Support
Questions
The short answers. If yours is not here, write to us. A person reads every email.
From New York City’s own open data: housing violations and complaints from HPD, 311 complaints about the building, permits from the Department of Buildings, bedbug filings, HPD’s Housing Court cases, marshal evictions (counts only), and the owner and managing agent registered with HPD. We do not add to it or edit it. The methodology page lists every dataset and what we do with it.
We refresh it every night from the city’s datasets. The city itself can take days or weeks to publish a record, so a problem reported yesterday may not appear yet.
We cover Astoria and Ridgewood in Queens and Bushwick in Brooklyn first, and are adding neighbourhoods one at a time. See what we cover. If you searched for an address outside New York, you can leave an email to hear when your city opens. We use it once, for that.
Not yet. Tenant reviews are the next part we are building. When they open, anyone with an account will be able to write one, and you will be able to confirm you lived there with your own move-in or move-out photos, never a required document. Confirming decides how a review is labelled and whether it counts toward a score; it never decides whether it is published.
Yes. Your name is never shown next to a review, and we never tell a landlord who wrote one.
No. When reviews open, verified will mean we confirmed the writer lived in the building. It says nothing about whether what they wrote is accurate, and we will never claim otherwise.
Reading is free, with no login. About says how we plan to pay for it.
No. We never take money from a landlord, managing agent or anyone else on the other side of a tenant: not for placement, not for prominence, not for removal.
If we have shown the city’s record wrongly (wrong building, wrong date, a mistake in how we read it), write to disputes@bytenants.com and we will fix it. If the city’s own record is wrong, the correction has to happen at the agency that keeps it; once they change it, our page follows the next night.
No. We do not list apartments, show them, or take fees from anyone renting one. See our fair housing statement.