A searchable database of NYC construction projects, powered by AI.

Open search across what's been built, the products specified, and the physical characteristics of every project — at the granular level you need, across the entire city. Connect AI to the construction and property data behind your daily decisions: find, compare, and amalgamate a dataset never before assembled.

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12
City Agency Sources Per Report
52
ECB Violations — One Property
$433K
LL11 Penalty Exposure Identified
6×
Approval Time Variance by Examiner

Latest Research — June 2026

NYC HVAC Market 2025: Permit Volume,
Contractor Concentration, and the Shift to Heat Pumps

225,004 tons of new mechanical capacity permitted in 2025. Heat pump penetration reached 66% of scope. Four contractors control 28% of commercial volume. Built from every DOB NOW mechanical filing across all five boroughs.

Total capacity — 2025
225K
tons of cooling and heating permitted across 5,241 buildings — all five boroughs
Heat pump share
66%
of permitted HVAC scope is now heat pump — up from under 20% three years ago
VRF growth — 3yr
8×
variable refrigerant flow systems have multiplied eightfold since 2022
Market concentration
28%
of commercial HVAC volume controlled by four contractors — the rest is highly fragmented
Read the full report

Latest Research

Market Intelligence · Jun 2026

NYC HVAC Market 2025: Permit Volume, Contractor Concentration, and the Shift to Heat Pumps

225,004 tons of new mechanical capacity permitted in 2025. Heat pump share now 66%. Four contractors control 28% of commercial volume. Built from every DOB NOW mechanical filing.

225K
tons — 2025
66%
heat pump share
8×
VRF growth, 3yr
Read the report →
Founder's Essay · Jun 2026

New York builds its housing open shop. Our policy still assumes it doesn't.

I spent twenty years as a union contractor measuring something almost no one else could — how much of this city the unions still actually build. The answer is smaller than nearly anyone believes.

"You're the only one who's been able to measure the thing I've felt all along."

— a labor attorney, after four decades in the field
Read the essay →
View all articles →

Raw data, delivered

Buy the underlying data. Own it outright.

One-time purchase or annual subscription. Clean, documented, delivery-ready. Every dataset is sourced exclusively from NYC government records and processed by BuildNYC's extraction pipeline.

Plan Examination
DOB Plan Examiner Objections
565,000+ objections with code sections, examiner IDs, resolution status, and round-trip counts. The only complete objection dataset available anywhere.
EXCLUSIVE
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Fire Safety
FDNY Building Profiles
Inspection histories, violation records, certificate of occupancy data, and fire protection system details for 1M+ NYC buildings.
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MEP Scope
HVAC Scope & Manufacturers
Equipment schedules, manufacturer specs, and unit counts extracted from permitted HVAC plans. Tied to BIN, block, and permit date.
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Geotechnical
NYC Geotechnical Database
112,000+ soil borings with bedrock depth, groundwater elevation, soil classifications, and kriging-interpolated predictions citywide.
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Compliance
Combined Building Violations
DOB, ECB, HPD, and OATH violations unified by BIN — normalized, deduplicated, and enriched with resolution status and penalty amounts.
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Permitting
DOB Filing Profiles
Full permit application histories across BIS and DOB NOW — job types, filing dates, approval times, contractor assignments, and scope narratives.
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View All 10 Datasets →
Custom schemas, NDA delivery, and enterprise licensing available.
Residential labor map — NYC buildings classified by workforce

A snapshot of completed residential buildings across New York City, classified by the workforce that built them—measured by scopes of work.

What BuildNYC finds before you close

One Chelsea building. Six material findings. Every one traceable to a government source.

View sample report: 109 West 24 Street →

01
The owner filed a false permit application
ECB violation 39124355R (Class-1, Sept 9, 2024): the owner checked "No" for occupied building and "No" for rent on PW1 application #102796306. DOB inspectors confirmed both were false. NYC Admin Code §28-211.1 prohibits false statements on permit applications. This finding does not appear in standard permit searches — it surfaces only on the ECB enforcement record.
02
An active permit sits on a 2.5-year hold
Filing M00758698 has been in OnHold-NoGoodCheck status since 2022 — still active as of June 2025. The permit above it was renewed in June 2025 and remains valid. The hold means the filing cannot be signed off, amended, or supplemented while it persists. The declared cost is $30,000. The apparent installed value of the mechanical scope is approximately $500,000.
03
$433,000 in LL11 façade penalties — two cycles unfiled
Cycles 8 and 9 of the LL11/FISP inspection program show no report filed. Auto-generated DOB penalties total $433,100 across both cycles. An April 2024 ECB Class-2 violation specifically cites the failure and is currently ACTIVE with a balance due. Cycles 6 and 7 were each initially UNSAFE before amendment to SWARMP.
04
Eight Class-1 ECB violations for working under Stop Work Orders
Four months. Four inspection dates. Eight Class-1 violations — June 3, July 8, August 5, September 5, and September 9, 2024 — each documenting work continuing under an active Stop Work Order. GC: KEDC Corp. Owner: OAC Adelphi LLC. The owner did not appear at subsequent OATH hearings; three defaults were issued in November 2025, now enforceable judgments.
View sample report → Request a report

Contractor due diligence

Know who you're hiring before you sign the contract.

Every contractor working in NYC has a complete DOB record — every permitted job they've filed, every building they've touched, every trade they've worked in, across every borough, going back decades. That record is the most reliable proxy for capability that exists.

BuildNYC assembles it in one place. Search any firm and see exactly what they've built, where they've worked, which owners keep hiring them back, and what's on their plate right now.

Request a contractor report →
Project track record
What have they actually built, and at what scale?
See every permitted job filed under a contractor's license — project type, declared cost, building class, and borough. Know whether they've actually completed work at the scale and complexity you're hiring them for, or whether your project would be their largest job by a factor of ten.
Owner relationships
Who keeps hiring them back — and who doesn't?
Repeat relationships between contractors and building owners are the strongest signal in the public record. BuildNYC maps every owner-GC pair across all their shared jobs — showing you which owners trust a contractor enough to use them on multiple buildings, and which relationships ended after one project.
Current workload
How much are they carrying right now?
An active permit is a commitment. BuildNYC shows every live permitted job under a contractor's license — the buildings they're currently obligated to, the declared scope, and when each permit was issued. Know whether the firm you're about to hire has the capacity to take on your project.

Why unified data changes everything

The whole is greater than any single part.

Every firm in NYC construction operates from its own information. The developer knows their contractors. The broker knows the ownership. The attorney knows the filing history. The engineer knows what's underground. Each document, each system, each relationship — held separately, by separate parties, serving separate interests.

Individually, each piece is useful. Unified, they reveal something none of them could show alone — the complete record of a building, an owner, a contractor, or a market.

One platform. Every system. The full picture.

What unified data reveals

20%
of NYC contractors account for 80% of all stop-work orders citywide.
Contractor Risk
3×
more ECB violations accumulate at buildings that miss a single OATH hearing.
ECB Enforcement
1 in 4
Lower Manhattan excavations encounter unexpected subsurface conditions.
Geotechnical Intelligence
<15%
of LL97-covered NYC buildings are on track for 2030 carbon compliance.
LL97 Compliance
1,200+
distinct legal entities used by NYC's 50 largest residential portfolios.
Ownership Intelligence
6×
variance in permit approval time across boroughs, work types, and examiners.
Permit Review Intelligence
85%
objection rate from the slowest Manhattan examiner — vs. 10% from the fastest. The difference is 75 days on your filing timeline.
Plan Exam Review
38%
of all plan examiner objections cite the Zoning Resolution — and take 2× longer to clear than Building Code objections.
Zoning Intelligence

Built for every decision-maker in NYC real estate

Developer & Investor
Understand the full history of a site, sponsor, and contractor network before you commit capital.
General Contractor
See which GCs have the incumbent relationship before you bid — and what they've built together.
Broker & Acquisitions
Trace beneficial ownership through LLC chains to the person who actually controls the asset.
Attorney & Expediter
Pull every filing, violation, and entity connection across an owner's full network in one query.
Architect & Engineer
Know which firms an owner consistently retains — and model objection patterns before you file.
Subcontractor & Supplier
Identify active permitted work in your trade and the relationship network behind each job.
Insights

The NYC Construction Market Generates More Intelligence Than Any One Team Can See

How manufacturers, contractors, lenders, and labor organizations are using cross-project, cross-borough market intelligence to answer questions they couldn't before.

Read the article →

Frequently Asked Questions

BuildNYC indexes DOB NOW job applications, permit issuances, stop-work orders, examiner objections, and the legacy BIS permit system — over 2 million filings across all five boroughs. Data refreshes daily from NYC Department of Buildings feeds.
BuildNYC's Ownership & Entity Graph traces beneficial ownership across ACRIS deed transfers, HPD registrations, and LLC filings. You can identify the individual or entity that controls a building even when it is held through multiple shell companies or related LLCs.
Local Law 97 (LL97) sets carbon emissions limits for NYC buildings over 25,000 square feet, with penalty thresholds in 2024 and 2030. BuildNYC calculates per-building penalty exposure by comparing benchmarked emissions against the applicable carbon limit, generating an annual penalty estimate for each covered property in the five boroughs.
Yes. BuildNYC's Shield module scores every contractor across DOB NOW and BIS permit history, computing a Permit Abandonment Rate (PAR) from 29,000+ entities. See active jobs, stop-work order history, violation rates, and network risk derived from co-occurrence with other high-risk entities. Add any building to your portfolio and get alerted the moment a high-risk contractor files.
BuildNYC uses a kriging interpolation model trained on 112,000+ soil borings and geotechnical investigation reports to predict subsurface conditions at any NYC coordinate. Outputs include bedrock depth, groundwater elevation, fill extent, and P10/P90 uncertainty bounds — before you commission your own geotechnical investigation.
BuildNYC serves anyone making decisions about NYC construction, development, or real estate — developers, brokers, general contractors, architects, subcontractors, structural and MEP engineers, material suppliers, attorneys, expediters, and PE firms. Any role where understanding who has worked with whom, what has been built, and what the data says about a building, owner, or contractor leads to a more informed decision.
Two ways to access BuildNYC data.

Subscribe to the platform. Or buy the data outright.

Platform Subscription
Full Intelligence Platform
Plan examiner profiles, objection search, examiner prediction, graph explorer, geotech, labor intelligence — everything, live and searchable.
Explore the modules →
Data Purchase
Custom Dataset Export
Buy specific datasets outright — plan examiner objections, FDNY profiles, geotechnical borings, violations, HVAC scope, and more. One-time or annual.
Browse Datasets →
Platform: cancel anytime. Datasets: immediate delivery after purchase.