NYC Distressed Property Leads — Violations, Liens, Evictions

Find motivated-seller leads in New York City by stacking three official distress signals per tax parcel (BBL):

1. Open HPD housing maintenance code violations (class A / B / C)
2. DOF tax lien sale notices (90/60/30/10-Day Notice and Final Sale cycles)
3. Marshal-executed evictions

Every parcel that shows enough distinct signals gets a weighted distress score, the registered owner or managing agent contact from HPD registrations, and comes out ranked highest-distress first — ready for direct mail, skip tracing, cold calling, or acquisition underwriting.

Who it's for

• Real estate investors & wholesalers hunting off-market, pre-foreclosure-adjacent deals
• Agents & brokers prospecting listings from owners under financial/regulatory pressure
• Lenders, note buyers & tax-lien investors screening collateral risk by parcel
• PropTech & data teams who want a scored, deduplicated per-BBL feed instead of three raw city dumps

How the score works

distress_score = openC*3 + openB*2 + openA*1 + lien(10 * cycle multiplier) + evictions*5

Lien-sale cycle escalates the weight: 90 Day Notice ×1.0 → 60 Day ×1.2 → 30 Day ×1.5 → 10 Day ×1.8 → Final Sale ×2.0. A parcel with 1 open class-C violation, a 30-Day lien notice, and 2 executed evictions scores 3 + 15 + 10 = 28.

signals_present lists which of violations, lien_sale, evictions the parcel shows; minSignals controls how many distinct types are required (default 2).

Example input

{
  "borough": "BRONX",
  "minSignals": 2,
  "lookbackMonths": 12,
  "maxResults": 100
}

All fields are optional — an empty input runs the Bronx with the defaults above.

Output fields

Field	Meaning
bbl	10-digit Borough-Block-Lot parcel id
borough, block, lot	Parcel identifiers
address, zip	Best available street address
distress_score	Weighted score (see above), sorted DESC
open_violations_a/b/c	Open HPD violations by class in the lookback window
lien_sale_cycle	Most severe lien-sale stage, or null
lien_water_debt_only	true if the lien listing is water/sewer debt only
evictions_count	Executed evictions in the lookback window
signals_present	Which signal types fired
owner_contact	{type, name, corporation, business_address} or null
lookback_months	Window used for this run
source_urls	NYC Open Data pages that contributed to the row

Freshness: dataset-anchored lookback

The lien-sale list is published in cycles and can lag other sources (currently through the 2025-06 cycle). To avoid silently returning nothing, every lookback window is anchored to that dataset's own most-recent record date, not today. The run log prints each dataset's max date so you can see exactly what vintage you got.

Honest notes (read before you buy)

• NYC-only v1. The five sources are NYC Open Data (Socrata); other metros may follow.
• Contact join path shipped: the owner/agent contact is joined via registrationid carried on the HPD violations rows, with a fallback lookup through the HPD Registrations dataset (tesw-yqqr) by borough/block/lot for parcels flagged only by liens or evictions. Buildings that never registered with HPD (small owner-occupied homes, many commercial parcels) emit with owner_contact: null — they are never dropped.
• Lien-sale data vintage: the DOF list updates only when the city runs a lien-sale cycle; expect months-old month values between cycles. That is the source, not a bug.
• Tenant privacy: eviction records are used only as a per-parcel count. Respondent (tenant) names, court index numbers, docket numbers, and marshal names are never fetched into the output. This is a landlord-side product.
• Violation counts cover open violations issued within the lookback window (older still-open violations are out of window by design — raise lookbackMonths to widen).

Use as an MCP tool

This actor works as a tool for AI agents (Claude, Cursor, etc.) via mcp.apify.com — ask your agent for "the 50 most distressed parcels in Brooklyn with owner contacts" and it can call this actor directly.

FAQ

How do I find distressed properties in NYC for free data sources? This actor does it for you: it merges the three public distress feeds per parcel and scores them, so you skip the joins, BBL normalization, and cycle parsing.

Is this a foreclosure or pre-foreclosure list? No — it is upstream of foreclosure: code violations, tax-lien-sale notices, and evictions are the pressure signals that often precede a distressed sale.

How do I get the property owner's contact info from a BBL? Each lead includes the best HPD registration contact (owner first, then head officer, then agent) with its business mailing address when the building is registered.

Can I run all five boroughs? Yes — run the actor once per borough (5 runs). Per-borough runs keep results focused and your per-result spend predictable.

How is this priced? Pay-per-result: you are charged only for the ranked parcel leads actually emitted (cap with maxResults). Zero-match runs cost only the actor start.

Related actors — the NYC investor shelf

All three key on the same borough-block-lot (BBL), so they stack into one workflow:

Actor	What it adds
NYC ACRIS Deed Transfer Intel	Who actually bought and sold — deed price, LLC-buyer, cash-sale and out-of-state-buyer flags
NYC Landlord Registry Lead List	The owner's whole portfolio — filter to landlords holding 5–50 buildings, with business contact
Parcel Owner Lookup	Address → owner of record, for one-off checks outside NYC too

Typical play: score distress here → check ACRIS for recent transfer activity on the same BBL → pull the owner's full portfolio and mailing contact from the HPD registry.