How to Check Your NYC Building for Violations (Free)

Whether you are buying a building, managing one, or just want to know what is on your property's record, checking for NYC building violations is something every landlord should do regularly. The good news is that all of this information is publicly available and free. The city publishes violation data across several portals, and anyone can look up any building.

The not-so-good news is that the data is spread across multiple systems that do not talk to each other. Checking a single building thoroughly means visiting at least three or four different websites. Here is how to do it, site by site.

DOB Building Information System (BIS)

URL: a]810-bisweb.nyc.gov

The DOB BIS portal is your primary source for Department of Buildings violations, permits, complaints, and inspection records. To look up a building:

• Go to the BIS homepage
• Select the borough from the dropdown
• Enter the house number and street name (or use the block and lot number if you have it)
• Click search

The results page shows an overview of the building including its BIN (Building Identification Number), block and lot, number of floors, and building class. From here, you can navigate to several tabs:

Violations tab: Shows all DOB violations issued against the building, including the violation number, date, description, and current status (open, resolved, dismissed). Pay attention to the disposition -- "DEFAULT" means the owner missed the hearing and a full penalty was assessed.

Complaints tab: Shows all DOB complaints filed against the building. Complaints are investigations that may or may not result in violations. An open complaint means an inspection has been requested or is pending.

Permits tab: Shows active and expired work permits. This is useful for understanding what construction work has been authorized and whether any permits have expired with the work incomplete.

FISP tab (or Facade Filing): Shows the building's Local Law 11 facade inspection history, including the most recent filing status (Safe, SWARMP, or Unsafe) and the cycle year.

HPD Online

URL: hpdonline.nyc.gov

HPD Online is where you check residential habitability violations -- the ones triggered by tenant complaints about conditions like leaks, pests, no heat, and mold.

• Go to the HPD Online portal
• Enter the borough, house number, and street name
• Click search

The building profile shows:

Open violations: All currently open HPD violations, including the class (A, B, or C), the specific condition cited, the apartment affected, the date issued, and the correction deadline. This is the most important section. Open Class C violations indicate active, immediately hazardous conditions.

All violations: A complete history of every HPD violation issued against the building. This gives you a sense of the building's maintenance history. A building with 50 HPD violations in the past two years has significant habitability issues, even if some of those violations have been closed.

Complaints: Open and closed HPD complaints. A complaint is filed when a tenant calls 311. Not every complaint results in a violation (the inspector may not confirm the condition), but a high volume of complaints indicates tenant dissatisfaction.

Registration: The building's current HPD registration status, including the registered owner and managing agent. If this is blank or expired, the building is out of compliance with HPD registration requirements.

OATH/ECB Summons and Penalty Portal

URL: a]portal.oath.nyc.gov (search for "ECB violations")

This is where you check the financial side -- pending hearings, resolved hearings, penalties assessed, amounts paid, and outstanding balances. OATH handles hearings for summonses issued by DOB, FDNY, Department of Sanitation, and other agencies.

• Go to the OATH portal
• Search by respondent name, address, or violation number
• Review the results

The portal shows each summons with its current status: scheduled for hearing, heard and decided, defaulted, or paid. For each resolved summons, you can see the penalty amount and whether it has been paid.

What to look for: Default judgments (where the respondent did not appear) and unpaid balances. These indicate that the building owner may have deferred dealing with violations, and the outstanding amounts represent liens or potential liens against the property.

FDNY Inspections and Violations

FDNY violation data is accessible through the DOB BIS portal (some FDNY-related violations appear there) and through the city's NYC Open Data platform. FDNY does not have a dedicated public lookup portal as user-friendly as DOB BIS or HPD Online.

For a quick check, searching the building address on the DOB BIS system will show FDNY-related violations that were processed through ECB. For a more thorough search, you can use the NYC Open Data portal and search the FDNY Violations dataset directly.

NYC Open Data

URL: data.cityofnewyork.us

NYC Open Data is the city's public data platform. It contains datasets from every major agency, including DOB violations, HPD violations, ECB hearings, FDNY inspections, and much more. The data is updated regularly (typically daily or weekly depending on the dataset).

You can search and filter datasets directly on the website, or download them as CSV files for analysis. This is particularly useful if you manage multiple buildings and want to do a bulk lookup rather than checking each building one at a time.

Key datasets for landlords:

• DOB Violations (active and historical)
• HPD Violations (open and closed)
• ECB/OATH Violations and Hearings
• FDNY Violations
• DOB Complaints
• HPD Complaints

The raw data approach is powerful but requires some comfort with spreadsheets or data tools. For most landlords, the individual portals described above are more practical for day-to-day use.

The problem with checking multiple portals

If you have followed along, you have noticed the core issue: thoroughly checking one building requires visiting four or five different websites, each with its own search interface and data format. For a landlord with one building, this is manageable if tedious. For someone managing five, ten, or twenty buildings, it becomes a part-time job.

The data is also not always consistent across portals. A violation might show as "open" on one site and "resolved" on another depending on update timing. Address formats vary (is it "123 Main St" or "123 MAIN STREET"?), which means you occasionally get no results even when violations exist.

This fragmentation is exactly the problem we built the Pijexa compliance check tool to solve. Enter any NYC address and you get a single consolidated view of DOB, HPD, ECB, and FDNY violations in one place. No need to visit four different websites. No need to reconcile different data formats. One search, one result, all the information you need to assess a building's compliance status.

The tool is free to use for any NYC property address. You do not need a Pijexa account to run a check, though having one lets you save buildings to your dashboard and get notified when new violations are filed.

How often should you check?

For your own buildings: at least monthly. Violations can be filed at any time, and the sooner you know about one, the sooner you can respond. For Class C HPD violations in particular, the correction deadline is 24 hours, so even a weekly check might not be fast enough. Automated monitoring with alerts is ideal if you can set it up.

For buildings you are considering buying: always run a full check as part of your due diligence. The violation history tells you more about a building's true condition than any listing description ever will. A building with a clean record and a building with 30 open violations may look identical from the sidewalk, but the cost of ownership is dramatically different.

For tenants: checking your building's violation history is your right. If you suspect your landlord is not maintaining the building properly, the HPD and DOB records will either confirm or alleviate your concerns. You can also use this information when communicating with your landlord about needed repairs -- a reference to an open HPD violation carries more weight than a general complaint.

The data is out there. The only question is whether you take the time to look at it.