Made something to check NYC apartments issues before signing a lease, would love feedback

So I've been apartment hunting in NYC (again) and got burned a few years ago in a place that had a bedbug problem the landlord conveniently didn't mention. After that I started manually looking up buildings on NYC Open Data before tours, checking HPD complaints, violations, eviction records, that kind of thing.

It's a pain to do by hand so I threw together a tool that pulls it all into one place. You put in an address and it shows you building owners, bedbugs, 311 complaints, housing violations, evictions, and crime nearby. I called it ApartmentIssues.

https://apartmentissues.com

One thing I noticed when comparing to other tools out there: some of them lump in stuff like bike lane complaints or park issues into their building counts because those complaints happen to be in the same area. That inflates the numbers and makes buildings look worse than they actually are. I tried to filter down to only the stuff that's actually relevant to the building itself, so the data should be more accurate.

I've been using it myself for a while and figured I'd share here in case anyone else finds it useful. It's free, I'm not collecting data or anything, just pulling from NYC's public datasets.

Curious if this is actually helpful or if I'm the only weirdo who looks this stuff up before signing. Also open to hearing what else would be useful to add. Let me know if you try it and something seems off or broken.

Posted Dec 5, 2025, 3:17 PM UTC

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