My Mystery Landlord
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
WNYC
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- For some renters, finding out who their landlord is can be a complete mystery.(GlebStock/Shutterstock)
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Do you know who owns your apartment building? Perhaps you know where to send the rent check, but what if something goes wrong? Who do you call? It's a question even city officials can have trouble answering.
The city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development does require owners to register their properties, but a study from the Moelis Institute for Affordable Housing Policy at the NYU Furman Center found that only 23 percent of all properties that are required to register have done so. The registration data provided by HPD also shows that most non-compliance comes from smaller buildings.
Mystery landlords are problematic for renters who can't get anyone to respond to their requests for repairs. In some cases, tenants aren't even sure where to send the rent.
"It's a shell game," said Letitia James, the Public Advocate for the city of New York.
James wants to strengthen the city's regulations and require landlords to link all their properties together.
"Knowing what other buildings that same owner owns could help the city target those buildings to see if they also have records of housing code violations," said Max Weselcouch, director of the Moelis Institute at the NYU.
She added that the city could also use a similar model to identify properties in financial distress.
As this information is not readily available, numerous private businesses are cropping up to aggregate building and owner data for the real estate industry. These new companies can more easily identify properties with their owners, and in some cases, spot potential problems.
"The number of over-leveraged buildings has been increasing steadily since the crash of 2008, with the greatest percentage rise between 2012-13," said Jonathan Ingber with Actovia Commercial Mortgage Intelligence, a real estate analytics firm.
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JANET BABIN, Economic Development Reporter, WNYC News
Janet Babin is a reporter at WNYC covering economic development.
