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SCANTHEBLOCK

Scan the Block · for buying a home

Know the block before it becomes your block.

You are about to make the largest purchase of your life on a street you have walked maybe six times. The city already holds a decade of records on that street — what was filed, cited, permitted and reported around this building — and this report reads all of it in a few seconds, compared with the city so you can tell a number from a normal.

The questions it answers

The sections that earn their keep

What will come upOpen permits, retrofit obligations, disclosure triggers — the items that surface in escrow, surfaced before you are in it.
Violations, from two agenciesThe Department of Buildings cites the structure and Housing Preservation and Development cites the conditions inside a rental, graded A through C and I for heat or hot water. Kept apart, because a building can be clean on one and heavy on the other.
The building's permitsWhat was legally built, what is still open, and the paperwork you would inherit at close.
Crime, by yearCounted within your radius and set against an average area the same size, so a busy corridor reads as what it is.
How much of the lot is builtThe floor area ratio actually built against the ratio the zoning allows. New York records transfers in a separate system that is not open data, so no sale price appears here at all.
What is licensed to make noiseThe places nearby holding a live entertainment permit, and the class the city licensed each under. Six daytime walks past a building will not tell you what nine o'clock sounds like.
Work permitted in the street outsideWhat the city has already agreed can be dug up around the address, and until when — the thing buyers find out the week after they move in.

Written for you

How to read a New York reportFour agencies keep the record here and none of them keys it the same way. Which number comes from where, and why two of them are not supposed to agree.Why the borough is not optional350 Broadway is a real address in more than one borough, and they are different buildings. This is the one thing a New York lookup cannot guess.Assessed is not market, and here the gap is the pointNew York assesses most property at a fraction of what it would fetch and limits how fast that figure may climb. A $577m assessment is not an estimate of the price.Built against allowed: the floor area ratioThe single most useful number on a New York lot, and one no other city in this product publishes. The Empire State Building is at 308% of what its own zoning now allows.

See it on a real address

Run any New York City address and the report reads that city's portal live, at the moment you ask. Plans start at $49 a month, billed monthly or annually, and re-reading a report you have run is always free.

See the plans Try an address

Also written for: renting · owner or landlord · agent or broker · investor · developer or builder · lender or underwriter · insurance · hoa or property management · attorney or other professional · contractor or trade