New York City closings order roughly the same bundle: fifteen municipal line items, numbered the way the industry menus number them. Most of the people who pay for the package have never read the menu. I produce these searches in software, so here is what each line item actually answers, which agency's records answer it, why the package costs what it costs, and what changes when the production method is a database instead of a runner.
The fifteen line items, by menu number
I keep the industry menu as a registry in code. Fifteen entries. Fourteen carry menu numbers and are produced from held data. One does not, for a reason I'll get to.
1. Tax Search. What is open against the property on the city's tax ledger. The Department of Finance's property-charge records answer it, and the current official Digital Tax Map sheet for the block is attached directly behind the search. Water and sewer are separate, because DEP removed detailed water data from the public record in May 2020, so that figure is entered by the preparer and labeled that way.
2. Housing and Building Violation Search. What violations attach to the building right now. Two agencies answer it: the Department of Buildings on the construction side and HPD on the housing-maintenance side.
3. OATH/ECB Violation Search. Whether the property carries open summonses at OATH, the city's administrative tribunal, which older paperwork still calls the Environmental Control Board. Resolved history exists too, but the search leads with what is open, because open is what a closing has to clear.
4. Certificate of Occupancy Search. What the building is legally certified to be used as. DOB's certificate feeds answer it, backstopped by the BIS document index, and the actual scanned certificates ride behind the search. A building finished before 1938 may lawfully have no certificate at all, and the document says so rather than implying one exists.
5. Fire Department Violation. FDNY summonses, which are adjudicated at OATH. There is also a historical violation-orders file frozen in 2019 whose current status FDNY no longer publishes, and the search discloses that instead of certifying over it.
6. Emergency Repair Search. Whether the city did work at the building and billed the owner. HPD's emergency-repair charge records answer it, the modern successor of the printed Lien Book, along with vacate orders. This is the line item that turns a heat complaint into a charge against the property.
7. Minor Permit and Alteration Search. Whether there is open, unfinished permitted work at the premises. DOB's permit records answer it.
8. Street Report. Whether the street in front of the premises is legally mapped, at what width, and whether the city has altered the map. The Department of City Planning's digital City Map answers it, and the alteration sheets themselves are attached as available.
9. Highway/Sidewalk Violation. Whether the Department of Transportation has cited the sidewalk. The obligation to repair a sidewalk runs with the property, which is why the buyer's side cares.
10. Air Resources Search. Asbestos filings and air-permit activity. The Department of Environmental Protection's records answer it: ACP-7 asbestos filings plus CATS permits and registrations.
11. Fuel Oil Permit. The record of permits for a fuel oil burner and related equipment, from the city's equipment-permit records plus DEP's fuel-side records.
12. Health Department Violation. DOHMH summonses, adjudicated at OATH. Window-guard enforcement is the quirk here: it does not appear in the health feed at all, it surfaces as HPD housing-maintenance violations citing the window-guard section of the Housing Maintenance Code, so that is where the search looks.
13. Landmark. Whether the premises is a designated landmark or sits inside a historic district, which changes what an owner may alter. The Landmarks Preservation Commission's designation records answer it, plus any LPC summonses at OATH.
14. Zoning Information. District, overlays, and floor-area ratios from the Department of City Planning's zoning records. Informational only. It is not a certificate of zoning compliance and does not determine legal use.
Survey Inspection Report. The fifteenth line item, and the one with no menu number in my registry, because it is not a search. A survey is fieldwork. Somebody walks the property. In my product it is an upload slot, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
Why it costs what it costs
On a published five-borough rate card, the wholesale municipal bundle runs roughly $58 to $80 per file. Downstream, the same package typically bills at $200 to $600. Industry turnaround is one to five days, inside a closing cycle that commits six to fifteen.
I am not naming the firm and I am not calling the price wrong. The price is an honest reflection of the production method. A runner physically enters a municipal office. An analyst reads a different record system per agency, each with its own identifiers, and reconciles them by hand. Runners and analysts cost what they cost, and one to five days is honest for that method.
The question worth asking is a different one. Does the method have to stay manual now that most of the underlying records are open data?
What changes when the production is software over held data
My version of the package is assembled from records already ingested and normalized to the parcel. The assembly step that produces all fourteen searches is roughly forty SQL queries against one local file, with zero network calls in that step. Measured on my side, July 28, 2026: the chain of title takes about 0.4 seconds, liens about 0.2, tax assessment facts about 50 milliseconds, violations about 0.3, and the rest of the menu, fire, health, air, fuel oil, landmark and zoning, about 0.4 seconds. A warm PDF render is five to fifteen seconds.
Two scope notes, because those numbers describe the assembly and not the whole deliverable. Tax arrears are the one thing I refuse to serve from the held file: the ingested charge rows are wrong by construction, so arrears come live from the city behind a seven-day cache, and I would rather wait than print a stale balance on a title document. And the attachments, the scanned certificates, the recorded document images, the official tax map sheet, are live government pulls behind long caches with their own time budgets. A cold package with everything attached takes minutes, not seconds.
One more, since coverage honesty is the whole game in this trade. This is a five-borough menu. Where I do not hold a county's records, the search prints not covered rather than a quiet blank, because no rows in a county I do not ingest is not the same claim as none found. Coverage is deep for New York City, thinner for New Jersey and upstate New York, and New Jersey owner names are blank by law.
The boundary
This is a data deliverable for an examiner. It prints instruments as recorded: the deed chain, the mortgages, the assignments, the releases, in the order the City Register recorded them. It does not decide whether a mortgage is open or satisfied, because that is a conclusion, and a conclusion is something an examiner signs. It is not a title opinion and it is not insurance.
That rule is written into the code that assembles the document, not into a footnote. The assembler's ground rules read, verbatim: "No open/satisfied mortgage verdicts. Instruments as recorded; the examiner concludes."
I hold the records. The examiner concludes. That division of labor is the product.
If you order or produce these packages for a living, the Title Search Abstract is live at regwatch.nyc. Run an address you already closed and compare it line for line.