NYT: Learning Everything About an Apartment

New York Times
November 6, 2005

Learning Everything About an Apartment

By WILLIAM NEUMAN

You want to know about schools, about the neighbors, about problems
like noise, about the future of the block, and what's likely to be
built there. Most people are not aware of it, but you can get answers
to these questions - and the easiest and fastest way to do it, not
surprisingly, is online.

GETTING STARTED

A good place to start is a Web site called Oasis, short for Open
Accessible Space Information System, which was developed by a coalition
of public agencies and private companies and institutions to catalog
the city's open spaces. (All Web addresses are contained in a list with
the continuation of this article.)

But it has also turned out to be a great source of information about
the built environment in New York City. Type an address into Oasis and
it will show you a detailed map of the surrounding blocks that you can
customize to reveal a variety of helpful information, including
property ownership, parks and other features. It will tell you the
police precinct and in the case of houses and co-op buildings it will
also give the block and lot numbers for the address, which can be
useful in looking up other information.

The site also tells you the zoning designation, which affects other
possible development in the area. It will give the dimensions of the
property and tell you the size and square footage of the building. You
can also click on nearby properties to find out ownership and other
information about them. And there are convenient links to the Web sites
of several New York City agencies, including the Department of
Planning, the Department of Finance and the Department of Buildings.

Oasis even can show you an aerial photograph of any area in the city.

Another good starting point is the New York City Map Portal, which can
be reached through the city's Web site. Here too, you can plug in an
address to retrieve a map of the area, with links to the Web sites of
various agencies that can tell you a building's block and lot number,
the police precinct, the school zone and Buildings Department
information. This site offers access to a raft of valuable information,
including precinct-level crime data from the Police Department, census
data and information on hospitals, schools and things like drug
rehabilitation clinics.

It also lets you find out what your future neighbors complain about
most often. The portal has a neighborhood statistics section that uses
information culled from the city's 311 line to create a kind of
kvetch-o-meter. It ranks each community district in terms of complaints
received about common annoyances like rodents, noise or disorderly
youths. Unfortunately, while it is often intriguing, the information is
a bit too broad to be really useful. Because it is organized by
community district, a fairly large area, it is impossible to know where
the complaints are concentrated.

Another helpful departure point for your data search is a privately
operated Web site called PropertyShark, a sort of one-stop-shopping
site that culls information from a number of city sites. It can be more
user-friendly than some of the city Web sites but in many cases it does
not give you direct access to scanned documents, like deeds, or
detailed summaries of filings, like construction plans, that are
provided by the city. It also cannot tell you the sale price of most
properties that changed hands before 2003. Beginners may want to start
searching at PropertyShark and then branch out from there. Once you
learn your way around the primary city-run sites, although they can be
frustrating to navigate at times, you are likely to appreciate the more
complete access to information they can give you. PropertyShark allows
you to make six free searches a day, but charges for more than that.
The city Web sites are free.

It can be fascinating and addictive - in an informative or voyeuristic
way - to see what you can discover online about your neighborhood and
your neighbors. But no matter how much you find out on your own, in
most cases you will need to hire an engineer to go over the home you
are thinking of buying to look for possible structural problems or
other defects. And you will want to have a real estate lawyer go over
the contract and, in the case of an apartment, evaluate the building's
finances and look over the minutes of the condo or co-op board.

WHO PAID WHAT?

Every time a condo, a house, a town house or a building is sold, a new
deed is filed with the city. The deed shows the name of the buyer and
seller and, since January 2003, how much was paid. Before that date,
deeds did not show the purchase price, although the price can be
calculated from the transfer tax paid on the transaction. (See "What
Was Paid?".)

All deeds filed since 1966 for all boroughs except Staten Island are
kept in an online format by the city's Finance Department on the
Automated City Register Information System, or Acris. By typing the
block and lot number of a property into Acris you can call up a scanned
copy of the deed. The block and lot numbers for houses and buildings
can be found through Oasis, the city's Map Portal or on Acris, using
its "Find addresses and parcels" button. In addition, Acris lets you
search for the lot number of individual condo units, but unfortunately
this function can be balky and does not always work. (In these cases,
the easiest place to get lot numbers for condo units may be
PropertyShark.)

You can also search on Acris for recent deed transfers within an entire
tax block, a good way to learn about sales of similar apartments or
houses in a neighborhood.

Co-op sales are not registered in the same way with the city. While the
buyer of a co-op pays a transfer tax, neither the amount of tax paid
nor the sale price is made public. Most real estate firms, however,
have access to a database of listings, and your real estate broker
should be able to provide information about other recent sales in the
building you are interested in, or for similar apartments in the
neighborhood.

For both co-ops and condos, though, it is possible to do quite a bit of
additional snooping on your future neighbors. Acris has a wealth of
information on both condo and co-op buildings, including mortgages,
bank and court filings, and liens for unpaid common charges. An online
reverse directory, a phone book that lets you search by address, like
the one at ReferenceUSA.com, can also provide a list of the names of
people in a building, or at least those with listed numbers.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD

You have found the apartment of your dreams and it is full of light,
with a view to die for. But will it stay that way, or is some monstrous
high-rise slated to go up across the street and block the view?

There are several sources for information about what is being built or
what could be built in the city.

Building permits are filed with the Buildings Department and made
available online through the department's Building Information System.
While it is not the easiest system to navigate, if something is under
construction, it will show up here. And any construction plans filed
with the city should indicate the height and the intended use of the
new structure. The system can also tell you if a property has landmark
status, what the zoning is, and if it has outstanding violations from
the Buildings Department or the Environmental Control Board.

The Buildings Department also has offices in each borough with
self-service computer terminals where the public can look up this
information.

But what about future development? The Oasis system can tell you the
zoning designation for a particular property and it can also show you a
picture of the zoning map for an area, although the maps can be
difficult to interpret. Once you know the zoning designation, you can
go to the Web site of the Department of City Planning to find out what
it means.

Zoning rules, however, can be complex, and the best way to understand
the zoning for a property or area may be to ask the experts. The
department operates a Zoning Information Desk on the third floor of its
headquarters at 22 Reade Street, in Lower Manhattan, which takes
questions in person or over the telephone at (212) 720-3291. In murky
cases you might want to consult an architect or a lawyer.

Zoning generally uses a floor area ratio, or FAR, to designate the
maximum size of a building. In rough terms, you can find the total
square footage that could be built on a lot by multiplying the FAR by
the area of the lot. For instance, a 3,000-square-foot lot with an FAR
of 10 could support a 30,000-square-foot building, although other
factors, including the design of a building and the way it is set back
from the street, can affect its height. Some zoning districts also set
height restrictions on buildings. It should be remembered, however,
that developers or property owners can seek exceptions to the zoning
that could allow for larger buildings.

The local community board can provide another good source of
information about development plans in a neighborhood. You can call the
community board or attend a meeting to ask about projects in the works.
The city's Web site gives a list of community boards, many of which
have Web sites of their own.

There are also several neighborhood preservation groups that follow
development issues closely. They include the Neighborhood Preservation
Center, the Historic Districts Council, the Greenwich Village Society
for Historic Preservation, the SoHo Alliance, Landmark West! and the
Brooklyn Heights Association. Weekly neighborhood newspapers or real
estate blogs, like curbed.com or brownstoner.com, are also good places
to learn about development plans.

Finally, if there is a lot that you suspect may entice a developer, it
is worth checking on Acris to see if it has been sold recently. In some
cases, you may find that a developer has bought one or more parcels
with an eye toward a future construction project.

SCHOOLS

At the New York Department of Education Web site, go to the "Our
Schools" page. At the center of the page is a school directory with a
form at the bottom where you can type in an address and find out what
school the property is zoned for. You can also use an "advanced search"
page to type in the name or number of a school to get a description of
the school, including a "school report card," which shows how students
scored on state English and math tests. Once there, you can click on
the "mapping system" to see the school's location and then customize
the map to show the street boundaries of the zone. (Some of these
functions, and a link to the Education Department Web site, are also
available through the city Map Portal.)

The independently run Internet site insideschools.org also has lots of
information about schools in New York City.

CRIME

The New York City Police Department's Web site, which can be reached
directly or through the "my neighborhood" button on the city Map
Portal, has a crime statistics section with figures for each precinct
updated every week.

The New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services can give you
information on the addresses of convicted sex offenders whom it
classifies as "high risk." The division's Web site provides access to
the New York State Sex Offender Registry and allows you to search by
name, county or ZIP code.

PROPERTY TAXES

You can check the property taxes due on a building or condo, determine
if any back taxes are owed and also verify whether an apartment
building has a tax abatement on the "property information" page of the
Finance Department Web site.