If you own NYC real estate and you're still checking BIS for violations, you're checking the wrong system. As of 2026, DOB NOW is the primary platform through which the Department of Buildings processes new enforcement actions, civil penalties, and compliance filings. BIS, the older system, is effectively a historical archive. The problem: many owners don't realize the switch happened, and they're learning about violations only when penalties have already escalated.

What DOB NOW is

DOB NOW is the Department of Buildings' digital platform for filing permits, tracking safety violations, submitting facade inspection reports, and managing building compliance records online. Rolled out in phases starting in 2016, it now handles the vast majority of enforcement activity in all five boroughs. If a violation is issued on your building today, it almost certainly lives in DOB NOW — not in BIS.

The critical difference for owners

A building can have active violations, safety penalties, or failed facade inspections that appear only in DOB NOW. If your monitoring process is built around BIS, or around occasionally checking the city's public-facing lookup tool, you will miss things. And by the time you find them, the penalties have been compounding.

The facade problem

DOB NOW: Safety handles facade inspection filings under FISP (Local Law 11). Facade violations are among the most financially punishing in the entire NYC compliance landscape. A building that ignores a FISP filing deadline for a full year can accumulate over $17,000 in penalties before a single dollar is spent on actual remediation. Those penalties become enforceable liens. An UNSAFE rating triggers an immediate obligation to barricade the sidewalk and begin emergency repairs — failure to act creates not just DOB penalties but real civil liability if anyone is injured.

Where DOB NOW penalties hit hardest

Manhattan: highest concentration of FISP-eligible buildings (six stories or more) and the most active facade compliance filings. Pre-war masonry buildings — brick, terra cotta, limestone — need especially close monitoring. Brooklyn: rapidly growing permit filings due to the outer-borough development surge. Crown Heights, Flatbush, and Bushwick are showing high elevator violation activity in pre-war multifamily buildings.

How to monitor DOB NOW properly

Manual lookups work for a one-time check. They become unmanageable for owners with multiple properties. The DOB NOW datasets are available through NYC Open Data and can be queried in real time — which is how serious monitoring is done. The owners who avoid surprises aren't the ones who check the website occasionally; they're the ones whose properties are pulled continuously from the source data, with alerts the moment something changes.

Bottom line

DOB NOW is where your real compliance reality lives in 2026. If you're not monitoring it in real time, you're flying blind on the most consequential agency in NYC real estate. That's the work we do continuously, across every building in your portfolio, so the answer to "anything new on my property?" is always already known.