Hey everyone! In this tutorial we will show you how to look up the
certificate of occupancy for a building here in New York City. I'm Nick at Hauseit.
You can check out our website www.hauseit.com to learn about ways to save money when
buying or selling real estate here in New York City, so let's get started! So
the first thing you'll want to do to look up a certificate of occupancy is
navigate to the correct Department of Buildings website now what I typically
do is I google NYC do be in Google and then I typically click on the second
result which is the buildings information system. The Department of
Buildings has a number of different interfaces and data repositories
including the newer DOB NOW so there's actually essentially two different
places where permits could potentially appear but specifically for the
certificate of occupancy we typically use the buildings information system so
go ahead and click on that and this is the standard interface what you'll want
to do at this point is go ahead and click on building information search now
on this page you will type in the property house number and street
alternatively you could put in the block and lot but typically it is fairly
straightforward to use search option number one so in this case let's take a
hypothetical building in Manhattan house number is 321 and the street is West
13th Street so there you have it we'll click go and here we are this is the
property profile overview it gives you some detail about the property it shows
you that block and lot identifier as we mentioned before and down here in case
you're curious there's a bunch of things you can look at complaints DOB
violations jobs filings and a bunch of other stuff
elevator records and such but for certificates of occupancy it's very easy
the selection is right here view certificates of occupancy go ahead and
click on this and there should be a bunch of PDFs there might be multiple
PDFs it's the building has updated its C of O as they
also call it over over the years and this is basically what we're looking for
so let's go ahead and click on that and here we are so this is actually an
interesting example I'm very glad we picked this one because I've never
actually seen a certificate of occupancy that is totally illegible so obviously
this was not scanned correctly and presumably then to find the original
you'd have to actually contact the Department of Buildings but in essence
that really is what a C of O looks like and presumably as well if you wanted to you
could potentially download this let's see most likely you'd want to click
print and here you could then print it in your browser so unfortunately we're
gonna have to do one more I'd love love for you to see an actual C of O that's
legible so let's go back and let's try a new building so let's click on Manhattan
and let's type in 195 power let go and here we are so this is another building
this one's in the lower Eastside the last one was in Meatpacking District
in the West Village and let's click on View certificates of occupancy now this
one is a fantastic example because there's a bunch of C of Os so clearly they
updated C of Os constantly but this one we hope is the most recent one so let's
click on that and well this one is actually from 1948 so we must presume
there's actually a newer one because I know that this building was converted to
condos far more recently than that so if we click back we could probably go
through and basically look through these to try to find one that is up-to-date so
here's an example of a temporary certificate of occupancy which expired
in 2010 and presumably we'd then have to just go
through these and find the one that is the most up-to-date I think we may have
found one that is appropriate this is the final certificate of occupancy and
the effective date is fairly recently so here we go let's put on below and you
can see here how they designate so for example the fifth floor tonight 195
Bowery has two Class A apartments fourth floor is an office there's also another
one on the fourth floor for one Class A apartment so here you here you go I mean
this is basically what we're looking for the C of O this one I'll be honest is very
complex very complicated but in that kin that sense it's a pretty good example to
look at so we hope you found this video helpful just remember you need to use
the NYC Department of Building information search which is here the URL
is up at the top if you have any questions or suggestions for future
topics please don't hesitate to leave a comment below or send us an email team@hauseit.com
team@hauseit.com. I'm Nick at Hauseit and we'll see you on the next video!