How Buildings Are Rated
Every NYC building gets a rating — red, yellow, or green — based on city inspection records and housing filings from NYC agencies (HPD, DOB, and 311). Three weighted factors set the base score. A short list of penalties and hard caps can pull it down from there.
Nothing is estimated. If a factor can't be measured for a building, it's dropped and the others are re-weighted rather than filled in with a guess.
Violations
(40%)Open HPD violations, weighted by severity and normalized per unit — 10 violations across 100 units is a very different building from 10 across 5. Open DOB violations and active stop-work orders reduce this same subscore, as does a low resolution rate. Violations spread across many units count for more than the same number stacked in one apartment.
How NYC HPD classifies violations by severity:
- Class C — Immediately hazardous. Lead paint, no heat, gas leaks, broken smoke detectors. Landlord must fix within 24 hours. Weighted three times a Class A.
- Class B — Hazardous. Mold, leaks, broken windows, pest infestations. Landlord must fix within 30 days. Weighted one and a half times a Class A.
- Class A — Non-hazardous. Cracked paint, minor maintenance issues. Landlord must fix within 90 days. A high count of open Class A violations is a strong signal of general neglect.
Complaints
(30%)Tenant complaints about conditions inside the building over the last 12 months, measured per unit rather than as a raw count. Complaints about the street, sidewalk, parked cars, vendors, or the surrounding blocks are shown on every report but never affect the rating — a landlord isn't responsible for the block. A building with no complaints but a poor violation record doesn't get full credit here: silence next to open hazards usually means tenants stopped calling.
Responsiveness
(30%)How reliably and how quickly violations get resolved after they're filed — resolution rate, median days to fix, and how much of the last 24 months' filings are still open. When a building has too little history to measure this honestly, it isn't guessed at: the remaining two factors are re-weighted to carry the full rating instead.
What else pulls a score down
These aren't weighted factors — they're deductions taken off the base score when the record shows them.
- Unpaid ECB fines. Judgment debt owed to the city on this building. Scales with the balance, up to 20 points.
- Elevator and certificate problems. Open elevator violations, inspections more than a year overdue, and expired certificates of occupancy.
- 311 call density. Building-specific 311 volume relative to its size — not street or block calls.
- Alternative Enforcement Program. A 20-point deduction while the city has the building in the program it reserves for its most distressed buildings.
Hard ceilings
Some findings are serious enough that a good record elsewhere shouldn't outvote them. These set a maximum the score can't rise above.
- Full vacate order. An open order to vacate the entire building caps the score at 25, no matter how the rest of the file reads.
- Partial vacate order. An open order on part of the building caps the score at 77. A vacate order lifted within the last two years still costs 10 points.
- Structural distress. Heavy DOB violation counts, or immediately hazardous violations affecting a tenth of the units, cap the score at 50.
- Class C concentration. More than two immediately hazardous violations per unit floors the violation subscore outright.
Rating Scale
The weighted factors, penalties and ceilings above produce a single score from 0 to 100. These are the cutoffs that score falls into.
No major concerns on record. HPD/DOB records are quiet and complaints resolve quickly.
Mixed signals worth investigating — open violations, unresolved complaints, or a pattern of slow responsiveness. Not a dealbreaker, but ask questions.
Serious unresolved issues on record — hazardous violations, chronic complaints, or a landlord history that warrants real caution.
The score sets the starting tier, but a few findings override it directly. An active vacate order or a landlord on the city's watchlist within the last three years reads red. Any open violation, 12 or more complaints inside the building in a year, or heavy 311 volume pulls a green building to yellow — a quiet score doesn't get to outrank an open hazard.
A worked example
One real building, start to finish. 1818 Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, 120 residential units, as the records read on 16 September 2026. The numbers below move as the city publishes new records; the arithmetic doesn't.
Violations
91 / 100 · weighted 40%Three open violations, all three immediately hazardous. That's a serious class, but it's three across 120 units — 0.03 per unit — and there are no open Class B or Class A items sitting behind them. Severity costs the building points; the density is what keeps the subscore high.
Complaints
75 / 100 · weighted 30%16 complaints about conditions inside the building in the last 12 months — roughly one for every eight apartments. Tenants are calling, and they're calling about the building rather than the block.
Responsiveness
55 / 100 · weighted 30%36 violations filed in the last 24 months, three of them still open. Median time to certify a fix is 104 days. Most things do get closed out here — they get closed out slowly, and slow is what this factor measures.
(91 × 0.40) + (75 × 0.30) + (55 × 0.30) = 36.4 + 22.5 + 16.5 = 75
No penalties apply — no unpaid ECB judgment, no overdue elevator inspection, not in the Alternative Enforcement Program — and no ceiling is triggered, since there's no vacate order and the hazardous violations touch far fewer than a tenth of the units. The score stands at 75, inside the 62–77 band: take a closer look. Three open hazardous violations would hold this building at yellow even if the arithmetic had landed higher.
Read that as what it is. Three hazardous conditions are open right now, tenants are still calling, and fixes here take about three and a half months to certify. That's not a crisis-level record, and it isn't a clean one either — it's a building worth asking questions about before you sign.
What "open HPD violations" counts
Everywhere on Brix — building reports, landlord pages, your workspace, alert emails and the homepage total — "open HPD violations" means one thing: HPD violations of Class A, B or C that are not closed in city records and were issued on or after the date exactly 4 years before today (rolling; today that means on or after Oct 17, 2022). Class I orders, DOB violations and ECB/OATH violations are always separate, labelled counts and are never added in.
- Older open violations (issued before Oct 17, 2022 and never closed) are listed separately on each building report.
- Class I orders are listed separately too, not added in.
- DOB violations are always shown on their own as "open DOB violations" and never added to the HPD count.
- The score has its own inputs, described above; this count is a display figure, not the score formula.
Rule in effect from October 8, 2026.
Disputing a rating
Think a rating is built on incorrect data? Tell us — we'll trace it back to the source record and correct anything we got wrong. Every dispute we act on is written up in the public correction log, including the ones where the record stood.
Ratings are updated regularly as new violation and complaint data is published by NYC agencies. Ratings are estimates based on public records and should not be the sole basis for housing decisions.