NYBVC

The problem

NYBVC serves a New York compliance services firm that resolves building violations for property owners across the five boroughs. Before the platform, the firm's work began with a phone call: an owner received a city notice, could not tell what it meant or what it would cost, and called to ask.

Establishing what a building actually owed meant looking violations up by hand, one record at a time, then quoting the owner verbally and collecting payment separately. Every quote was a conversation, and every conversation had to be repeated when the owner called back to confirm what they owed.

What we built

NYBVC is a New York City building-violation resolution platform. An owner or staff member searches by BIN, street address or violation number, scoped to a borough. The results come back as a list showing violation type, BIN, street address and dollar amount — a DOB safety failure-to-maintain, an ECB work-without-a-permit, a boiler filing failure — each with the balance attached.

Violations are selected into a cart that carries a running subtotal, so an owner sees the total for a building before committing to anything. From the cart, staff generate an invoice and send the owner a payment link by SMS or WhatsApp. The owner pays from the link without logging in or visiting the site, and the invoice is marked paid with a receipt sent back.

How it works

NYBVC reads violation data from NYC Open Data's public Socrata API. Building violations come from the OATH hearings dataset as the primary source, with DOB safety violations queried by BIN and ECB records used to enrich them. This is a read-only integration against public datasets: NYBVC does not file with, integrate with, or connect to any NYC DOB or ECB filing system.

Lookups hit the city API live so a search reflects current data, and results are cached briefly to absorb repeated queries. Bulk work runs separately: a nightly Sidekiq job fetches the previous day's DOB ECB violations and enriches them with PLUTO owner data, and a second job reconciles Square invoice status and sends paid receipts. Imports run on Sidekiq so a slow or failing city dataset never blocks an owner's lookup. Records carry a last-synced timestamp and are re-fetched only when more than 24 hours old, so staleness is handled per record rather than by re-importing everything.

Payments run through Square, which issues the hosted invoice and its public payment URL. Message delivery runs through Twilio for both channels — SMS uses a Twilio Messaging Service for A2P 10DLC compliance, and WhatsApp uses Twilio's WhatsApp channel. Pay-by-link was chosen because the owner receiving the invoice is often not a platform user: the link reaches someone who never visits the site and requires no account to pay.

The result

NYBVC replaced a phone-and-quote process with a lookup, a cart and a payment link. An owner's balance across a building is now established in a single search rather than assembled by hand, and payment is collected through a link delivered to the owner's phone rather than arranged over a call.