Is your rental safe? How to Look Up Property Violations in Rochester

A newly launched tool allows Rochester landlords and renters to see how their properties and owner profiles compare to those of others in the city.

Since August 2023, the City of Rochester has assigned publicly available scores out of 100 to landlords and rental properties. The numbers can provide insight into the number of code violations, properties, owners and property managers.

The scoring system is available on the city-operated BuildingBlocks website, managed in partnership with the Tolemi data platform and based on code compliance.

How is a rental property rated in Rochester determined?

Factors involved in calculating scores include active health and safety violations per unit, the number of days since the property’s certificate of occupancy expired, and the number of days since the oldest health and safety violation was cited. The lower the score, the greater the number of open violations the property has accumulated.

Not all properties are assessed in this way. Of the total 64,810 structures and plots in the city, only 22,117, or about 34%, have been scored.

Only manager contact information submitted after May 24, 2023 will be included in the scoring. Homes that have not been inspected in the past year may not be included in the landlord’s score calculations. The site does not indicate when the rating of a property or landlord was last reviewed or updated.

Users also cannot search by the name of the property owner or manager, but only by the property’s address.

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This way you can view the landlord scores yourself

To view the score for a specific rental property or property owner:

1. Navigate to the BuildingBlocks site. The site works best with the Chrome or Firefox search engines and does not work in Internet Explorer. Make sure “Rochester, NY” is in the top left corner. On the right side you will see a list of all the properties in the database, along with their parcel IDs (their identification numbers), their addresses and owners.

2. Type the property addresswithout abbreviations, in the small, dark gray search bar at the top of the page.

3. Click on the property; if the address looks right, it will appear below the search bar.

4. Scroll down the property page to ‘Tools for Tenants’. If the property in question has been scored, you will see this section about eight subsections further down. Here you will see the number of rental units in the home, the ‘Rental Owner Score’ and the ‘Rental Property Score’.

To see all properties within a score range:

1. Navigate to the BuildingBlocks site. Make sure “Rochester, NY” is in the top left corner. On the right side you will see a list of all properties in the database, along with their parcel IDs, identification numbers, addresses and owners.

2. Click on ‘Add filters’ the bright blue button in the top left corner of the page. Several boxes will appear representing categories you can search for.

3. Scroll down and click on ‘Scores’ a white button with a meter symbol.

4. Choose which score type you want to see. Three options will appear and you decide whether you want to search by ‘Rental Manager Score’, ‘Rental Owner Score’ or ‘Rental Property Score’. Click on one of them.

5. Filter the score range. For example, if you want to see a list of all the high-scoring properties in the city, you can select a range between 50 and 100 or 75 and 100. Drag the slider to adjust the range.

6. Click to the right to see which properties or landlords rank within your chosen range.

Property owners or managers looking to improve their score or inquire about a missing property can visit the city’s Infor Civics portal, which launched in May 2023. The portal also includes instructions on how to dispute scores and report incorrect information.

— Christina Chkarboul is a summer intern at the Democrat and Chronicle and a student journalist at USC, where she focuses on earth sciences, global studies and journalism. Contact her at cchkarboul@gannett.com with story tips related to code enforcementT.

This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Is your rental safe? How to Look Up Property Violations in Rochester NY