Reading the record
Guides
The City publishes its property files for administrative reasons, not for buyers. These five pieces explain the conventions that make the record readable, using the same data the rest of the site is built from.
Guide 01
How to read a building's sale history
Every row on a building page is a document that was filed with the City. Knowing what each kind of document is for is the difference between reading a price and misreading one.
Guide 02
What a building class code means
C1, D4, RM. Two characters on the tax roll decide how a building is taxed, what kind of ownership it usually carries, and how its record behaves.
Guide 03
What ACRIS is, and what it is not
The Automated City Register Information System is the filing cabinet for New York City property documents. It is authoritative about what was filed and silent about almost everything else.
Guide 04
Co-op and condominium in the record
The two forms of ownership leave completely different traces in the City's files. If you do not know which you are looking at, the sale history of a building will not make sense.
Guide 05
What the assessed value does and does not tell you
Every building page prints an assessed land value and an assessed total value. Both are real figures with a narrow purpose, and neither is what the building is worth.
Follow the record
A note when the files are refreshed
A short note when the City's files are refreshed and this site is rebuilt: what changed in the record, what was found wrong here and fixed, and anything new in the guides. Occasional. It goes out when the data does, which is not on a schedule.