Here’s Why It’s So Hard to Find Your Landlord’s Name in NYC

Late last year I got a press release from Attorney General Tish James’s office announcing that they had won a big settlement against one of New York’s worst landlords. I see hundreds of similar emails every week, but this one was different — they were talking about my landlord. Lilmor Management, the company named in the suit for exposing more than 130 kids to lead paint, was the name I wrote on my checks every month.

Except the person identified in the settlement as the head of the company, Morris Lieberman, wasn’t a name I’d heard before. I moved into my building in 2021 and had always thought my landlord was Jason Korn because my address appeared under his name on the city’s list of worst landlords. Korn was notorious. Not only had he topped the list in 2020 and 2021, he’d been sued by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development and made headlines over the squalid conditions in his buildings. (Korn ultimately settled.) Whenever the leak in my bathroom ceiling came back, I cursed Korn. When I could hear mice in my radiators, I cursed Korn. But as I learned in the settlement, Korn wasn’t my landlord, he was just an “agent” of Lilmor.

I was confused. I reached out to the attorney general’s office, who told me that while Korn might make money on my building, maybe through shares or a trust, he doesn’t own it.

What does this mean? I understood that landlording in New York was opaque, but I figured my particular landlord, since he was quite notorious, was at least a known entity. But as I dug more, I learned that in place of one guy in a suit, the big landlords across the city are often a nesting doll of many guys in many suits behind mazes of LLCs and management companies, through layers of employees and agents. It’s a system that protects wealth and shields against consequence — and, in my case, appropriately addressed scorn. Or as one housing researcher described the system we have in place, “I think the thing to say is, if landlords want to hide, they can hide.”

Unlike Korn, Lieberman is a relative unknown. Before the attorney-general settlement, a Google search pulls up almost nothing — he’s only mentioned in a few small lawsuits. But it’s Lieberman, according to the state, “who bears ultimate responsibility” for the conditions in his buildings — and his buildings were deplorable. As I learned from the settlement, children were repeatedly exposed to lead paint in the 2,500 apartments Lieberman owns or manages. His firm’s repeated failure to comply with the city’s lead-paint laws and the subsequent legal action taken against him also explained why workers poured into my apartment last September, completely unannounced, to tear out the doorframes in the name of lead remediation. I was put out of my apartment for days without so much as an explanation.

Other tenants experienced considerably worse. One, dealing with a leak, wrote to Lilmor Management: “It looks like the ceiling may collapse.” A few hours later, they wrote again: “The ceiling has collapsed.” Another sent photos of mold covering the entire wall of his child’s bedroom. In a rare appearance, Lieberman himself responded to an email detailing 30 heat complaints from tenants with one word: “And?” (Lieberman did not respond to a request for comment.)

One of the ways the city goes after these kinds of landlords, besides fines and lawsuits, is public shame. The public advocate’s annual Worst Landlord list ranks owners by the average number of open HPD violations they have per building, and the idea is to put a face and a name to the conditions people are living in under their watch. The problem with the list, though, is that landlords self-report ownership details to HPD. And since the overwhelming majority of large rental buildings are owned by LLCs, names are even more hidden. (JustFix, a nonprofit that builds tools for tenant organizers, found that 95 percent of buildings in the city with between ten and 19 units had a corporate owner listed; for larger buildings, with 20 or more units, that number is 98 percent.)

One glance at HPD’s online portal and you can see that the “names” of many owners are just listed as an LLC. There’s a head officer named, but that could be anyone associated with the corporation — a super, a building manager, a family member. (For example, the person officially listed as the head officer of my building is neither Korn nor Lieberman.) Is this legal? It was a harder question to answer than I thought. HPD pointed me to a rule that states if the owner of a property is a corporation or partnership they must list the name of “any person” or “limited partner” whose share of ownership of corporation exceeds 25 percent. This seemed straightforward enough — so why wasn’t Morris Lieberman’s name listed anywhere when it came to my building? John Kaehny, the head of the government transparency group Reinvent Albany, pointed out that under the city’s building code, a “person” is defined as “an individual, partnership, corporation, or other legal entity.” So an LLC’s “owners” could simply be other LLCs. “The ridiculousness you’re having trouble with,” Kaehny explains, “is the definition of person in New York City building and real estate law.” (When I tried to confirm this with HPD, they simply reiterated that individuals or entities required to comply with the law are … well, required to comply with the law.) Either way, it was clear that in practice, the personal names of true owners were often not being listed. “If you’re just getting it from HPD registrations then it’s very likely not a factual human being’s name.” Joel Stillman, co-executive director of JustFix, said.

Here’s more of what that weirdness looks like in practice: In 2023, Johnathan Santana was named as the city’s “worst landlord.” But he was actually just the “head officer” of the LLCs for the buildings that were actually owned by notorious landlord Daniel Ohebshalom, who has been jailed twice for his flagrant refusal to address the conditions in his buildings. This year, Melanie Martin, who was number four on the public advocate’s list, was named as the head officer for many of the Ohebshalom’s buildings. “This is specifically to try to evade folks like the public advocate’s office, government, and tenants to find out who owns that building,” Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said when he revealed this year’s list in January. (The unreliability of the list is basically written into the project, per their site: “It is the responsibility of building owners to ensure that the building’s registration is up to date and correct. The Office of the Public Advocate is not liable for incorrect registration information.”)

One of JustFix’s tools, Who Owns What, is the best way to piece together a landlord’s portfolio (even HPD pointed me to them). But it’s also based on scraping publicly available HPD data, so it still has to rely on self-reported ownership data. Stillman says ACRIS, the city’s property records system, is one way to try to identify the people and parties with a financial stake in your building, but it requires flipping through the actual PDF of the deed or mortgage and seeing who signed. When I looked mine up, lo and behold, Lieberman’s name came up. (Even more confirmation — Lilmor Management is a portmanteau of Morris and his wife, Lillian, who shares ownership of the management firm with her husband.)

More maddening? Even this may not be the end of the chain of ownership, says Jacob Udell, a researcher at the University Neighborhood Housing Program. A deed or mortgage listed on ACRIS will only give you one name when a building might have multiple investors behind it. “Sometimes the landlord is the landlord,” Udell says, but the name listed on the documents “could be the front for a bunch of investors who are never named anywhere.” He points out that landlords aren’t necessarily using individual building LLC’s to hide — it’s also the easiest way for them to get financing. There are also tax benefits and liability protections. The result is that landlords have an incentive to create hierarchies of individual LLCs for their buildings, which are in turn owned by other LLCs, which may then be owned by other LLCs. “The more nesting of LLCs there are, the harder it is and longer it takes to figure out who actually owns this thing,” Kaehny says. (Even if an overstretched agency like HPD wanted to figure out who was benefiting financially from a building, it would be incredibly difficult.) “I’ve been suing people for years and you never actually figure out who the owner is,” John Montoute, director of Bronx Legal Services’ tenants-rights coalition, said. “It’s always an agent who shows up.”

There have, of course, been attempts to bring some daylight to these ownership structures. In December 2023, Kathy Hochul signed the LLC Transparency Act, which would create a database of beneficial owners of limited liability companies. This law has only become more important as similar federal legislation stalled in court. But after a pressure campaign from the real estate industry, including REBNY and developer Tishman Speyer, the governor cut the part of the bill that would make the database publicly accessible, meaning certain government agencies can know who your landlord is, but you still can’t.

According to Kaehny, the opposition to the New York State law came from the high-end New York City condo market (where money laundering abounds) and small landlords who complained that the bill would expose them. “We heard again and again that people who owned one or two apartment buildings in the Bronx or Manhattan were afraid of retaliation from tenants,” says Kaehny. “But frankly no other small businesses expect to do business and be secretive.”

Now, only government agencies and police will be able to access the database, which could be helpful if your landlord is awful enough to attract the attention of the attorney general’s office, but not if you’re just a regular tenant trying to figure out whose house you want to picket after your third winter with no heat. “The law had zero effect for tenants since we can’t access the information publicly and therefore are in the same position we were before the LLC Act,” tenant organizer Jackie del Valle tells me.

It was only through some legal maneuvering by the state that I now knew who my landlord was — or I sort of did. This information felt like a special gem. Tenants, especially those living in big buildings, are so far removed from their landlords — between you there’s a super, a manager, a management company, a faceless LLC you write in on your checks — that it can start to feel like you’re just throwing your money into a void every month. (A friend recently moved and couldn’t get a reference letter from her landlord because she didn’t have a name, phone number, or address for them beyond the PO Box where she sent her checks.) There’s something cathartic about putting a name to your housing misery, which is probably why so many of us are trying. There’s also something strategic about it — even if it turns out to be a bunch of names all at once.