DOB leads — NYC jobs before the award, who won, violations, heat, boilers, cooling towers, new COs, LL97, public bids

Step by step

1. Sales → DOB leads → Filters first: your trades, boroughs, job types, minimum filed cost, keywords that raise the score and words that hide a job.
2. The overview (the first DOB leads page) shows how many open leads each list has and what is new this week, plus the few worth a call today from each list — Create lead or Not interested right there. Every list has Cards or a compact Table (the switch above the list remembers your choice).
3. Before the award lists DOB NOW filings with one of your trades flagged and no permit pulled for that trade yet. Approved is the hottest stage; the score adds recent movement, filed cost, job type and your keywords.
4. Each card names the owner, the engineer / architect of record and the filing representative (expediter) — the people who know who is bidding. Create lead puts it in Leads with all three in the notes and a follow-up in two days; Not interested hides it.
5. Who won watches every lost bid and lost estimate with an NYC address for 18 months and records the GC and trade contractors that pull permits there after your bid date. When a building has several jobs, pick yours with "This is our job" — the likeliest one is on top. In NYC the mechanical permit is pulled by a registered GC, often the GC itself; then it shows as "pulled by the GC" and is not counted as a competitor.
6. Violations lists open DOB/ECB and DOB violations for your trades — boilers, plumbing and gas, HVAC, sprinklers, fire alarms, energy — with the penalty, the hearing date and the last contractor on the building. Missed inspection filings (mostly the annual boiler inspection) are a list of their own. "Wrong trade" hides a misread one and improves the rules.
7. People (engineers, GCs & competitors) ranks the engineers, expediters, repeat owners, GCs and trade contractors behind the jobs in your filters. On the mechanical list the GCs and CMs that pull their own mechanical permits are hidden — "Show them" brings them back.
8. Follow a firm: Follow next to an engineer, expediter, owner, GC or competitor (on People or on a job page) watches them. Every new DOB NOW job they file and every permit they pull shows on People → Following (last 30 days) and in the next daily digest — even when the digest is switched off for the rest. Following ✓ stops it.
9. Heat & hot water lists apartment buildings HPD has cited for no heat, no hot water, gas shut off, water supply or plumbing (the problems follow your trades), with this month's whole-building tenant complaints, the owner and managing agent registered with HPD and the last boiler / plumbing permit there.
10. Boilers lists buildings whose boilers give you a reason to call, from the DEP boiler registrations and the DOB yearly boiler inspections: still burning No. 4 oil (banned from July 1, 2027), heating with No. 2 oil, defects on the last inspection, a DEP registration about to expire or lapsed. Each card shows the boilers on file, the last inspection and who did it, the owner on the DEP registration and the managing agent registered with HPD.
11. Cooling towers lists every registered cooling tower building in your boroughs with what the health department found on its inspections of the last 18 months — public health hazard, critical and general citations, sampling, maintenance-program or equipment problems. Each tower needs a maintenance program, weekly monitoring, inspections every 90 days and cleaning twice a year, so every building is a service-contract prospect; Cited and Public health hazard come first.
12. New COs lists buildings that got a first temporary or final certificate of occupancy in the last 12 months (renewals left out) — new buildings and big alterations whose new systems now need someone to service them. Each card shows the apartments, the owner, the engineer of record and the contractors who pulled the mechanical, plumbing, boiler and sprinkler permits.
13. Public bids lists City Record solicitations from NYC agencies for your trades — due date, pre-bid, whether a pre-qualified list applies, the agency contact — and, under Awards, who won public MEP work and for how much. Add to Bids puts a solicitation on the Bids board with its due date; without the Bids board it becomes a lead.
14. Every address opens the building page: everything MEPSub holds for that building in one place — reasons to call across all the lists, the owner of record and the managing agent, boilers, DOB filings and violations, HPD, LL97 and the permits pulled there — with Create lead on each item.
15. Jobs you worked from Before the award get an outcome: when the permit for your trade is pulled, the Worked view shows Won or Lost to the contractor who pulled it, the lead gets a note and the next digest says so. Put your company name and DOB licence numbers under Filters → Your company on DOB permits so a permit you pull counts as won.
16. LL97 energy lists buildings of 25,000 sf and up whose own energy benchmarking puts them over the Local Law 97 limit — the estimated yearly penalty now and from 2030, where the emissions come from (gas, oil, steam, electricity) and the owner of record. It is an estimate: buildings with 35%+ rent-regulated units file under Article 321 and pay no fines.
17. Phone and email: licensed contractors (plumbers, GCs, fire suppression, oil burner and others) come with the phone and email from their DOB licence record at no cost — marked "DOB licence". For everyone else "Find phone & email" looks the firm up on Google and on its own website (one click per firm, or the top 8 of a board at once). A lead created afterwards carries what was found.

Tips

• The data refreshes once a day; the digest tells you what is new.
• Contact lookups are for businesses only, kept 30 days, up to 100 a day per company.
• Approved-but-no-permit is a signal, not a guarantee — an owner may already have picked a GC.
• Filed cost is what the permittee declared to DOB — often low, never the contract value.
• An owner who asks not to be contacted: open the job → "Owner asked not to be contacted".