Every violation in New York has a deadline, a penalty, and somebody who has to hire you.
BuildDocket watches DOB, ECB and HPD violations and the compliance mandates behind them — FISP facades, HPD repair orders, ECB penalty balances — then names the owner of record, or the managing agent registered with HPD where one is on file. A permit tells you who might build. An open violation tells you who cannot wait. We sell the second one, ranked and filtered to your trade.
30 days free on any plan. Card on file, first charge on day 31. Built by a commercial GC. No contract. Cancel anytime.
Open right now, measured
—A permit is a maybe. A violation is a deadline with a penalty attached.
Anyone can resell a permit feed. Discretionary work gets postponed, value-engineered or cancelled. An open violation cannot be — it carries a date, a dollar figure that grows every month, and an owner of record legally on the hook to clear it. That is the work that gets funded. This is the layer BuildDocket was built for, and it is the reason the list converts.
Local Law 11 / FISP — facades
$5,000/yr + $1,000/moEvery building over six stories, on a five-year rotating cycle. It is the only NYC mandate that publishes a pass/fail verdict per building, which means we can hand you the ones that failed. 5,604 buildings were filed Cycle 9 SWARMP — defect found, repair required — and have still not filed for Cycle 10. Sub-cycle 10A closes February 21, 2027.
- Buildings on cycle
- 16,881
- Unsafe / SWARMP filings on record
- 39,307
Gas piping & plumbing orders
Statutory cure clockHPD writes gas and plumbing repair orders continuously, on complaint and on inspection, and each one carries a correction date the owner is legally bound to. These two numbers are our own pool, not the city's total: 2,294 open orders matched, filtered to this trade and resolved to an owner, growing by about 550 a month. A steady daily flow rather than an annual sweep, which is what makes this division sellable as a digest.
- In the pool now
- 2,294
- Added per month
- 550
Heat & hot water orders
Statutory cure clockHeat and hot water are the most heavily enforced obligations a residential owner carries, and HPD issues the orders year-round on tenant complaint. 15,640 orders have been issued and left open this year. We deliberately do not sell the city’s boiler violation pool: it is large but it has published nothing new since 2025, so a subscriber would get the headline and an empty inbox.
- Open orders, issued this year
- 15,640
- Open, all years
- 120,768
ECB penalties — the unpaid balance
$530.0M outstandingWhen a violation reaches the OATH hearing calendar the city publishes the penalty imposed and the balance still owed. We have not found another source that publishes both. That is a hard dollar figure attached to a named respondent with a mailing address — the strongest buying signal in the file.
- Active construction violations
- 86,206
- Unpaid on those
- $530.0M
What we deliberately do not sell
We audited eleven trade divisions against the actual city data before we would put them on a price list. Three of them do not have a feed behind them, and we say so instead of taking the money. Local Law 97 is the big one: no city dataset publishes a building's carbon cap or whether it exceeded it, so nobody — us included — can hand you a list of non-compliant buildings. LL126 parapet reports are self-certified and never filed with DOB. Fire protection is worse: every FDNY inspection dataset has been frozen since March 2019.
Electrical and elevator are off the list for the same reason. If a competitor is selling you an LL97 or parapet feed today, ask them which dataset it comes from.
We name the owner — and tell you how sure we are
A violation record on its own gives you an address. That is not a lead — it is homework. BuildDocket resolves every address against the city's recorded deeds and the annual assessment roll, then scores how far those two independent sources agree. You get the owner of record and, on most leads, a mailing address you can actually use. Where a managing agent or corporate officer is registered with HPD, we name them too. Where nobody is named, we say so rather than guess.
Every lead carries a confidence band — High, Medium or Low — with the reasoning shown in plain language, so you know which calls to make first and which to verify before you spend a stamp.
We read the permit file every night. We never sell you a permit.
Permits do exactly two jobs here, and neither one is a lead. First, suppression: if a permit has already been pulled at that building for your trade, the job is gone — somebody else won it — so we take it off your list before you waste the call. Second, calibration: permits are the only place the city publishes a dollar figure, so we use them to learn what a facade job at that building size actually costs, and rank your violations accordingly.
One real violation lead from each division we sell, drawn from this morning’s list. The address is masked here — subscribers get it in full, with the owner’s mailing address.
Open violation leads · five boroughs
Violation layer| Address | Borough | Division | Cure deadline | Owner of record |
|---|
Three moving parts. None of them are your problem.
Fourteen city datasets
DOB safety violations, ECB penalty balances, HPD repair orders, FISP facade verdicts, complaints, permits, sidewalk sheds, deeds, the assessment roll and the HPD owner registry. 27.8 million records, every source named on this page so you can check us.
A contractor's filter, not a keyword match
Scored on declared job value, work type, whether the owner is a reachable entity, whether a filing representative is involved, and the stage of the job. Tuned by someone who has filed these permits, not by someone who bought the dataset.
A call sheet before the workday
Ranked, filtered to your trade and borough, with a plain-English scope summary and a one-line reason to call now. In your inbox, and on your call board. Claim it, call it, mark it won.
Eight divisions we can actually supply. Three we cannot.
Every lead is routed to the division that performs the work by the violation code itself — not a guess at who might bid it. Where a Local Law compels the work, the division inherits that mandate calendar. Each card carries two numbers, because either one alone misleads: the pool of violations open right now, and the flow of new ones each month. A big pool with a thin flow is a market you work through once; a steady flow is what keeps a subscription earning. Both are live from the database that builds the digest — see where every number comes from.
However you actually work.
We are not asking you to learn new software. It arrives in your inbox, and the call sheet is a web page. That is the whole surface area.
Email digest, first thing
Ranked, filtered, mobile-first. Written to be read on a jobsite with one hand. 6am, every weekday, on every plan.
ALL TIERSWeb call sheet
Claim a lead so nobody on your crew calls it twice, then log what happened — reached, voicemail, gatekeeper, quoted, won, dead. A claim log, not a CRM.
ALL TIERSEvery lead comes with its opening
An opening line written for that specific violation, plus a follow-up email and a text message, ready to copy. You are not staring at a row wondering what to say.
ALL TIERSA way in on every lead
Where a number is published you get the number. Where none is, you get the route that does work — the managing agent, the registered address, or the door. No dead ends.
ALL TIERSOne job pays for the year. The rest is margin.
No projections and no case studies we cannot show you. Here is the arithmetic on our own data, with the sample sizes attached so you can decide whether to believe it.
Priced per lead, we are an order of magnitude under the lead market
One trade in one borough is $199 a month. Across the 27 trade-and-borough cells we actually sell — 145 seats between them — the typical cell carried 130 ranked leads in the last thirty days — about $2 a lead. Thinner seats carry less, so the division table above publishes the monthly flow for every trade — check your own before you pay. And it is the same lead every month rather than a one-time introduction you have to buy again.
Shared leads on the contractor marketplaces run $15 to $100 for plumbing and HVAC and $45 to $400 for mold and restoration, per lead, sold to several firms at once. Exclusive versions run two to five times that. We are not claiming to be a better marketplace — we are pointing out that a violation with a statutory deadline and a named owner is a warmer starting point than a form fill, at a fraction of the price.
What you actually get in the digest.
Not a spreadsheet row. The violation, the deadline, the owner of record, and the opening line — so the first call of the day takes ten seconds to prepare instead of twenty minutes.
“I saw the plumbing order at 1■■ Bedford. I’m licensed and I can get it corrected and certified.”
- Is the leak active right now, or was it repaired without filing?
- Is the gas service involved at all?
- Who has been maintaining the building’s plumbing?
Then the work is done and the violation is still open, because nobody filed. That is the easiest close you get — you are selling the certification, not the repair.
The nearest published price is two and a half times ours.
Most of this market will not show you a price at all. Here is what is actually public.
| Service | What you get | Published price |
|---|---|---|
| BuildDocket one borough | One trade, one borough you pick, owner of record on every lead, up to 15 ranked leads a day | $199 / mo |
| Violation Leads NYC | 100 exclusive NYC plumbing violation leads a month, that trade only | $997 – $1,497 / mo |
| SiteCompli | Compliance monitoring for owners and managers — built to protect a portfolio, not to sell to one | Quote only |
| Dodge Construction Network | National project and bid intelligence, permit-led and pre-construction | Quote only |
| Construction Monitor | National permit data by county, subscription per market | Quote only |
| Contractor lead marketplaces | Shared homeowner form fills, resold to several firms, bought again each time | $15 – $400 / lead |
Prices as published on each vendor’s own site, August 2026. “Quote only” means the vendor publishes no price — we are not guessing at one. The permit-led services are not direct competitors: they sell what might get built. We sell what has a deadline attached.
$199 a month for one trade in one borough. That is the whole price sheet.
There are no plans to compare. You tick the trades you work in and the boroughs you bid in, and each combination is $199 a month — two trades across two boroughs is four of them, $796. Everything is in it at every size: the violations, the compliance deadlines, the owner of record, the call sheet, and the 6am send. Nothing is held back to sell you an upgrade, and there is no bigger tier to be talked into.
We used to charge a flat $399 for “all five boroughs,” and then briefly charged less for each borough after the first. Both were wrong in the same direction. A borough of Brooklyn plumbing costs the same to produce whether it is your first or your fifth, and there is a hard limit on how many contractors can be sent the same lead before it stops being worth having — so a volume discount was handing scarce inventory to whoever asked for the most of it. One price per combination, every time. A borough that produces nothing in your trade is not on the form to pick.
Plumbing in Brooklyn and Queens — 2 × $199 = $398
Plumbing and roofing across both — 4 × $199 = $796
- Violations & compliance deadlines — HPD orders, ECB penalties, DOB violations, FISP facade filings
- Up to 15 ranked leads a day for each trade-and-borough you hold — the cap is per day, not per month, and it is per line, so four lines is four caps
- A borough with no filings in your division is not offered — it is greyed out on the form before you reach payment, so there is no way to be charged for coverage that does not exist. That is the whole reason we price it this way
- Owner of record named on about nine in ten leads — deed + assessment roll, confidence scored, with the owner entity and filing representative
- Digest at 6am, every weekday — on a violation with a cure date already running, being first to the owner is the part that decides the job. Your call sheet is live and claimable before the day starts
- Web call sheet with a claim log — nobody on your crew calls the same lead twice
- An opening, a follow-up email and a text message written for every lead
- Your trade and borough is capped, not sold to the whole city — how many subscribers can be sent the same lead is computed from how much volume that borough actually produces, so a thin segment stays tight
Want to be the only one on a trade and borough? Buy every seat on it. How many contractors can be sent the same lead is computed from how much that borough actually produces in your trade, so the number of seats on a thin combination is small and a closed one is just that number × $199. We used to sell this as a separate “Sole Seat” product at a flat price, and on half the combinations that flat price was less than the seats it took off the market. Ask which combinations are open and how many seats each one holds — [email protected].
Anyone can sell you a list of permits. I've filed them. I know which ones turn into a purchase order and which ones die at the expediter's desk — and that's the only part that matters.
— Dimitrios Sevastos, Founder · Optimus Group
Bronx · Staten Island
public record
on every plan
The questions you're actually asking.
Isn't this data free?
Yes. All of it is public record, and you are welcome to go get it. It’s 27.8 million rows across fourteen separate datasets, with no scoring, no scope summaries, no owner joins, and no idea which of them is worth a phone call. Some of the joins are genuinely nasty — the facade file keys on BIN, the penalty file keys on borough/block/lot, the owner registry keys on neither, and the legacy violation file has a date column with values like T90517 in it. We did the last mile. That's what you're paying for.
How is this different from Dodge, ConstructConnect or a permit alert app?
The enterprise platforms are national, sales-quoted, and priced accordingly — buyers commonly report five and six figures a year. The new crop of cheap permit-alert apps are national too, which means shallow: nobody covers more than a small fraction of US jurisdictions properly.
But the real difference is what we send. They sell permits. We sell violations. A permit is a job that has already been awarded to somebody else — by the time it is published, the contract is signed. An open violation is work that legally must happen and has not been assigned yet. That is the entire thesis, and it is why we use the permit file to remove leads from your list rather than to fill it.
Will you sell the same leads to my competitor?
Yes, and we would rather tell you the mechanism than sell you a promise. Every lead is capped on how many subscribers can receive it, computed per trade and borough against how much real supply that cell has — so a thin division stays tight instead of being sold to everyone who asks. What we do not do is claim a single firm owns a trade outright, because that is not what the delivery system enforces.
We do not sell the 6am send as a privilege — every subscriber gets the list at 6am, because on a violation with a cure date already running there is no honest reason to hold one customer’s list back so another can be sold the head start. If you want the cap on a trade and borough to be one, you can buy every seat on it at $199 a seat; on a thin combination that is a small number. We do not sell exclusivity we would have to take off an existing subscriber.
Either way you are not guessing who has already called. Every lead on the call sheet shows its claim state — once you claim it, it is yours on your sheet, and your team sees who claimed it, when they called, and what happened.
Are these qualified leads or just filings?
They are scored filings and violations, not pre-qualified appointments, and we won't pretend otherwise. Nobody at BuildDocket has called the owner before you. What you get is a real project with a real declared value, a named responsible party, and a reason to call today — usually well before the job hits a bid board.
How do I know who on my team already called a lead?
Each lead has one owner on your call sheet. Somebody claims it, and from that point it carries their name and a timestamped outcome — reached, voicemail, gatekeeper, wrong number, not interested, quoted, won or dead. Nobody double-dials the same managing agent. Marking a lead dead releases it, so a claim nobody is working does not sit on a slot the other subscribers paid for.
Do I need to change my CRM?
No, and we're never going to build one. You get a light call sheet for claiming leads and logging what happened on the call — that is the whole of it. If you run your business out of a notebook and a truck, the email digest is enough on its own.
What about my data and my privacy?
We only email people who subscribed, and every message has a working unsubscribe. We don't sell your pipeline, your notes, or your win/loss records to anyone — including your competitors. Your outcomes improve your own scoring, and nothing leaves in an identifiable form.
Start with 30 days of the real list, free.
Tell us your division and borough. You get the actual product — real digests built from live filings, Monday, Wednesday and Friday — not a brochure and not a one-off sample. Judge it on the leads.
Your card goes on file today and is first charged on day 31, so the list keeps arriving without you lifting a finger. Cancel any time inside the 30 days and you are never charged — one click, no questions.
Founding member pricing is locked for 12 months for the first cohort, and how many seats exist on a trade and borough is set by how much that borough actually produces, not by how many people want in.