BlockLot

Tutorials · Getting started

What BlockLot is

One record per building, built from New York City's public record — what is in it and where it comes from.

BlockLot puts everything the public record says about a New York City building in one place. For every tax lot in the five boroughs it connects the deeds and mortgages, the tax roll, permits, violations and complaints, the businesses at the address and the company behind the owner, so that you read one page instead of searching a dozen city websites.

Who it is for

BlockLot is built for people who need to know a building before they act on it: brokers looking for owners to approach, investors sizing up a block, lenders and attorneys doing diligence, and anyone who wants to know who really owns the building next door.

The home page

The home page is a search box. Type an address, a ZIP code or a block and press Search — see Searching for everything the box understands.

Without an account you see the tax-lot facts the City publishes for a building: where it is, what kind of building it is, its size, units and floors, its zoning and its assessed value, with the building on a map. An account adds what BlockLot works out from the record — the owner behind an LLC and the other buildings the same people hold, sales and mortgages, contacts, a single timeline of everything that happened to the building, distress signals and comparable sales. Accounts and plans explains the difference.

Once you are signed in, the home page also lists the reports you opened recently, so the building you looked at last week is one click away.

Where the data comes from

Everything in BlockLot comes from public sources: the City's property records (ACRIS deeds and mortgages, the PLUTO tax-lot file, the Department of Finance's rolls and sales), the Buildings Department, Housing Preservation and Development, the State's business registry, federal datasets and open map data.

The Sources & licences page, linked at the foot of every page, lists every source we use: who publishes it, the licence it is published under, the date we last retrieved it, what we changed, and where in BlockLot it appears.

Sources & licences — every dataset, its publisher, its licence and the date we last read it.
Sources & licences — every dataset, its publisher, its licence and the date we last read it.
  1. Who publishes it
  2. When we last read it

Where to go next