Who Really Owns Oswego?

Property ownership is public record — but it's scattered across thousands of tax filings nobody reads. So we read them. We mapped all 6,875 tax parcels in the City of Oswego by their owner of record, then cross-referenced a decade of city code-complaint records. Here's what the data says about who actually owns this city.

Oswego has about 5,150 distinct property owners for its 6,875 parcels — which means most people here own exactly one thing: their home. But a small group sits at the other end of the scale, holding dozens of properties each. These are the landlords behind a big share of the city's rental housing, and most renters have no easy way to find out who they are or what's on file for the place they're about to sign a lease on. Click any name below to open that owner's full portfolio, parcel by parcel.

The biggest landlords in Oswego, ranked

Ranked by number of tax parcels owned, excluding government, utility, and institutional owners. The last two columns count city code complaints filed against those properties since 2016 — everything from rental-permit filings to property-maintenance and structural violations — and how many remain open.

*"Open" counts complaints whose most recent city report showed no compliance date. The city doesn't publish a running closed/open status, so this is a snapshot — some of these are likely resolved by now. Lee Walker's holdings also appear under three name spellings (see "the spelling problem" below). Assessed value is the city's tax figure, not market value. Click any owner to open their full portfolio.

Charles Burger: the man who owns 75 pieces of Oswego

No single private owner in Oswego comes close to Charles Burger. The records put 75 parcels in his name — 38 single-family homes, 17 two-family houses, a row of attached buildings, and a scattering of vacant lots — assessed together at about $6.6 million. He owns clusters of six properties each on East Fourth, East Tenth, and East Bridge Streets. If you rent in Oswego, there's a real chance your landlord, or your neighbor's, is Burger.

That scale comes with a paper trail: 230 city code complaints have been filed against Burger-owned properties since 2016, 96 still listed open in city files. Spread across 75 properties over a decade, that's not the worst rate in the city — but it's a reminder that one person's decisions shape the condition of a whole lot of Oswego housing.

The complaint kings: when a few properties generate hundreds of cases

The most revealing numbers aren't always at the top of the ownership list. Some of the heaviest complaint records belong to landlords with far fewer properties — which means the complaints are concentrated.

For balance: not every big landlord carries a big complaint load. Matthew J. Brancato owns 23 properties — including a remarkable 15 on a single street — yet has just 7 complaints on record. Scale and problems don't always travel together, and the records let you tell the difference instead of guessing.

The street takeover: one landlord, 15 houses, one block

Some landlords don't just own a lot of properties — they own them next to each other. Matthew Brancato owns 15 residential parcels on East Second Street alone. Truax Realty LP holds 12 on Lincoln Avenue. Litatro Holdings has seven on West Fifth Street; Charles Burger has clusters of six on three different streets. For a renter, this is the difference between disliking your landlord and discovering that the same person owns half your block.

The rental-permit problem: 1,311 properties, no permit

Oswego requires a permit to rent out a property. The records show that requirement is honored in the breach: there have been 2,239 "no rental permit" citations covering 1,311 distinct properties — close to one in five parcels in the entire city. Several of the biggest owners appear repeatedly in that column. Whether you read it as lax enforcement, widespread non-compliance, or both, it's one of the clearest signals in the data of how Oswego's rental market actually operates.

The names behind the names: LLCs and the spelling problem

Two things make it genuinely hard to know who your landlord is.

First, LLCs. Litatro Holdings, V&T Homes, Oswego Rental Properties, Home Renew, Oswego Dama — some of the largest holders in the city are limited-liability companies whose names reveal nothing about the people behind them. That opacity is legal and common, but it's also why a tool that links an LLC to all of its properties in one click matters.

Second, spelling. Deeds record names exactly as written, so the same person can be split across variations. "Lee Walker," "Lee B. Walker," and "Lee B. Walker Jr" appear as three separate owners in the raw records — but together they account for roughly 41 parcels, which would place that name second in the whole city. Wherever you see fragmentation like this, the real concentration of ownership is higher than any single row suggests.

Not every big owner is a landlord

One name on the list deserves an asterisk in the other direction. Lazarek, Inc holds 36 parcels — and zero complaints. The reason: 33 of them are vacant residential lots in a subdivision the company developed, on streets that include one literally named Lazarek Drive. It's a useful reminder that "owns the most parcels" and "biggest landlord" aren't the same thing — and that the records reward a careful read, which is the whole idea here.

What this means if you rent in Oswego

A handful of owners control a meaningful slice of Oswego's housing. Knowing who they are — and seeing every property and complaint tied to them in one click — is exactly what public records are for.

Before you sign a lease, you can look up the exact address and see the owner of record, how many other properties they hold, and what's been filed against them. It takes about thirty seconds and it's free. The records were always public; they just weren't usable. Now they are.

How we built this (and what to keep in mind)

This analysis aggregates the City of Oswego's public tax-assessment roll (6,875 parcels) by the owner name on each parcel, as of June 2026, and joins it to the city's code-complaint records (about 20,600 complaints, 2016–2026) by parcel. A few honest caveats:

• A complaint is a filed report, not a verdict. The records include rental-permit filings, minor maintenance items, duplicates, and cases that may since be resolved. We don't characterize any property as unsafe.
• "Open" is a snapshot, not a live status. The city publishes monthly violation reports but no running open/closed ledger, so we mark a complaint "open" when its most recent report showed no compliance date. Older "open" complaints are often already resolved — treat the open counts as an upper bound.
• Government, utility, and institutional owners are excluded from the landlord ranking. (For the record, the City of Oswego, the Oswego County IDA, and National Grid are each among the largest holders overall.)
• Owners can appear under more than one spelling, so some real holdings are larger than a single row shows.
• Assessed value is not market value — it's the figure the city uses for taxes.

Every figure here is drawn from public records you can inspect yourself. Click any owner above to see the underlying properties, or search any address to start from the other end.