Legal & Regulatory Compliance Management for NYC Owners

Owning a residential building in New York City means answering to several agencies at once, on schedules that don't line up. HPD wants annual registration and expects violations cleared. DHCR wants rent registrations filed for regulated units. DOB wants periodic inspection reports for your boiler, your elevator, your gas piping, and — on taller buildings — your facade. HRA administers the subsidy programs your tenants may use. The Commission on Human Rights enforces Fair Housing and source-of-income protections in how you lease.

None of these agencies coordinates with the others. Each has its own deadlines, forms, portals, and penalties. And the failure mode is almost always the same: not a refusal to comply, but a deadline nobody was tracking.

This service exists because that tracking is a discipline, not an instinct.

What we track

The obligations owners most often miss

Unfiled periodic inspections. This is the leader, and it's worth understanding why it happens. An owner has the boiler serviced every year by a reliable heating contractor. The system works. Nobody is being negligent. But the service visit is not the city inspection, and the contractor's invoice is not a filing — so the building accrues a violation for a missing report on equipment in perfectly good condition. The same pattern repeats with elevators and gas piping. We cover each of these in detail: boiler inspections, elevator requirements, Local Law 152 gas piping, and FISP facade inspections.

Lapsed HPD registration. Annual, straightforward, and easy to let slide — with consequences that extend beyond the penalty, since an unregistered building faces real obstacles in Housing Court.

Missed DHCR registration. On regulated units, gaps in the registration history are the kind of thing that surfaces years later inside a rent overcharge claim, when reconstructing what happened is far harder.

Lead paint documentation in pre-1978 buildings. Not just the disclosure at lease signing, but the ongoing investigation and recordkeeping obligations. This is one of the highest-exposure areas in New York City residential ownership, and documentation is the entire defense.

Community district scheduling. Gas piping inspections run on a four-year cycle assigned by community district, not by a citywide date. Owners who know "it's every four years" but not which year is theirs are the ones who file late.

Contact information nobody monitors. Violation and hearing notices go to the registered address. When that address is stale, an owner can default on an OATH hearing they never knew about — and a default typically means the maximum penalty for the violation class.

Prevention is the entire value proposition

The cheapest violation is the one never issued, and the arithmetic is not subtle. A boiler inspection filed on time costs the inspection. The same inspection missed costs the penalty, the late fee, the eventual filing, and an open item on the property record that resurfaces during a refinance.

A facade repair planned inside a FISP cycle costs the repair. The same repair triggered by an Unsafe classification costs the repair plus a sidewalk shed rented monthly until the work is done — which on an occupied building is frequently measured in years, and can exceed the cost of the masonry work itself.

A source-of-income complaint costs vastly more than simply processing a voucher application properly.

Compliance management is not an expense that competes with maintenance and leasing. It's the one that keeps those from becoming emergencies.

When violations already exist

Most owners come to us with something open. That's normal, and it's the first work we do.

We pull the building's complete HPD and DOB records and inventory what's actually there — because owners are frequently surprised in both directions, carrying items they didn't know about and worrying about items that resolved years ago. Each is classified by agency, type, and severity, with particular attention to DOB's ECB violations, which carry hearing dates at OATH and default to maximum penalties if the hearing is missed.

Then every deadline goes on a calendar, corrective work is scoped and priced for you as a decision rather than a surprise, licensed professionals are engaged where a filing requires one, and — the step most often skipped — we confirm the record actually cleared afterward rather than assuming it did. Violations sit open on property records for years because nobody went back to look.

Our guide to DOB versus HPD violations explains why these two systems require completely different approaches.

Where we stop

We are property managers, not attorneys, and we're explicit about the line.

We handle the administrative and filing work, the deadline tracking, the corrective work, and the day-to-day compliance that keeps problems from arising. We do not provide legal advice or representation.

Contested hearings, illegal occupancy cases, complex rent-regulation disputes, Human Rights complaints, and litigation belong with qualified counsel — and our job in those situations is to hand the attorney an organized file rather than a shoebox. Owners are generally better served by a manager who knows where that line is than by one who improvises past it.

For eviction matters specifically, see our eviction management page, which describes how we support the process alongside counsel.

Who this is for

Owners of Brooklyn and NYC multifamily buildings — particularly rent-stabilized, subsidized, and older pre-war stock, where the compliance layer is thickest and the penalties for getting it wrong are steepest.

If you've just bought a building and don't know what it owes, if you've inherited a violation history you haven't inventoried, or if you simply want one team accountable for the whole calendar instead of a set of vendors each watching their own piece, that's the service.

Schedule a property consultation and we'll review where your building actually stands.