Manhattan
77% of units in elevator buildings, the densest co-op market in the country, and landmark districts on half the good blocks.
Where we work
Five boroughs, both Long Island counties, and Westchester
One service area, drawn around a day’s driving. Inside it, a standard site survey costs nothing. Outside it, we’ll tell you honestly that somebody closer will serve you better.
The area, plainly
What the service area actually is
Not a marketing radius. The places we can reach, work in and come back to when something needs adjusting.
We cover Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island; Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island; and Westchester County. That is the whole list. We do not work in New Jersey, Connecticut, Rockland or upstate, and we would rather say so on this page than take a deposit and hand you off.
Distance is rarely the real constraint in this trade. A job in Great Neck and a job in Midtown are about the same drive from most of the city; what separates them is that one has a driveway and the other has no loading zone, a 4 p.m. freight elevator cutoff and a security desk that wants every vendor’s paperwork on file two days before anybody arrives. Scheduling around that is most of what makes a New York install run late, so we ask about it during the survey rather than discovering it on install day.
Roughly 80% of New York City’s housing stock predates 1974: of 3,705,000 units citywide, about 2,017,000 were built before 1947 and only around 175,000 since 2010. Practically every job in this service area is a retrofit into a building that was finished before anyone imagined a Cat6 run, and the survey exists to find out what that building will actually allow.
Why the borough matters
One number changes the whole job
The share of housing units in a building with an elevator is the cleanest predictor of what an access-control job in that borough will look like. It varies by a factor of nearly eight across the five boroughs.
| Borough | Units in elevator buildings | Units up a flight of stairs | What that makes the job |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manhattan | 77% | 17% | Elevator readers, floor restriction, attended lobbies, co-op boards |
| The Bronx | 54% | 21% | Mid-rise pre-war elevator multifamily, at portfolio scale |
| Brooklyn | 34% | 33% | Walk-up and brownstone retrofit, the highest walk-up share in the city |
| Queens | 31% | 23% | Two-family houses, driveways, and low-rise campuses with dozens of entrances |
| Staten Island | 10% | 10% | Detached single-family, garages, driveway gates. Almost no intercom market |
Shares of occupied housing units, 2023 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey. Rows do not sum to 100% because a large share of units (54% in Manhattan, 24% in Queens) are reached from the sidewalk with no steps at all.
Borough and county pages
Pick where the building is
Each of these is written around that place’s actual building stock, not a template with the name swapped out.
Brooklyn
362,500 walk-up units, stoop-and-vestibule double doors, and more row-house historic districts than anywhere else in the city.
Queens
Two-family houses with four separate openings each, driveway gates, garages, and garden co-op campuses.
The Bronx
Pre-war elevator multifamily at volume, the city’s highest violation rate, and vandal-resistant hardware as a baseline spec.
Staten Island
Detached houses, driveways, detached garages and flood-zone equipment siting. One homeowner decides, not a board.
Long Island
Nassau and Suffolk: single-family, village commercial strips, school districts and office parks.
Westchester County
Six cities and twenty-three villages, from Yonkers apartment stock to corporate campuses on the I-287 corridor.
The rest of the map
Towns, villages and neighborhoods with their own page
Long Island: Nassau County and Suffolk County, and within them Hempstead, Garden City, Great Neck, Long Beach, Rockville Centre, Huntington, Babylon, Islip and Smithtown.
Westchester: Yonkers, White Plains, New Rochelle, Mount Vernon and Scarsdale.
City neighborhoods where the building stock is distinct enough to be worth its own page: Upper East Side and Harlem in Manhattan; Williamsburg, Park Slope and Bay Ridge in Brooklyn; Astoria, Flushing and Forest Hills in Queens; and Riverdale in the Bronx.
Everywhere else inside the counties and boroughs named above is covered too. There is no page for Ozone Park or Pelham Bay or Wantagh because we have nothing genuinely different to tell you about them yet, and a page that only swaps the place name is worth less than no page at all.
Outside the five boroughs the technical work is much the same and the approval layer is not. The New York City Administrative Code and the Landmarks Preservation Commission stop at the city line. In Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester you are dealing with a town or village building department instead, and in counties with dozens of incorporated villages that can mean a different set of rules every few miles. The property type shifts too: outside the city the typical job is a single-family house, a village storefront, a school district building or an office park, so the questions become driveways, parking lots, cable runs between separate structures and weather exposure rather than risers, vestibules and board packages.
Coverage
The whole service area
Standard site surveys are free anywhere on this list.
New York City
5 boroughs areas- Manhattan
- Brooklyn
- Queens
- The Bronx
- Staten Island
Nassau County
2 cities, 64 villages areas- Hempstead
- North Hempstead
- Oyster Bay
- Glen Cove
- Long Beach
- Garden City
- Great Neck
- Rockville Centre
- Mineola
- Freeport
- Valley Stream
- Lynbrook
- Westbury
- Roslyn
- Port Washington
- Manhasset
- Massapequa
- Levittown
- Hicksville
- Plainview
- Syosset
- Bethpage
- Merrick
- Bellmore
- Wantagh
- Seaford
- Oceanside
- East Meadow
- Uniondale
- Elmont
- Franklin Square
- New Hyde Park
- Floral Park
- Woodmere
- Cedarhurst
- Lawrence
- Sea Cliff
- Locust Valley
- Old Westbury
- Jericho
Suffolk County
10 towns areas- Huntington
- Babylon
- Islip
- Smithtown
- Brookhaven
- Riverhead
- Southampton
- East Hampton
- Southold
- Shelter Island
- Northport
- Commack
- Dix Hills
- Melville
- Bay Shore
- Brentwood
- Central Islip
- Hauppauge
- Deer Park
- Lindenhurst
- West Babylon
- Patchogue
- Port Jefferson
- Stony Brook
- Setauket
- Centereach
- Selden
- Medford
- Holbrook
- Ronkonkoma
- Sayville
- Shirley
- Mastic
- Riverhead
- Westhampton Beach
- Sag Harbor
- Greenport
- Montauk
Westchester County
6 cities, 23 villages areas- Yonkers
- White Plains
- New Rochelle
- Mount Vernon
- Peekskill
- Rye
- Scarsdale
- Harrison
- Port Chester
- Larchmont
- Mamaroneck
- Tarrytown
- Sleepy Hollow
- Bronxville
- Eastchester
- Tuckahoe
- Hastings-on-Hudson
- Dobbs Ferry
- Irvington
- Ardsley
- Elmsford
- Pleasantville
- Briarcliff Manor
- Ossining
- Croton-on-Hudson
- Mount Kisco
- Bedford
- Chappaqua
- Armonk
- Rye Brook
The free survey, and its one limit
A standard site survey anywhere inside the service area costs nothing. We come to the building, open the riser or the panel, count and ring out the existing pairs, look at the doors and their hardware, check power and network, photograph what we find, and write it up. You get that document whether or not you hire us.
What we charge for is destructive or diagnostic investigation: opening finished walls, dismantling a riser, or a full point-to-point continuity test across a large legacy system. That is real labor over real hours, and we quote it separately and in writing before we touch anything.
FAQ
Common questions
Do you charge for travel inside the service area?
No. The survey is free and travel to the job is priced into the scope, not added afterwards as a line item that grows because traffic on the Cross Bronx was bad.
Two things we do flag in writing when they apply: metered or garage parking where there is no legal place to leave a van for a working day, and buildings that charge for freight elevator operation or a security desk attendant while work is going on. Both are building costs, both are knowable at survey, and neither should ever appear as a surprise on an invoice.
We’re just outside the area. Will you still come?
Sometimes, for larger scopes or for a client whose other buildings are already inside the area. Ask and we’ll give you a straight answer the same day.
For a single door in Rockland County or northern New Jersey the honest answer is usually no, and it is not about the drive. It is about the return visit. Low-voltage work generates small callbacks: a station that needs re-aiming, a strike that needs its gap reset after the door settles, a firmware update that changes a menu. If we cannot get back to you inside a day or two without rearranging a week, you are better served by someone local.
Does the same crew work in every borough, or do you subcontract?
The person who surveys your building is the person who does the work. There is no sales rep who scopes the job and hands a drawing to a stranger, which is where a large share of failed installs in this city actually originate.
What changes borough to borough is the hardware short-list, not the crew. A vandal-resistant flush stainless panel that is the right call in a Grand Concourse lobby is the wrong call on a landmarked Park Slope parlor door, and a driveway gate operator that makes sense in Whitestone has no application in a Midtown tower.
Which parts of the service area have the most legal constraints?
Anything inside a Landmarks Preservation Commission historic district. Citywide the LPC protects more than 37,900 properties across 150 historic districts, and any street-visible change (an intercom faceplate, a camera housing, surface conduit, a pedestal reader, replacement entry door hardware) needs an LPC permit before a Department of Buildings filing. The three routes are a Certificate of No Effect, a Permit for Minor Work, or a Certificate of Appropriateness, and they are not interchangeable.
The second constraint is life safety. Any electrically locked door in an egress path has to release the way the code says it does, and that is decided by the door and the occupancy, not by preference. We tell you which of the two constraints your job is going to hit before we quote it, because both of them cost time rather than money and time is the part people fail to plan for.
Do you work outside New York State at all?
No. New Jersey and Connecticut are close enough to be tempting and far enough that we could not support the work properly, and both have their own licensing regimes for this trade.
If you have a portfolio that straddles the state line, we are happy to scope and document the New York properties to a standard your out-of-state contractor can match (same hardware, same credential format, same labeling convention) so your buildings do not end up on four incompatible platforms.
Related
Work that usually comes with this
Intercom Systems
Installation, repair and replacement of entry intercoms, from a six-unit walk-up buzzer to a 200-unit IP video system.
Access Control
Fobs, cards, keypads and phone-based credentials, plus the locking hardware and egress compliance behind them.
Security Cameras
IP camera systems designed around identification distance and retention, not camera count.
Low Voltage & Cabling
The Cat6, fibre, risers, racks and wireless that everything else depends on.
Property Management
Portfolio work: one vendor, consistent hardware, COIs on file, documented every time.
Tell us the address.
The building’s address tells us most of what we need to guess at before we arrive: age, stock, likely riser, likely landmark status. Send it with the symptoms and we’ll book a free survey.
Sun to Thu 9am to 5pm · Fri 9am to 12pm · Sat closed