Why We Built CondosCoopsNYC

We bought a condominium in New York City. We did what you are supposed to do. We hired a real estate attorney. We reviewed the offering plan. We checked the common charges. We looked at the financials. And then we moved in — and discovered that everything we had been told, everything we had been shown, and everything we thought we understood about how our building worked was incomplete, misleading, or wrong.

The moment it clicked.

The managing agent was the first clue. We asked a simple question: who is this company, how long have they been managing our building, and what is their track record? We could not find the answer in any public database. Not on HPD. Not on the Department of State website. Not in any city or state registry. The firm managing our building — controlling our common charges, hiring our staff, selecting our vendors, maintaining our home — was invisible to every public oversight system in New York.

That seemed wrong. So we checked. In New York State, the Department of State licenses 73 different professions. Barbers. Cosmetologists. Appearance enhancement practitioners. Hearing aid dealers. Notaries public. Each of these professions requires a state examination, continuing education, and a public disciplinary record. If your barber is incompetent, there is a complaint form and an administrative hearing. If your managing agent is incompetent — or worse — there is nothing. No license. No exam. No bond. No complaint registry. No disciplinary body.

We started pulling the thread.

Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. We started researching every regulatory gap, every governance defect, every financial abuse pattern in NYC condo and co-op management. We found over 100 of them. Over a hundred documented failures in the system that is supposed to protect homeowners — and not one of them has a functioning enforcement mechanism outside of civil court.

No minimum reserve fund requirement — so boards keep charges low to make the building marketable, then hit owners with $50,000 special assessments when the boiler fails. No competitive bidding for building contracts — so the managing agent steers every contract to preferred vendors and collects undisclosed referral fees. No financial disclosure to buyers — so you commit to an $800,000 purchase with less information than you would get buying a used car. No independent audit requirement — so nobody checks whether your common charges are being spent as budgeted.

We found that the managing agent industry operates without any state licensure. We found that Local Law 11 facade repairs have no cost-reasonableness review. We found that boards can impose unlimited special assessments without a unit owner vote. We found that the Attorney General's Real Estate Finance Bureau — the closest thing New York has to a condo regulator — has approximately five lawyers to handle 800+ complaints per year.

We built what should already exist.

We started with a simple question: which buildings does each managing agent operate? There was no public database. So we built one. Using NYC Open Data, HPD registration records, and pattern analysis, we identified managing agent portfolios across more than 4,400 buildings. Total cost: $0. Every claim is reproducible from free public data.

Then we built the managing agent profiles — cross-referencing HPD violations, DOB complaints, LL11 filings, and litigation records by agent. For the first time, you can see how a managing agent performs not in one building, but across their entire portfolio. You can see patterns that no individual building can see alone.

Then we documented every regulatory gap — over 100 of them — with primary sources, comparison jurisdictions, and proposed fixes. We built neighborhood profiles so buyers can see building-level data before they commit. We built buyer's guides that tell you what to look for, what to ask, and what to run from.

The thesis.

New York is the largest city in the country. It has more condominiums and cooperatives than any other state. It should not have the weakest governance protections. The fact that it does is not an accident. It is the result of an industry — managing agents, board attorneys, engineers, insurance brokers — that benefits from the absence of oversight and has no incentive to demand reform.

We are not anti-condo. We are not anti-co-op. We are not anti-managing-agent. We are anti-opacity. We believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant, that data is more powerful than opinion, and that the people who fund these buildings — the unit owners — deserve to know how their money is spent, who is spending it, and whether anyone is watching.

Nobody else is building this. The state will not. The industry will not. The media covers individual scandals but not structural patterns. So we are building it ourselves — one dataset, one investigation, one regulatory gap at a time — until the weight of evidence makes reform unavoidable.

What you can do.

If you are a condo or co-op owner in New York City, start with your own building. Look it up. Check your managing agent's profile. Read the issues that affect your building. Share this site with your neighbors. Forward it to your city council member. File a complaint with the AG's REFB — even if nothing happens, the complaint creates a record, and records create patterns, and patterns create political pressure.

If you are buying a condo or co-op, use our buyer's guides before you sign. Ask the questions nobody tells you to ask. Check the data nobody shows you voluntarily. Make informed decisions with real information — because nobody else in this process is going to give it to you.

This site exists because we believe the system is fixable. Not easily. Not quickly. But fixable — if enough people see the data, understand the gaps, and demand better.