Every January the Public Advocate publishes the Worst Landlord Watchlist, New Yorkers click through looking for their own building, and the story ends there. The list is useful. It is also one ranking, built one way, from one agency's records — and it leaves out portfolios that are, by the plain count of open violations, among the worst in the city.
So we ran the ranking ourselves. Every portfolio we track, sorted by the violations that are open right now, not the ones that were opened and closed years ago. Then we checked which of them the city named.
- A&E Real Estate Holdings240 buildings22,345
- Stellar Management465 buildings12,384
- Camber Property Group62 buildings9,707
- Summit Properties USA79 buildings7,805
- M&T Real Estate359 buildings7,300
- Progressive Management of NY164 buildings6,472
- DeMatteis Organization3 buildings6,303
- Moshe Piller109 buildings5,436
- Residential Management (NY)89 buildings5,414
- Alma Realty152 buildings4,761
The largest portfolios, and who the city named
A&E Real Estate Holdings sits at the top by a distance no other portfolio comes close to: 22,320 open violations across 240 buildings, about 93 per building. The city named them. It also named Stellar Management (12,384 open across 465 buildings) and Camber Property Group, whose 62 buildings carry 9,708 — roughly 157 open violations per building, the densest concentration on this list.
Then the two rankings part ways. Summit Properties USA holds 7,808 open violations across 79 buildings. M&T Real Estate holds 7,300 across 359. Progressive Management of NY holds 6,483 across 164. Moshe Piller holds 5,436 across 109. None of the four appear on the 2026 watchlist.
Why a portfolio that size can be missed
The watchlist is HPD-driven and weighted toward buildings where violations are both numerous and recent relative to size. That is a defensible way to rank. It also means a landlord can hold thousands of open violations spread thin across a very large portfolio — twenty per building rather than a hundred and fifty — and never surface near the top of it.
Counted our way, at least 44 portfolios of five buildings or more are carrying 500 or more open violations without appearing on the watchlist at all. Neither number is wrong. They answer different questions: the city's asks which landlords are worst per building, ours asks which landlords are sitting on the most unfixed work.
The LLC problem underneath both lists
Neither ranking works if you can't tell which buildings belong to whom. Most large landlords hold each property in its own LLC, so the name on your lease is a shell with one address behind it. New York's 2024 LLC transparency law helped; it did not finish the job.
That's the part we spend most of our time on. Every portfolio in the chart above is a link — the buildings, the open violations, the grades, and the entities filed against them are all on one page. Your landlord isn't "742 Nostrand Ave LLC." It's whoever appears on eighty other buildings across the Bronx and Brooklyn.
What to do with this
Look up your own building before you sign or renew, and read the owner's other buildings, not just yours. A landlord with one quiet building and ninety loud ones is a landlord with a pattern, and the pattern is the thing that predicts what happens after you move in.
