Sale at 52 East 78th Street #3ABC

I am issuing a challenge to the SE community to come up with any listing where the misrepresentation is more complete than in this case. It is a sad comment on the RE brokerage business that my challenge will probably be met. Where even to begin... - listing claims 3,000sf. If you draw a rectangle around the whole outer perimeter of the footprint, the dimensions are about 37' x 80-odd', or approx.... [more]

I am issuing a challenge to the SE community to come up with any listing where the misrepresentation is more complete than in this case. It is a sad comment on the RE brokerage business that my challenge will probably be met. Where even to begin... - listing claims 3,000sf. If you draw a rectangle around the whole outer perimeter of the footprint, the dimensions are about 37' x 80-odd', or approx. 3,000sf. The terrace is a third of that and the two sections either side of the 'waist' of the floorplan are something north of 400sf, leaving (maybe) 1,600 interior sf. Roughly 700 in the living area, 700 in the bedrooms/bathrooms and a couple of hundred in the kitchen/hallway 'waist' in between - this is listed as a 6 room apartment, where in fact there are four - living room, kitchen, 2BR. How does this one even pass the red face test? A: It does not - terrace is described as 1,000sf where even by the broker's measurements it's 900 - all of this is even before one starts to wonder if there might, just possibly, be any reason to doubt the integrity on the broker's measurements. Or maybe the better question is whether there is any reason to believe the integrity... Looking through this broker's co-op listings, every square footage claim appears to be exaggerated (mostly checked using the simple draw-a-rectangle-around-the-footprint-and-compare-to-claimed-sf method), although most look like the 10% +/- misrepresentation that is basically the starting point for the brokerage industry. There is one other that is pretty far off, but this one is truly special [less]