New York City's tax roll carries 767,871 residential lots holding 3,753,223 homes. Sort them by the legal form of the name on the roll and the two counts tell opposite stories: companies own a minority of the buildings and a majority of the homes.
LLCs hold 93,167 lots — 12.1% — and 1,100,319 homes, 29.3%. Add every other company form and it is 23.6% of the buildings and 54.2% of the homes. The gap between those pairs is the whole finding: company ownership is concentrated in the buildings that hold the most people.
The whole tax roll, by owner form
| Owner form | Lots | Share of lots | Homes | Share of homes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LLC | 93,167 | 12.1% | 1,100,319 | 29.3% |
| Other company form | 88,000 | 11.5% | 935,341 | 24.9% |
| No company form in the name | 584,704 | 76.1% | 1,507,027 | 40.2% |
| Government | 813 | 0.1% | 183,264 | 4.9% |
| HDFC | 962 | 0.1% | 27,007 | 0.7% |
| No owner recorded | 225 | 0.0% | 265 | 0.0% |
Three-quarters of New York's residential buildings carry no company form in the owner name at all. They are also small: those 584,704 lots average 2.6 homes each, against 11.8 for the LLC-held ones.
The government line is the same effect at its extreme. 813 lots — one in a thousand — hold 183,264 homes, because a NYCHA campus is one tax lot with two thousand apartments on it.
Where the concentration actually is
Split the roll by building size and the pattern is not subtle.
| Building size | Lots | LLC-held lots | LLC share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 home | 322,313 | 11,756 | 3.6% |
| 2 homes | 272,663 | 25,563 | 9.4% |
| 3 to 9 homes | 131,399 | 36,702 | 27.9% |
| 10 to 49 homes | 29,593 | 14,750 | 49.8% |
| 50 or more homes | 11,903 | 4,396 | 36.9% |
LLC ownership climbs from one small house in twenty-eight to half of all buildings in the ten-to-forty-nine-home range — the walk-ups and small apartment houses that are the city's rental stock.
Then it falls back at the top, and the reason is worth stating because it is the commonest misreading of this data. The largest buildings are disproportionately co-ops and condominiums, and a co-op's owner of record on the tax roll is the cooperative corporation — "Something Owners Corp". That lands in the other-company-form row, not the LLC row, and it is not an investor at all. It is the residents. Company form is not a proxy for landlord.
By borough
| Borough | Lots | LLC lots | LLC share of lots | LLC share of homes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Manhattan | 32,521 | 12,898 | 39.7% | 33.6% |
| Brooklyn | 249,735 | 40,794 | 16.3% | 33.1% |
| The Bronx | 75,791 | 11,000 | 14.5% | 31.1% |
| Queens | 297,629 | 23,628 | 7.9% | 22.9% |
| Staten Island | 112,195 | 4,847 | 4.3% | 8.0% |
Manhattan is the outlier on buildings — two in five of its residential lots are LLC-held, against one in twenty-three on Staten Island — and that is mostly a statement about what kind of building each borough is made of. Manhattan has 32,521 residential lots holding 963,302 homes; Staten Island has three and a half times as many lots holding a fifth as many homes.
On homes rather than buildings the boroughs converge sharply: Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx all sit within three points of each other, around a third. Whatever drives an owner into an LLC applies to apartment buildings wherever they are.
By the decade the building went up
This is the closest this data comes to a trend, and it needs its limit stated first: PLUTO records the current owner, not the owner at construction. So this is not a history of transactions. It is a photograph of who holds each vintage of building today.
| Built | Lots | LLC share of lots | LLC share of homes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Before 1930 | 306,567 | 15.6% | 33.9% |
| 1930–1969 | 317,461 | 9.0% | 22.1% |
| 1970–1999 | 81,741 | 5.0% | 15.2% |
| 2000–2009 | 40,553 | 12.6% | 24.0% |
| 2010 or later | 20,819 | 36.5% | 59.3% |
Read with that caveat in place, the last row is still striking. Of the homes in buildings put up in New York since 2010, 59.3% are in buildings whose owner of record is an LLC — nearly six in ten. For buildings from 1970 to 1999 the figure is 15.2%.
Some of that is age: a building from 1965 has had sixty years to pass into a family, an estate or a co-op conversion, and a building from 2019 has had five. But the LLC is also simply the form new development uses now, and the roll shows it.
What an LLC on the deed does and does not mean
It does not mean anything is hidden. Holding property in a limited liability company is ordinary, legal and usually about liability and financing rather than secrecy. Plenty of LLCs are one family with one building.
What it does mean is that the name on the tax roll stops being a person. For a tenant that is a practical problem: it is hard to write to a company, and harder to know whether the company owning your building owns nine others. That is why HPD registration exists — a building with three or more units must file a head officer and a managing agent with names attached — and why looking up your landlord means reading the deed and the registration together rather than either alone. The method for going further is in tracing NYC landlord LLCs.
Note what the 29.3% figure therefore is not. It is not a measure of anonymous ownership, because an LLC that has filed an HPD registration is not anonymous. It is a measure of how much of the city's housing sits behind a corporate name on the deed.
How this was computed
Every residential lot in PLUTO — unitsres > 0 — counted in full with aggregate queries rather than sampled, and classified from ownername, the owner of record on the Department of Finance tax roll.
The classifier applies six mutually exclusive tests in order, so each lot lands in exactly one bucket: government body; then HDFC; then any LLC form; then any other company marker (Inc, Corp, Ltd, Company, Associates, Partners, LP, LLP, Realty, Holdings, Properties, Management, Trust, Enterprises, Group, Ventures, Church, Housing Development); then names with no company marker; then lots with no owner recorded. The six buckets sum to 767,871 lots and 3,753,223 homes exactly, which is the check that the ordering lost nothing and double-counted nothing.
Three limits, each measured rather than assumed:
- "No company form in the name" is not the same as "an individual". It is what is left when no marker matched. It is predominantly individual owners, and it will also hold any company whose name carries none of the words above. It is not called "individuals" anywhere on this page for that reason.
- Name truncation was checked and is negligible. A truncated owner name could lose a trailing "LLC" and be misfiled. Of 767,871 lots, 1,518 carry an owner name at the maximum observed length of 40 characters, and 63 of those are already classified as LLCs — so the possible misclassification is under 0.2% of lots and cannot move any figure above.
- A company form is not a landlord. Cooperative corporations, condominium boards, religious institutions and non-profits all carry company markers and all appear in the other-company row.
Era figures exclude the 1,088 residential lots the tax roll does not date. PLUTO is republished a few times a year, so this is a snapshot of the file as it stood on 8 August 2026 and not a live count.
These are counts of lots and homes by category. No owner is named, counted individually, or ranked anywhere in this analysis, and none of these figures is about any identifiable person or company.