Recently I was considering buying a condo in a four-unit new-construction building in Brooklyn. The pictures of the unit in the glossy marketing materials, naturally, looked gorgeous. But after some intensive digging into the building and its developer, I bailed. I had narrowly avoided buying the real estate equivalent of a lemon.

new construction condo purchase
Photo by Josh Hutto

Given the amount of money at stake, it’s worth spending a couple days doing due diligence on the developer of any new building you’re considering. You can do it yourself. And, unlike virtually anything else in the process of buying property, it’s free.

My experience is instructive.

The building in question was mostly finished, but it didn’t yet have its certificate of occupancy. This is normal for new-construction buildings. No one was actually living there yet.

I had an inspection done. The inspector turned up some potentially concerning issues: The roof flashing hadn’t been installed properly, for example, opening the way for possible leaks into the building.

At first I thought these might be normal problems. The place wasn’t done, after all.

But then I spoke to a friend who had purchased in a new building only to discover that its roof was defective, at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars. I started to get worried. I decided to dig deeper. In hindsight I wish I had done this even before paying for an inspection.

Public records held by a variety of city agencies are worth looking at, even though they won’t capture many issues. You should always start, of course, by simply Googling the address of the building you’re considering. The New York City map site NYCityMap aggregates data from a variety of city agencies and organizes it by address.

The map connects you directly to the pages for a given building at the relevant city agencies, such as ACRIS for title and tax information, the Department of Buildings for construction complaints and violations, and Housing Development and Preservation for rent-regulated units.

If a condo building contains rentals and there have been 311 complaints in the building, you can easily track them using sites such as Rentlogic.

If violations or complaints do pop up that shed light on the construction of the building, I recommend tracking down the original source material on the individual city agency website.

But the high-quality intel can only come from human beings that live in a building by the same developer. Here’s what to do:

1. Determine the sponsor.
First up is figuring out who the sponsor (aka the developer) is, and who the individual people behind the building are. Plug in the address to the search page of the New York State Attorney General’s Real Estate Finance Bureau. This is the government entity that reviews condo offering plans.

A page should pop up with several tabs. Click on “Principals of Sponsor.”

A name or names should appear that are clickable links.

2. Find other work by the same developer.
Now you’ll want to figure out what other work the developers behind your building have done in the city. Click the name of each principal, and the site should spit out other buildings associated with those individual developers. (Note: Because of possible variation in how names are spelled, search any possible variations you can think of. Try just searching for the last name, or just the first name.)

You should get a page with a list of other offering plans by the same developers.

new construction condo purchase
Photo by Fleur Losfeld

3. Find buyers in the developers’ other buildings.
Now you want to find people who have purchased units in the developer’s previously constructed buildings. Sales records (and anything to do with title and taxes) are found at the city’s No.1 website for real estate data, ACRIS.

(Third-party sites such as StreetEasy and PropertyShark aggregate the same data, and can be easier to navigate. StreetEasy displays this information under the “past sales” option on a particular building. Click “recording closing” and the names of the buyer and seller should show up.)

Create a list of people who have purchased in buildings by your developer.

new construction condo buying
Photo by Fleur Losfeld

4. Track down the buyers.
Now comes the hard part: Finding contact information for as many of these people as you can. This bit takes some sleuthing.

These days, it’s often easier to find a person’s Facebook profile than his or her email address. Go ahead and message them politely on Facebook.

Often it’s easier to find a professional email than a personal address. Does the person have a LinkedIn profile that identifies their employer? If you know that, there’s often a formula (e.g. firstname.lastname@corporation.com) that will allow you to guess his or her address.

5. Reach out.
I led with: “Sorry for this email out of the blue — my name is Justin Elliott. I also live here in New York. The reason I’m reaching out: I’m considering buying an apartment from the same developer who did your building. I got your name from real estate records (apologies — I hope that’s not an intrusion).”

new construction condo purchase
Photo by Fleur Losfeld

I asked a couple basic questions: what has your experience been like? Is there anything I should know?

In my case, within 24 hours of reaching out to a handful of people, the horror stories poured in. I found people had a sense of solidarity — most were more than happy to chat. “Essentially all of the units in the building have experienced plumbing issues, leaks (some serious), issues with new appliances, leaking windows,” said one.

“Our common stairwell began leaking from the top apparently because of a bad sealing job on the roof,” said another, an eerie parallel to the issue my inspector had identified. Several people said the management company aligned with the developer was frustratingly unresponsive.

6. Use your knowledge.
It is, of course, not unheard of for there to be problems around the edges with new construction. But knowledge is power. Even if you’re going ahead with the purchase, you can use what you uncover to inform what you ask for in negotiations with the seller –- before you’ve signed your contract.

Or you can use your ultimate power as a buyer: Walk away.

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