About ByTenants

A rental research site built for the person paying the rent, not for the people renting to them.

Before you sign a lease you get a twenty-minute viewing and whatever the listing chooses to say. The city already holds a great deal more: every violation an inspector has written up, every complaint a tenant has made, every permit and registration the owner has filed. It is public, and almost nobody reads it, because it is spread across a dozen datasets written for the agencies that keep them. ByTenants puts it on one page per building, in plain words.

Three parts

The public record of a buildingLive now

Housing violations, complaints, permits, bedbug filings, Housing Court cases, evictions and the registered owner and managing agent, from New York City’s own open data, updated every night. No login, nothing to sign up for. Browse the buildings we cover or search any address from the home page.

Reviews from tenantsComing

What the record cannot tell you: whether the heat actually works in January, how the super answers the phone, what happened to the last tenant’s deposit. Reviews will be anonymous on the page and moderated before they publish. Where a tenant lets us, we verify that they actually lived there, and each review is labelled with whether we did. Building scores will be calculated from verified reviews only. Verification proves someone lived in the building; it does not prove that everything they wrote is true, and we will never say it does.

A private record of your own tenancyComing

Move-in photos, key dates and an issue log, kept for you and visible to nobody else: the things that win a deposit dispute or back up a repair request. Useful the day you sign up, whether or not you ever write a review.

Where we are

New York City first, starting with Astoria and Ridgewood in Queens and Bushwick in Brooklyn, where we hold the full record for every rental building with six or more apartments. Any other address in the city gets a page too; its record loads overnight. Other cities come later, one at a time, starting where the city’s own data is good enough to be worth reading.

How we pay for it

Right now, nothing is for sale and reading is free. One rule is fixed for good: we never take money from a landlord, property manager, eviction service or tenant-screening company to change how a building looks on its own page: no paid placement, no paid responses, no paid removal.

Who is building it

ByTenants is built by Adi Ashkenazi, as a one-person project for now. If something on a page is wrong, or you run a tenant organisation and want to talk, write to hello@bytenants.com. A person reads every message.

How the record is put together, and what we leave out: methodology. What we collect about you: privacy.