What is HPD registration?

HPD registration is the annual filing most New York City residential property owners must make with the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. It is the record that forces a building to name people — a head officer and a managing agent, by name — rather than just the company on the deed. For anyone trying to find out who is actually responsible for a building, it is the single most useful record the city keeps.

Who has to register

• All residential properties with three or more units, including hotels, condominiums and cooperatives.
• One- and two-family dwellings where neither the owner nor a family member occupies the building.

Registration is annual, and must also be re-filed whenever ownership changes or whenever anything on a valid registration changes — a new managing agent, a new site manager, a new address. The city's public file currently holds about 203,000 registrations.

The 1 September deadline

Registrations run on an annual cycle ending 1 September, and the date is visible in the data itself. Here is a real registration record from the city's file:

Note the pair at the bottom. The owner filed in March; the registration expires on 1 September regardless. Every registration in the file ends on a 1 September, which is why the deadline is the same date for the whole city rather than an anniversary of each filing. The fee is $13, billed by the Department of Finance on the property tax statement rather than paid to HPD directly.

What the filing contains

Registrations are stored with a separate contacts file, one row per person or company named. Across the city those roles break down like this:

The head officer is typically an owner or principal behind the owning entity. The agent is the managing agent, who must be a real person and must be reachable in New York City. The corporate owner row is where the LLC sits. Reading them together is how you get from a company name on a deed to a person who answers for the building — the method is set out in how to look up your NYC landlord, and the portfolio version of it in tracing landlord LLCs.

Why the law insists on a human

Because the city, tenants and process servers need somebody they can actually reach and legally serve. A limited liability company cannot open a door at two in the morning when the boiler fails. That is the whole reason the registration requirement exists in the form it does, and it is why the registration is more useful for this purpose than the deed.

A missing registration is itself a violation

Failing to register is not a technicality. HPD issues violations for it, and they are graded Class I — a class that sits alongside A, B and C in the same column but is not a hazard grade at all. About 806,000 Class I violations are on file. An owner who has not registered also cannot legally sue a tenant for unpaid rent in some circumstances, and cannot certify the correction of other violations. So an unregistered building is often a building with several other things going on. The classes are explained at HPD violation classes.

Where to see it

Registrations are public and searchable by address on HPD Online. Check a Building reads the registration and its contacts alongside the deed, so you can see the owner of record and the named head officer and managing agent in the same place. It is property research and tenant education, not tenant screening.

Sources: NYC HPD — Register Your Property; NYC Open Data — Multiple Dwelling Registrations (tesw-yqqr) and Registration Contacts (feu5-w2e2). Counts and the sample record are live values on the date queried. General information about public records, not legal advice.