Rentary is a public atlas of Manhattan's rent-stabilized housing stock — built from government records, plotted on a map, and kept as current as the data allows.
Nearly one million apartments in New York City are rent-stabilized, yet most renters have no reliable way to find them. Landlords are not required to advertise stabilization status, and publicly available records are scattered across half a dozen city and state agencies. Rentary connects those records into one place.
Rent stabilization is a New York State program that caps annual rent increases in qualifying apartments and gives tenants strong legal protections — including the right to renew their lease indefinitely, the right to pass the apartment to a family member, and limits on what a landlord can charge when a unit re-rents.
The system was created in 1969 during a housing crisis, when vacancy rates in New York City fell below two percent. The Emergency Tenant Protection Act of 1974 expanded coverage dramatically. Today, roughly one million apartments across the five boroughs remain stabilized — a number that has fallen steadily since the 1990s as units have been deregulated through vacancy bonuses, preferential rents, and luxury deregulation loopholes that were partially closed by the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA).
Every year, the New York City Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) sets the maximum percentage landlords can raise rents on renewal leases. These guideline increases apply to both one-year and two-year renewals. Landlords can also apply for Individual Apartment Improvements (IAI) to justify higher rents when they make capital repairs — though since 2019, these increases are now capped and temporary rather than permanent.
Most stabilized apartments are in buildings constructed before 1974 with six or more units. Post-1974 buildings can also contain stabilized units if they have participated in tax incentive programs like 421-a or J-51, which grant property tax breaks in exchange for keeping rents regulated for a fixed term. When those tax benefits expire, the apartments can lose stabilized status — a process sometimes called regulatory expiration or "destabilization."
The New York City rental market is one of the most competitive in the world. Apartments in stabilized buildings rent at meaningful discounts compared to market-rate units in the same neighborhoods — sometimes 20–40% below comparable free-market apartments. But finding them is hard.
Stabilization status is almost never disclosed in listings. Platforms like StreetEasy and Zillow do not filter by it. The DHCR building database exists, but it is a flat CSV file that most renters will never encounter. The city's own housing agencies have no public-facing tool that plots these buildings on a map and shows you which ones have active listings right now.
Rentary is that tool. It was built on the belief that public records should be publicly readable — not just technically available, but genuinely usable by someone sitting at a kitchen table trying to find an apartment.
Rentary is assembled from four primary public data sources, cross-referenced and cleaned to build a coherent picture of each building.
The official New York State list of rent-regulated buildings. This is the foundation: if a building is on the DHCR file, it has or has had stabilized units. Updated annually.
Published by the NYC Department of City Planning. Adds residential unit counts, number of floors, year built, owner name, zoning code, building class, lot area, and precise lat/lng coordinates.
Complaint and violation records from HPD often include apartment numbers, allowing Rentary to reconstruct which individual units are known to exist inside a building.
Listing data is scraped periodically from StreetEasy to surface active rentals and recent rental history at the apartment level. Listing status is refreshed with each scraper run.
Not every building on the DHCR list is an equally strong candidate. Rentary assigns one of four tiers to each building based on its characteristics:
The most reliable method is to request your apartment's rent history directly from DHCR (the Division of Housing and Community Renewal). You can do this online at hcr.ny.gov — search for "apartment rent history" and submit a request with your address. You'll receive a printout showing every registered rent going back years. If your apartment appears in that history, it was stabilized at some point. If the history is missing or ends abruptly, it may have been deregulated — which is sometimes done improperly and worth investigating.
You can also check your lease: stabilized leases are required to include a "Rent Stabilization Lease Rider" disclosure. If your lease lacks this rider, that is suspicious and worth following up on.
Since the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA), no. Prior to 2019, landlords could raise rents substantially when a unit went vacant (the "vacancy bonus"). HSTPA eliminated this. Landlords can now charge the previous legal regulated rent plus the current RGB vacancy allowance — which is set annually and has been zero or near-zero in recent years.
They can also pass through Individual Apartment Improvement (IAI) costs, but these are now capped at 1/168th of the improvement cost per month (for buildings with 35+ units) and are temporary rather than permanent.
Most are, but not all. Some buildings have been entirely deregulated — for example, if the owner participates in a cooperative conversion where tenants purchased their units. Some buildings with hotel histories have different regulatory frameworks. And some buildings that appear on the DHCR list may have had their registration lapse or been removed.
This is why Rentary uses a confidence tier system rather than a simple yes/no — and why we always recommend verifying individual apartment status through DHCR rather than relying solely on building-level information.
Succession rights allow certain family members to take over a stabilized lease when the primary tenant permanently leaves or passes away. To qualify, the family member must have lived in the apartment as a primary residence for at least two years before the primary tenant leaves (one year for spouses, disabled individuals, and seniors).
"Family member" is defined broadly under the law and includes not just legal relatives but also anyone who can demonstrate an emotional and financial commitment comparable to a family relationship — sometimes called a "non-traditional family member." If you think you may qualify, consult a tenant attorney. The Housing Court has a free legal help desk at 111 Centre Street.
Evictions from stabilized apartments require legal cause. The most common grounds are non-payment of rent, violation of lease terms, or the landlord needing the apartment for personal or immediate family use (called "owner use"). A landlord cannot simply decide not to renew your lease — they must offer a renewal at the guideline increase every year.
If you receive a non-renewal notice or are served eviction papers, contact a tenant attorney immediately. NYC has a "Right to Counsel" law that guarantees free legal representation for qualifying tenants facing eviction in Housing Court.
DHCR stands for the Division of Housing and Community Renewal. It is the New York State agency that administers rent stabilization (and the older rent control program). DHCR maintains the official registration of regulated buildings and apartments, processes overcharge complaints, resolves lease disputes, and issues annual rent guidelines along with the RGB.
Key DHCR resources: rent history requests, Individual Apartment Improvement objections, Major Capital Improvement challenges, and owner-use applications. Their office is at 25 Beaver Street in lower Manhattan. They also have a Tenant Hotline at (718) 739-6400.
The RGB is a nine-member body appointed by the Mayor that meets every spring and summer to set the maximum allowable rent increase for stabilized apartment renewals. The board includes two tenant representatives, two landlord representatives, and five public members. Their annual order — typically announced in June — sets the percentage that applies to leases beginning between October 1st of that year and September 30th of the following year.
You can find current and historical RGB orders at nycrgb.org.
Yes, and it is worth investigating. There are a few scenarios: the listed rent may be a "preferential rent" — a rent below the legal regulated rent that the landlord voluntarily offered. In this case, the legal rent (and any future allowable rent) could be higher. Alternatively, the landlord may have applied IAI increases. Or the unit may have been deregulated and then re-regulated under a different program.
The only way to know the actual legal regulated rent is to request the rent history from DHCR. If the listed rent exceeds the legal regulated rent, you may be entitled to an overcharge claim — potentially with treble damages.
DHCR registration is technically required for all stabilized buildings but compliance has historically been imperfect. Some landlords have failed to register — intentionally or not — while their buildings still contain stabilized apartments. Rentary uses PLUTO building characteristics (age, size, class) to identify likely-regulated buildings even when DHCR registration is absent or lapsed. These appear with lower confidence tiers and should be verified more carefully.
The base building dataset (DHCR file cross-referenced with PLUTO) is updated when NYC and NYS publish new versions of those datasets, typically annually. Listing data from StreetEasy is scraped on a rolling schedule and updated more frequently — the goal is to reflect current availability within a few days of a listing appearing or disappearing.
Each building detail page shows the date of the most recent scraper observation, so you can judge how fresh the listing data is for any specific address.
Yes. Rentary is and will remain free for all users. There is no paywall, no account required to browse the map or look up a building, and no plan to add one. Housing information should be public. If you find Rentary useful and want to support it, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who is looking for an apartment.
A building appearing on Rentary does not guarantee that any specific apartment inside it is currently rent-stabilized. Stabilization status can change over time due to deregulation, tax-benefit expiration, vacancy history, preferential rent agreements, cooperative conversions, or unit-specific exceptions. The data Rentary publishes reflects public records at the time they were last updated and may not reflect recent regulatory changes.
For legally binding confirmation of an apartment's stabilization status, request a rent history directly from DHCR or consult a qualified tenant attorney. If you believe your apartment has been improperly deregulated or that you are being charged above the legal regulated rent, contact Legal Aid Society, MFY Legal Services, or Met Council on Housing.