Protect yourself from shady landlords with these letter grades of NYC buildings

One quirky feature of New York at the moment is that the city has developed a clear, useful letter grading system for restaurants that you may spend an hour or two in, but not for the buildings that you could potentially be lease-shackled to for years. Bon Appétit! 

Thankfully, the site Rentlogic hopes to fill that informational void with a useful new piece of software that they launched earlier this week. The service provides letter grades for residential buildings in NYC based on eight years worth of open source data from government agencies. The data covers past issues that may have afflicted the property such as mold, legal actions against the landlord and rodents.

Interesting that we live in a place that has to develop multiple systems for reporting the abundance of rats in the near vicinity, isn’t it?

In order to access the data, download the browser extension here. The A-through-F letter grade of a building will then pop up in a box as you browse the real estate listings on more than 200 different rental sites.