Trust
How scoring works
RentersFax scores are deterministic and built from official NYC public records. An LLM may explain a report, but it never invents the number.
What we publish
Enough for you to trust the product — not enough to clone it. We describe the kinds of signals we use and the principles behind the score. Exact weights, thresholds, and feature engineering stay proprietary.
Scoring principles
- Severity beats raw counts (hazardous issues weigh more)
- Open / unresolved issues beat old closed ones
- Recent patterns beat one-off ancient records
- Building, landlord, and neighborhood signals are combined — not a single raw dump
- Scores are rule-based; generative AI does not set the number
What goes into a report
- Housing & building violations (HPD / DOB)
- 311 complaint patterns (heat, pests, noise, elevators, and more)
- Ownership / registration signals
- Pest-related risk indicators
- Rent-stability pressure proxies (not a legal DHCR determination)
- Hidden-risk flags and an explained summary
Data sources
- NYC HPD Housing Maintenance Code Violations
- NYC DOB Violations
- NYC 311 Service Requests
- NYC HPD Multiple Dwelling Registrations & Contacts
- NYC Planning GeoSearch
The underlying city datasets are public. RentersFax’s value is the cleaned match, proprietary scoring, premium breakdown, and continuously updated report — not a spreadsheet of the city’s raw CSV.
Why buy instead of DIY
- Public portals are fragmented across HPD, DOB, 311, and registrations
- Address matching and building identity are easy to get wrong by hand
- Premium metric values are computed server-side and are not in free page HTML
- For $3.99 you get the packaged answer before signing a multi-thousand-dollar lease
Limitations
Public records lag reality. Quiet buildings can still have problems tenants never report. Always tour the unit, talk to neighbors, and read the lease.