Check a Building is a free lookup for New York City's public building records. Type an address and it pulls together what a dozen city and state agencies already publish about that building — violations, permits, ownership, inspections, filings — into one page, so you do not have to visit a dozen websites and know what a BBL is before you start.
What this is for
The records are public and always have been. They are also scattered across the Department of Buildings, Housing Preservation and Development, the Department of Finance, City Planning, the Environmental Control Board and several state registries, each with its own search box, its own idea of what identifies a building, and its own vocabulary. Finding out whether your landlord has open violations is not a question of access. It is a question of knowing where to look, ten times over.
So the point of this site is not new information. It is the same information, assembled.
Who it is for
Tenants checking a building before they sign, or working out who is responsible for a repair. Buyers and their agents reading a property's record. Anyone who has been handed a company name on a lease and wants to know what else that company owns. The tenant guides are written for the first of those and are free to read without an account.
What it is not
This is not a tenant-screening service and not a consumer reporting agency. It reports facts about buildings and about the companies recorded against them. Nothing here may be used to decide whether to rent to, hire, insure, lend to, or otherwise evaluate an individual person — it is not assembled or maintained for those purposes, it has not been prepared to the standards those decisions require, and it must not be used for them.
That is not a disclaimer bolted on at the end. It shapes what the site will and will not do: it publishes pages about buildings, neighborhoods, companies recorded as owners of record, and licensed contractors. It does not publish pages about people, and it does not rank landlords or contractors against one another.
Free, and what that means
The building lookup is free to use. The records behind it are public records, published by the city at no charge, and a paywall in front of public information is a toll booth on a road somebody else built. Accounts exist so the site can remember the buildings you care about, not to unlock the facts.
What we are honest about
Every figure on this site comes from someone else's dataset, on that dataset's own schedule, with that dataset's own gaps. A building's page says where each number came from and when the page was built. Where a match is uncertain — a company recorded under two spellings, a lot that has been merged, a permit whose licence number is shared by two trades — the page says so rather than presenting a guess as a fact.
Data sources lists every publisher this site reads. Methodology explains how records are matched to a building and where that matching is known to be imperfect. If something here is wrong about a building you know, there is a correction link on every page in the app, and it is read.