A Brooklyn house can have two permit histories, kept by two different city agencies. The Department of Buildings holds the record of building work. If the house is a designated landmark or stands inside a historic district, the Landmarks Preservation Commission holds a second record, of work that changed its exterior and, in some cases, its interior. A buyer who searches only the first can miss the second entirely.
First, find out whether the house is landmarked
The quickest check is LPC's Permit Application Finder map. Search the address, or click the building, and the map shows whether it is a designated building or site and whether any LPC applications or permits are attached to it.
If it is, the city's Landmarks Law applies to it. Under NYC Administrative Code § 25-305, altering, reconstructing or demolishing a landmark, or a building in a historic district, requires LPC's approval before the work is done. LPC describes its role as working with owners on changes rather than preventing them, but the approval has to come first.
Searching the house's LPC permits
LPC's Permit Application Search looks up applications and permits by:
- address (house number and street name only),
- the name of the landmark or historic district,
- borough, block and lot, with Brooklyn selected as the borough,
- docket number, if you have one.
It covers applications filed and permits issued since January 1, 2016. For anything older, LPC asks you to make a Records Access Request. Read pending results with care: LPC notes that the work types shown on a pending application are what the applicant described, and may not match the scope LPC finally approves.
Reading the permit type
Each issued LPC permit is one of three types, and the type tells you what kind of work it was:
- Certificate of No Effect (CNE): work that needs a Department of Buildings permit but does not affect the building's protected features, such as interior renovations, plumbing and heating equipment, or rooftop mechanical equipment.
- Permit for Minor Work (PMW): exterior work that does not need a DOB permit and is restorative or appropriate, such as window or door replacement in existing openings, masonry cleaning and brownstone resurfacing.
- Certificate of Appropriateness (C of A): work that affects the protected features or does not conform to LPC's rules, such as additions, demolitions, new construction, or removing a stoop or cornice.
The search also shows whether a permit was approved at staff or Commission level. LPC says about 95% of its permits are issued by staff, without a public hearing; the rest are decided by the full Commission.
Checking for landmark violations
LPC keeps its own enforcement record, separate from DOB's. The Landmark Violation Search shows each violation's status (a Warning Letter, a Notice of Violation or a Summons) and a description of it. Active violations, and those rescinded since January 1, 2020, can also be found on the Permit Application Finder map.
LPC itself says these results are not a substitute for a title search. If something shows up, ask the seller in writing what it was, whether it has been corrected, and how. LPC's Enforcement Department (212-669-7951) can tell you the current status of a violation.
The DOB side
Building work in Brooklyn is recorded by the Department of Buildings in the same two systems the other boroughs use: the older Buildings Information System for historic filings, certificates of occupancy and violations, and DOB NOW for recent filings. The steps are the same in every borough, and our Bronx guide walks through both systems, from finding the block and lot to reading the Property Profile Overview.
On a landmarked house, read the two records side by side. Windows, a stoop, a façade, a roof deck or a rear extension that look recent should have an LPC record from the same period. Where DOB shows the work and LPC shows nothing since 2016, or the reverse, ask the seller when the work was done and whether LPC approved it. If it turns out the work was never approved by either agency, see what you take on with a house that has unpermitted work.
One more record by address: the water line
Brooklyn's row houses and brownstones are the kind of older one- to four-family homes that NYC's Department of Environmental Protection says may still have lead pipes, even though lead service lines have been banned in the city since 1961 and lead in household plumbing since 1987. DEP publishes a Service Line Map you can search by address. One local detail matters to a buyer: in New York City, DEP says homeowners own and are responsible for their service line in its entirety, not just the part on their side of the property line. Our guide to reading a water utility's lead service line record explains what its labels mean, and DEP offers a free lead test kit through 311.
Before you sign
- Check the address on the Permit Application Finder map.
- If it is landmarked or in a historic district, run the LPC permit and violation searches.
- Pull the DOB history in BIS and DOB NOW.
- Look the address up on DEP's Service Line Map.
- Ask the seller, in writing, about any exterior work that appears in one record but not the other.
Some problems show up in enforcement records rather than permit files, which is why checking a property's code violations online is the other half of the search.
What Brooklyn Is Permitting Right Now
For every new single-family house permitted in Brooklyn so far this year, the borough permitted about 382 units in multifamily buildings: 14 houses against 5,346 apartment units. The multifamily side is up 58.3% on the same months last year, which carries the borough total from 3,390 to 5,360 units. If you are buying an existing row house or brownstone, the permit history you pull will be a record of alterations to an old building, and the borough's construction boom is happening almost entirely somewhere else.
Source: US Census Bureau Building Permits Survey, county file, year to date through July 2026 against the same months of 2025. 100% of these units were reported directly by permit offices; the rest are Census estimates for offices that did not report.
Looking Up Permits Elsewhere
Outside New York City the agencies and portals change, but the habit is the same: find out who holds the record, then search every system that might. How to look up building permits by address covers it for any county.