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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

There is square footage on many NYC listings, but it’s wrong. They often have the square footage of the total area occupied by the apartment, including all the interior walls and columns that can take 20% of the area away.

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Wild. In Netherlands (and I assume other European countries as well) there’s a regulatory norm for how spaces should be measured - what counts as liveable, non-liveable, etc. It’s so much fairer and clearer for everyone involved.

https://www.nen.nl/bouw/beheer-en-onderhoud/oppervlaktebepal...

Right? Germany too. I wouldn’t even have thought this could be a problem…

In some countries, like a poster mentioned, they include the “built” size, not the actual liveable size. Sometimes the balconies are included in that, and it is misleading. Two bedrooms in 900sqf liveable is one thing vs 3 bedrooms in 900sqf built area including balconies.

... Huh. This actually explains something I'd been confused about before; people on this site claiming that a 1000sqft apartment was small. Which, I suppose, if you include the entire footprint of the apartment including balconies, sure. It would never have occurred to me to do it like that.

Maybe it’s different for rentals but you’d think the banks would also want accurate data on the properties they’re mortgaging…and cities for tax revenue…so strange!

Why? Banks and cities only care about the price. They also want price to be under and over estimated respectively, neither would want the accurate price, even less so the accurate area.

Are there no property taxes in the US? And how do you know if the price is reasonable without knowing its relationship to the property size?

Well technically, if anything, overstating the area available for rent would increase the paper value of your property, and thus usually your taxes.

There are no US-wide property taxes. However, almost every home in the US has to pay property taxes to at least one level of government. That's what pandaman was referring to when they said the city (which would be levying the taxes) would want the footprint overstated so they could get more tax revenue

There are property taxes in the US, they are levied on the appraisal price of the property, not on the living area. You know the price is reasonable from the comps. As you're overestimating or the appraisal is already at the legal cap (in case of taxes) you don't really care about the living area.

For big commercial rental properties they probably don’t care because it doesn’t really push the property value.

I don’t think it really changes the property value because those interior walls are usually cosmetic and not load bearing. If the bank has to foreclose, the next buyer will be well aware they can strip those walls out for nothing relative to the cost of buying the building.

I’m doubtful it pushes the tax revenue for the same reason, everyone is already evaluating based on what it could be.

Smaller units are probably just not worth the effort to manage. It’s a lot of over head to start auditing old duplexes where the owner has a property or two and isn’t a giant company with a whole compliance department.

Until you measure the apartment later and find out that a) it's much smaller and b) it doesn't matter because you rent the apartment as seen, not as advertised.

Well, in Germany at least - if the living space differs drastically, that is at least 10%, you can lower the rent accordingly and make a demand for a refund of the entire rent you overpaid since you moved in - and you probably should also make a second case for damages due to purposeful deception.

A consumer doesn't buy anything from a business "as seen", that is not a thing over here. There are binding rules to protect consumers from malevolent sellers or landlords, and legal obligations you can't subvert by tricking customers into purchasing something different from what was advertised.

Regulations? That sounds very anti freedom.

Back in the third world I remember my parents looked up the reference price per m^2 in the area and would divide the price by that to estimate the size.

Advertised amounts would be off by 20-25%. When you confronted them about it realtors would just give you the real number, I guess most people wouldn't go through the trouble so it was worth trying for them.

We largely have these regulations in the US too (at the state level), we just don't reuse them. Naturally there are rules about what is livable versus what is not. A balcony is not. A room with no windows isn't even a bedroom. That kind of stuff.

It would be truly trivial to then just transform that to calculating square footage, and many states do just that. But not all. It's a problem of motivation, not necessarily ability or cost.

I didn’t know the square footage of my apartment until I had built an app that utilizes LiDAR to actually measure it. Broker told me 650 square feet - it’s precisely 505 square feet.

(Won’t advertise my app, but you can find many on the iOS App Store).

Would be nice for StreetEasy to have some kind of third party verification about apartment size claims.

Do mention your app! HN only frowns upon astroturfing. If you disclose that it is your app, then it's fine to link to it.

If you are hesitant to mention it in the comments, please consider at least putting it in your profile bio. This sounds like a genuinely useful tool that I would personally want to use myself.

Done. Enjoy!

Louis Rossmann has a number of videos from the period when he was searching for retail space in Manhattan. He would take a laser measure and verify listing info himself. The sf on listings was almost universally not just wrong, but audaciously wrong. "Whatcha gonna do about it?" wrong.

Don't forget about those common areas too! I've seen many cases where hallways, elevators, and stairwells were included in the square footage numbers.

The normal definition of square footage I've seen typically includes hallways and stairs. (Though often not garages.)

Personally, I wish we would normalize including exact floor plans with measurements.

They mean the apartment building hallways and elevators. As in, if you summed the square footage of all the apartments on a floor, you'd get a number greater than the actual dimensions of the floor, because the common areas are counted multiple times.

Could include the size of the pavements fronting the building and the basement with those trash bin also are shared space.

That shouldn’t be the case. In some cases it would also be ridiculous, when the common areas are larger than the apartments themselves (corridors, elevators, technical rooms, etc.). They do include the proportional square footage corresponding to each apartment. But this is still very misleading because some buildings have a lot of common areas that can double the advertised size of the very small apartments.

Oh, I see. Yeah, that's false advertising. "Square footage" of a dwelling should only include your own private space, not any common areas.

They also often include external square footage like balconies which warp it.

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