How to read a report

We walk through one real building, section by section — including the three places this data most often misleads people.

1. Start with the shape of the building

The Overview tells you what you are actually looking at before you form any opinion about it. For this property:

Year built	1910
Residential units	38 (39 total, so one non-residential space)
Building area	55,026 sq ft
Lot area	11,825 sq ft

A 1910 building with 38 units is a rental walk-up, and that single fact frames everything after it. Old buildings accumulate violations the way old cars accumulate scratches. The question is never "are there any?" — it is "are they the kind that cost money?"

2. Violations: the count only means something per apartment

This property's open violation record:

Open violations	381
Residential units	38
Open per apartment	≈ 10
Outstanding penalty balance	$1,250

We show open violations only. A closed violation is a problem that was raised and then fixed — every old building has hundreds, and counting them tells you about the building's age, not its condition. So the lifetime total is deliberately absent from this site. It is noise dressed up as a number.

What is left is the figure that carries information: 381 violations are open right now. And even that is close to meaningless until you divide it by 38 apartments. That is about ten unresolved conditions per apartment — and that is a fact about the building.

Now look at the balance: only $1,250 outstanding. So this is not primarily a financial exposure. A heavy open count with almost no money attached means conditions are being reported and not corrected — items that were never certified as fixed. It is a maintenance and management problem, not a liability one. Whether that is better or worse depends entirely on what you intend to do with the building.

3. The trap that costs real money: floor-area ratio

Floor-area ratio (FAR) is how much building the zoning allows per square foot of lot. Here are this property's actual numbers:

Built FAR	4.65 — what exists today
Residential FAR limit	3.44
Commercial FAR limit	0.00
Community-facility FAR limit	6.50

A careless reading goes like this: the highest permitted ratio is 6.50, the building is at 4.65, so there is 1.85 of headroom — about 21,900 sq ft of unused air rights. Time to call an architect.

That reading is wrong, and it is wrong in an expensive direction.

Look again. The residential limit is 3.44, and the building is already at 4.65. This building is over-built for residential use — it is larger than today's zoning would permit. It almost certainly predates the current rules and is legally non-conforming. You could not rebuild it as it stands, let alone add to it.

The 6.50 headroom is real, but it belongs to community-facility use — a school, a clinic, a house of worship. It is not residential floor area, and it is not fungible with it. An investor who buys this building expecting to add apartments has misread a single row of a table and may have paid for square footage that cannot be built.

4. The trap in the sale history

This property's last recorded transfer:

Last recorded sale	14 November 1988
Recorded price	$0

A $0 sale is not an error and it is not a bargain. Recorded transfers include deeds between related parties, estate transfers, corrective filings and nominal conveyances — all of which are legitimately recorded at $0 or $10.

The consequence matters: every ratio built on that price is meaningless here. Price per unit is $0. Price versus assessed value is $0. If a report shows you a per-unit price of zero, the property has not been given away — it simply has not had an arm's-length recorded sale in a very long time. In this case, not since 1988.

5. Then read the value figures

Assessed total value	$1,695,150
Market value on record	$3,767,000
Estimated annual tax levy	≈ $206,651

Assessed value is not market value and is not meant to be — assessment follows its own formula and phases changes in over time, which is why the two figures differ so widely. The tax levy shown is an estimate: the taxable value multiplied by the published rate for the property's tax class. It knows nothing about exemptions or abatements the building may carry, so it will not match a real bill exactly. Use it for the order of magnitude, not for underwriting.

What a good five minutes looks like

1. Overview — establish age, size, unit count. Everything else is read in that light.
2. Violations — divide the open count by the number of apartments, then look at the balance. Neither figure means much alone.
3. Zoning — compare built FAR to the limit for the use you actually want.
4. Taxes & Value — check the direction of assessed value over time, not just today's figure.
5. Documents — read the last real sale, and check whether the recorded price is credible.
6. Complaints and Legal — a pattern here tells you how the building is run.

Terms you do not recognise are defined in the glossary. How every number is sourced and calculated is set out in the methodology.