Know before you sign
Search your address and feel confident about your next home.
OpenLease helps you inspect the history of complaints and code violations for long-term rentals. We generate a risk score that reflects the property's management quality so you have peace of mind in choosing your next home.
How to read what you find
A quick guide to where this data comes from and what the numbers on a property page actually mean.
It starts with public records, not reviews
Every complaint and violation you'll see comes straight from your city's own rental registration and code-enforcement databases — the same records a housing inspector works from. Nothing here is self-reported by a landlord or crowdsourced from a review.
We turn that history into one risk score
We average a property's yearly complaint and violation counts, weighting recent years more heavily so old, resolved issues fade over time, then divide by the number of units so a large building isn't penalized just for having more tenants able to file complaints, and scale the result to a fixed 0-100 range. Higher means more history of trouble — it's a signal to look closer, not a legal judgment.
Every property page reads the same way
Open issues are always shown before resolved ones, most recent first, with a colored pill so you can tell them apart at a glance. The risk score sits alongside a plain count of open vs. total issues, so you can see the number behind the score.
Example property page
4210 Fremont Ave N
Seattle, WA · 6 units
Risk score
74
Open issues
3 of 8
Heating: Building Maintenance
Opened March 2, 2025
Plumbing: Code Compliance
Opened January 14, 2024 · Updated August 3, 2024
Illustrative example — not a real address or record.
Why we built this
Quality isn't a walk score. It's how a landlord treats the people who live there.
Most rental sites rate a place by measuring the building — transit access, distance to downtown, the finishes in the listing photos. We think that misses what actually matters once you live somewhere: whether repairs get made, whether code violations get resolved instead of ignored, and whether the landlord is accountable to the city at all. That history is already public. OpenLease just makes it visible, in one place, before you sign anything — so the decision is yours to make, not the listing's to spin.
What other sites measure
- Walk score and transit access
- Distance to downtown
- Amenities and finishes
What we measure
- Whether complaints get resolved, and how fast
- Whether code violations recur or actually clear up
- A landlord's public track record, not their listing copy