s full permit, violation and eviction record with the date each line was read — attorneys pull one report per matter and export the history.
Neither version is a valuation, an appraisal, or a statutory Natural Hazard Disclosure, and no version may be used to screen a tenant. What it is, in both cases, is the public record on one address, gathered in one place.
Not sure what it tells you?
Say what brings you here and the assistant will say what the report holds for it — then answer whatever you want to ask.
First — which of these is you?
The assistant answers about this product and what New York City's records can show. It has no property in front of it, so it will not look an address up, price anything, or say what an area is like — running a report is what does that.
What a report contains
Nineteen sections. Zero opinions.
Every line beneath is real output for 350 5 AVE, Manhattan.
Every building, not the same report
What the records hold depends on what it is.
A house
The whole record: the lot, its permits, both violation registers, and the blocks around it.
A flat or condominium
The same block record as any other building, and the same tax lot record. A condominium in New York is usually its own tax lot, so the roll figure is that unit's rather than the building's.
An apartment building
The building's own violation record is the part to read. Housing Preservation and Development grades every condition it finds, and class C and class I are the two that mean somebody was living without something.
A shop, office or warehouse
An address outside the five boroughs is declined with the reason rather than answered with partial data.
Coverage is uneven because the records are, and where a section is thin the report says which record is thin rather than showing an empty space. New York City addresses only, whatever the building is.
Built to be believed
Three rules the report keeps, and under each one the thing itself: real output for 350 5 AVE, Manhattan, unedited. A count, a refusal, and a number with the caveat that makes it safe to use.
Every number is compared
A count on its own is unreadable. Nobody can say whether 14,810 is a lot, so every figure is set against what an average area of the same size in New York City records.
8× the New York City average
An average area this size holds 1,861, and this works out at about 28 a week.
Nothing is scored
No safety grade, no risk number, no letter for the block. Those are opinions wearing a number's clothes, on a page that can move a price that matters — and for a brokerage they are a liability: area scores and school grades are the classic proxies for what the Fair Housing Act protects. A report with neither is one your agents can forward without a compliance read.
- Safety score
- Risk rating
- Neighborhood grade
- Investment outlook
You get the records and the comparison. Drawing the conclusion is your job, and saying so is what keeps it yours.
The caveats travel with the numbers
A 311 request is not a finding. The two violation registers come from different agencies and are never added. 311 is counted from 2020, because that is where the city's current file begins.What New York City filed today
Office and up choose freely from all thirteen. Every weekday at 6:30am, on this city's own clock.
Every weekday the city records buildings being emptied, work being permitted, and inspectors finding things. Most of it is never read by anyone who would act on it. These are those filings, sorted into lists, delivered each morning — one filing type per list, in the order they were filed, never ranked and never an owner’s name.
13 lists, and you choose which arrive.
What is being built
Demolition, new construction and serious money.
- New buildings filedA new building applied for anywhere in the five boroughs, the day it is filed.
- Demolition permits filedA building applied to be taken down. The smallest of these lists and usually the first sign a site is about to change.
- Major alterations filedAlterations changing use, egress or occupancy - the filings that turn one kind of building into another.
Condition and compliance
What inspectors found, and what tenants say is wrong.
- Plumbing permits filedPlumbing work filed with the Department of Buildings.
- Equipment work filedEquipment work: the largest single permit type the city files, covering mechanical plant of every kind.
- Boiler and equipment permitsEquipment permits for boilers and fixed plant.
- Fuel oil and storage filingsFuel-burning and storage equipment, including the oil-tank filings a buyer asks about.
- Building violations issuedViolations issued by the Department of Buildings against the structure, city-wide.
- Immediately hazardous housing violationsClass C violations: conditions Housing Preservation and Development judged immediately hazardous.
- Heat and hot water violationsClass I violations: no heat or no hot water, which the city treats as its own emergency category.
- Water leak reportsWater leaks reported to 311, which is the complaint that most often precedes a violation.
Buildings with work outstanding
Standing obligations somebody has to organize and pay for.
- Illegal conversion complaintsReports to 311 that a building has been divided or occupied in a way the city did not permit.
Rent and income
Petitions that change what a building can charge.
- Illegal hotel room complaintsReports that flats in a residential building are being let by the night. New York polices this through 311 rather than through a licence register, so the complaint is the record - there is no list of who is doing it legally.
The city publishes on a lag — two days for permits and violations, nearer a fortnight for buyouts — and every row shows the date it was filed rather than the day it reached us. This is nothing on my patch gets past me, not first to the door, and we would rather say so than let you find out.
Scan the Block <hello@scantheblock.com> · 6:30 AM
682 new filings, 1 on more than one list
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Scan the Block <hello@scantheblock.com> · 6:30 AM
800 new filings on your lists, 32 in this email
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
What comes with it
Every plan, unless marked.
Plans
Every plan is billed monthly or annually — your choice — and can be canceled at any time — canceling stops the next renewal and keeps your access to the end of the period you have paid for; we do not pro-rate or refund part of a month. An allowance is a ceiling rather than a balance: it resets at the turn of the day or month, and unused reports do not carry over. A report counts against it only when it is newly run — re-reading one you already ran is free, always.
The guides are free to read whether or not you have an account — how to read a property record, what the city’s rules actually turn on, and what the records will not tell you, written separately for buying, renting, owning, agency and investment.
Open 24/7 Start the week of Pro yourself at the sign-in form — sixty seconds, no card. Pricing bids, not buying? Trade is $19/mo, no trial needed — see the card below. Teams and multi-seat plans: email hello@scantheblock.com and we set you up by hand. Email us →Plans with more than one account use the company’s own email domain — personal addresses (gmail and the like) fit the single-account plans.
Office and above include machine access over MCP, so Claude can run the account’s reports: switched on per seat, off by default, under the same allowance as the buttons. Claude is a product of Anthropic, PBC; Scan the Block is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic.
How this compares — against the city’s own free tool, NeighborhoodScout and PropertyShark, feature by feature, from each product’s own materials — including where they win.
See the comparisonThe data, seams and all
Where the city changed how it records something, the report says so next to the number rather than in a footnote. Three examples: this city files two of its date columns as TEXT rather than as dates, and one of them holds two different shapes in the same column — 3,901,858 permit rows written month-first and 88,551 written year-first — so every date question here goes through an expression that normalises both, because the ordinary comparison returns nothing at all and says so to nobody; the city publishes 311 in two files and the current one begins in 2020, so a ten-year question is answered over the window it actually covers rather than showing six quiet years that were never quiet; and violations arrive from two agencies that mean different things, the Department of Buildings citing the structure and Housing Preservation and Development citing the conditions inside a rental, which are reported apart and never added.
The spine is public records — New York City Open Data for permits, violations, housing maintenance, complaints and 311, the Department of City Planning's tax roll for the building itself, and the federal, state and regional sources listed opposite. Each is named on the line it produces. Alongside them sit a few third-party estimates: a property’s market value, a unit’s likely rent. Each is shown with its own range, named for the service that made it, and never presented as ours or turned into a score. We keep no copy of the city’s data — only your own receipt, which you can see and export.
Asked of the city just now, not stored here. Each dataset is published on its own rhythm, so a gap is the city's publishing lag rather than a gap in the report — and the report says so where it matters.
| Dataset | From | Rows |
|---|---|---|
| 311 service requests (current file) | 2020 | 22,453,415 |
| Housing maintenance violations (HPD) | 1974 | 11,234,201 |
| Police complaints (NYPD) | 2000 | 10,071,507 |
| Building permits (DOB) | — | 3,990,410 |
| Building violations (DOB) | 1987 | 2,476,696 |
| Building footprints, with the tax lot each stands on | — | 1,083,030 |
| Address register (AddressPoint) | — | 967,871 |
| Tax lots, with value, age, units and floor area (PLUTO) | — | 858,284 |
And eight from outside the city, each named where it appears:
| Source | From | What it answers |
|---|---|---|
| U.S. Census Bureau | ACS | The tract and its housing figures |
| FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer | FEMA | The flood zone a lender uses |
| USGS earthquake catalog | 1900 | Quakes that actually happened |
| National Register of Historic Places | NPS | Federal historic listings |
| OpenStreetMap | volunteer | The nearest chemist or food shop |
| EPA AirNow and PurpleAir | EPA | Air quality, official and community |
| NREL PVWatts | NREL | What a roof here could generate |
| FCC broadband filings | FCC | Internet available at the address |
Read up first
Free, no account. A different three each day.
One city, on purpose
A national property site knows a little about everywhere. This knows New York City, and most of what makes a report useful here does not exist anywhere else.
The things that only exist here
Two ids that are not interchangeable, because violations are filed against the building and the money against the lot. Two violation registers that mean different things. A floor area ratio published built and allowed, which no other city here does. And a borough that has to be named, because the same number and street exist in more than one.
Read from the city's own registers
The address comes from the city's own AddressPoint register, the lot from the Department of City Planning's tax roll, and the counts from New York City Open Data.
Then the next city
The method is the product: find the registers a city actually keeps, learn where they disagree with each other, and say so beside the numbers. That travels. The particular datasets do not, so the next city gets the same treatment from scratch rather than this one stretched to fit it.
New York City addresses only, today. If you want to know when somewhere else opens, write to hello@scantheblock.com and we will tell you.
Sign in
One link, straight to your inbox. No password to choose, forget or leak.
A week of Pro to start — sixty seconds, no card. Start it at the sign-in form; annual billing is two months free, every year.
Your history
Every report you have run, and every sign-in on this account. Re-opening a report is free and does not count against your allowance.
Claude access
Connect it to Claude
Or call it yourself
Report
Get access
We set accounts up by hand. Send this and we’ll email you an invoice and your sign-in link — your first week of Pro is free, and annual billing is two months free, every year.
Sent. We’ll reply from hello@scantheblock.com with an invoice and your sign-in link — usually the same day.
Is Scan the Block for you?
Keyboard shortcuts
Shortcuts stay out of the way while you are typing in any field.
Compiling your report
—
A fresh address takes a few seconds. Re-opening one you have run is instant.
Lists
Public filings, gathered daily. Each list is one filing type, newest first.
A different kind of list — screened live, not a subscription
Signals
Long-anchored multi-family parcels in one neighborhood, with open notices of violation joined in. Three public facts side by side; what they mean together is your judgment, and nothing here is ranked for you.
Notifications
Choose what arrives in your inbox. Nothing is sent that you have not asked for.
Picks a sensible set to start from. Change anything you like below — nothing is sent until you press Save.
When these arrive. 6:30am Pacific, weekdays only — these are city filings, so nothing is recorded at weekends. You are sent an email only when one of your lists has something new in it; an empty message every morning is how people learn to stop opening them.
How current they are.the portal refreshes on each agency's own cadence, and these lags are that cadence rather than a measured completeness rampfiled, which is not the day it reached us — so treat these as “nothing on my patch gets past me” rather than “first to the door”.
Leads
The working prospect list — statuses and notes save as you go. Several of us work this same list.
Loading the leads…
Team
Sources
Live state of every upstream, measured from real report traffic rather than synthetic checks.
A source shown idle has no recent traffic to judge by — that is not a fault.
Companies
A plan is sold to a company. Seats are how many people it covers; the monthly reports are a single pool they share. Billing happens outside this service. A Claude mark on an account means that person has switched on machine access for it — Scan the Block is independent of Anthropic, and the mark records their choice, not an affiliation.
Usage & cost
What the report's paid sources actually cost this month, counted from calls that really went out — a cache hit costs nothing and is not counted. The city's own data is free and is shown for context only. Estimates use current list rates; billing is settled with each provider.
Reading…