Reference
The distress score is MetroDeeds-internal — there is no NYC agency analog. It exists to answer one question that public records alone do not answer: out of every named operator we can attribute to an NYC residential rental portfolio, where does this one rank? The score is recomputed against the full operator population every night and the leaderboard ranking is refreshed hourly.
Inputs and weights
- Class C (Immediately Hazardous) HPD violations per unit — 30%
- Marshal eviction executions per unit — 15%
- Class B (Hazardous) HPD violations per unit — 15%
- Worst Landlord flag (NYC Public Advocate annual list) — 10%
- Share of portfolio buildings with Class C violations — 10%
- Heat and hot water 311 complaints per building — 10%
- HPD Speculation Watch flag — 5%
- Portfolio size, log-scaled — 5%
Each signal is normalized individually against its 90th-percentile threshold across the full operator population before weighting. This is the most important property of the score: a 100 does not mean an operator has the most violations in absolute terms. It means the operator's per-unit rate is at or above the worst-performing 10% of operators citywide on every measured signal. Two operators with identical absolute violation counts can have very different scores if their unit counts differ — which is the entire point. The score reflects how an operator treats the tenants in their buildings, not how many buildings they have.
Post-normalization adjustments
- Worst Landlord floor: every operator on the Public Advocate’s annual list gets a minimum score of 70 regardless of normalized inputs.
- Double Offender multiplier: Worst Landlord status combined with a top-10% eviction rate triggers a ×1.25 multiplier.
- Vacate order bonus: HPD vacate order history adds +3 points after normalization.
- Portfolio wealth multiplier: a tiered ×1.15 to ×1.60 multiplier driven by total DOF market value of the portfolio, capping at the $500M+ tier.
All final scores are capped at 100. Property-level distress (the 0–10 score visible on the deed-feed Detail Panel at the Scout+ tier) is a separate, BBL-scoped metric — it evaluates a single property’s HPD, tax-lien, and 311 signals rather than an operator’s portfolio-wide pattern.
What MetroDeeds does with this
A distress score, on its own, is a number. Its usefulness depends on what it is calibrated against and what it deliberately leaves out.
Calibration first. MetroDeeds calibrates against the full population of NYC operators we can attribute to a named individual or HPD-registered corporate owner. A score of 70 means an operator’s portfolio sits in roughly the worst-performing 10% of NYC operators on multiple weighted signals — not that they crossed a fixed violation threshold. This is a conscious choice. Fixed thresholds drift with citywide conditions; relative ranking captures who the worst actors are right now.
What the score deliberately omits. It is computed from public records only. MetroDeeds does not collect tenant testimony, lawsuits not yet filed in OCA, or off-record complaints. Operators who exclusively register through LLCs with no individual name on the HPD registration cannot be scored — a known coverage gap that affects an estimated several hundred NYC landlords. Non-profit affordable housing operators, government housing operators, and co-op/condo management firms are excluded from the scoring population entirely because their portfolio context (regulatory framework, tenant relationship, legal accountability) is fundamentally different from for-profit market-rate rental landlords.
How the score gets used in the product. The Landlord Ripoff Watch leaderboard sorts by score top-to-bottom. Every operator profile page renders the score as a horizontal heat bar with a numeric value. Deed-feed integrations cross-reference the operator score from any building keyed by BBL, so a transaction in the daily feed can be evaluated against the buyer’s portfolio-wide track record without leaving the deed feed.
Operator profile pages also document the inputs that drove the score — Class C-per-unit, eviction-execution rate, Worst Landlord status, AEP enrollment, Speculation Watch overlap — alongside the composite, so the score is interrogable rather than opaque. The full formula and post-normalization adjustments are documented on the Landlord Ripoff Watch methodology page, including the portfolio wealth multiplier that boosts scores for very large portfolios on the theory that a per-unit rate at the worst-10% threshold matters more when it affects 10,000 tenants than when it affects 50.
Frequently asked
What counts as a "good" or "bad" distress score?
Scores are relative, not absolute. A score of 70 or higher reflects the Worst Landlord tier. 50–70 indicates substantial portfolio distress signals. Below 50 indicates lower relative distress, but it is not a clean bill of health — operators below the scoring threshold can still have significant violation histories that simply do not place them in the worst 10% citywide.
How often is the score recomputed?
Nightly, against the full operator population. The Landlord Ripoff Watch leaderboard ranking is refreshed hourly so newly-recomputed scores propagate without a full page-cache cycle.
Why can two operators with the same number of violations have different scores?
Because the score normalizes by unit count, not by raw count. An operator with 100 open Class C violations across 1,000 units scores far lower than an operator with 100 open Class C violations across 50 units — the per-unit rate is what reflects how tenants in those buildings are treated.
Can an operator dispute their distress score?
The score is algorithmic and built entirely from public records. Operators who believe their portfolio has been misattributed (e.g., an HPD registration linking them to a building they no longer own) can email hello@metrodeeds.com to request a registry review.
How is this different from the NYC Public Advocate’s Worst Landlord list?
The Public Advocate publishes an annual list of approximately 100 named landlords. MetroDeeds’ distress score continuously evaluates every operator we can attribute to a named individual and feeds the Public Advocate flag back in as one of eight weighted signals. The MetroDeeds score updates daily; the Public Advocate list updates once a year.