The 14,062-building NYC condo + co-op universe.

Every NYC condo and co-op building has a BBL (Borough-Block-Lot). Neither the city nor the state publishes a list of which BBLs correspond to condo or co-op buildings. The closest thing is the Department of Finance's PLUTO file, which classifies every tax lot in the five boroughs. We wrote two PLUTO queries that, together, identify the full universe. The result lives at /buildings-master/ as a sortable, filterable table.

The two queries.

Condos: lot ≥ 7500 AND bldgclass like 'R%'. In PLUTO, condominium umbrella BBLs are assigned lot numbers ≥ 7500, and condo unit BBLs get lot numbers in the 1001-7499 range. The umbrella BBL is what represents the building as a single entity for our purposes. Returns 10,882 buildings citywide.

Co-ops: bldgclass in ('D0','D1','D3','D4','D5','D6','D7','D8','D9','C8') AND owner contains 'CORP'. Cooperative buildings in NYC are owned by a corporation (the housing cooperative corporation itself) that holds the building's title and issues shares to residents. The D/C-class building classes plus the "CORP" owner-name pattern catches the bulk of the population. Returns 3,180 buildings.

Combined: 14,062 buildings. The PLUTO release we used is the May 2025 version (25v4 / 25v5 transition era).

What's in the public catalog.

The public master list at /buildings-master/ shows, for each of the 14,062 buildings: BBL, BIN, address, ZIP, borough, neighborhood (NTA), type (condo or co-op), unit count, year built, building class, owner of record. The table is searchable by address, ZIP, or BBL; filterable by borough, type, and scored-or-not; sortable by composite score, address, units, or year. Click any scored building's address to land on its building-detail page.

Of the 14,062 universe, we have currently audited and scored 2,538 (roughly 18%) with our forensic methodology. The composite score for each audited building is published on the public grades page as a letter grade (A through F) plus the underlying composite number. The remaining 11,524 are in the universe but not yet audited; we add buildings to the audit queue on request and prioritize the next batch based on user signals.

What's behind the paywall.

The public catalog covers the identity layer: what each building IS. The paywalled layer covers the operational and governance layer: what each building HAS. Per-building HPD violation history (total, open, Class C), DOB violations (total, active), Local Law 11 cycle status, DHCR rent-stabilized registration, eviction record, HPD litigation counts: all of that is part of the Level 2 Buyer Brief at $39. The deeper forensic layer (AG REFB amendments, sponsor LLC + ACRIS chain, reserve fund + capital project ledger, special-assessment history, TCB modeling, NYSCEF docket pulls, engineer-counsel patterns) is in the Level 3 Forensic Audit at $149.

This split is intentional. Identity data is already public via NYC PLUTO and ACRIS; we don't gate what the city already publishes for free. The paywalled layer represents work we do beyond aggregating public records: cross-referencing, joining, interpreting, and writing the narrative that makes the raw data meaningful. That work funds the operation.

The known gaps.

Four known gaps, in declining order of impact:

HDFC co-ops that don't own through a "CORP"-suffix entity. Housing Development Fund Corporation (HDFC) co-ops are a specific class of affordable cooperatives in NYC. The ones owned by entities that don't end in "CORP" are missed by our query. Closing this gap requires either NTA-based heuristics (HDFC co-ops cluster in specific neighborhoods) or a join against the HDFC certification list maintained by HPD. Rough estimate: 800-1,200 additional buildings not yet in the universe.

Mitchell-Lama co-ops structured as separate corporate entities. Mitchell-Lama is the state housing program that produced thousands of middle-income developments mid-century. Most are captured by our query, but some edge cases (housing companies with non-CORP suffixes) miss. We are catching the bulk but not 100%.

Brand-new condos with offering plans filed but no PLUTO record yet. PLUTO refreshes roughly quarterly. A new condo declaration at the AG REFB takes 6-12 weeks to propagate into PLUTO. Buildings in that gap window are missing from the universe.

Some condo unit BBLs appear as separate records (lot 1001-7499) for individual unit-level data. Our counts use umbrella BBLs only (which is what you want for "buildings"). When you sort the master list by "Largest first," some R-class records with very high unit counts may be the umbrella and others may be individual units misclassified. We've cleaned the dataset but acknowledge edge cases.

How to reproduce this.

Every step is reproducible from public data. PLUTO is at data.cityofnewyork.us/City-Government/PLUTO/64uk-42ks. The Socrata SODA API supports the queries above with no API key required. The full extracted universe (stripped to identity-layer fields, 21 MB JSON) is downloadable from our data page. The strip script that generates the public version from the full enrichment output is open at 08_Site/scripts/strip-master-for-public.mjs in the repository.

For the cross-reference recipes used to build the full per-BBL enrichment (HPD Violations on a 10.9M-row table, HPD Registration's composite key, LL11's BIN-only joining, etc.), see the methodology page at /methodology/ or our internal reference memo on master-table cross-ref recipes.

What we want next.

Three improvements on the universe roadmap. First: close the HDFC gap with an NTA-weighted heuristic. Second: add the offering-plan AG REFB cross-reference so new declarations propagate into our universe within days rather than quarters. Third: per-BBL building photo + Street View snapshot rendered into each building's report page (currently placeholder). Each of these makes the catalog tighter without expanding the paywalled layer.

Related: Master building list · A–F building grades · ZIP code map (39 layers) · Methodology.