Help me find the 1618 sq ft

What do you mean? It's right there! *kidding*

Actually, I just think it's a typo, and should be '618' sf....

haha. Previous sales is 830 sq ft. So a really bad typo.

Not as bad, but here's another one at 40 west 22nd st.

http://streeteasy.com/nyc/sale/730789-coop-40-west-22nd-street-5-floor-flatiron-new-york

What should it be? It's a full floor in a 45'x97' building. I guess you could quibble about how much to deduct for the elevators and stairs, but the 4150' sounds good enough.

This apartment in the very same building claims to be somehow smaller than 300_mercer's unit.

http://streeteasy.com/nyc/sale/820568-condo-160-central-park-south-central-park-south-new-york

Why are square-footage numbers not legally binding, with building blueprints presented during the buying process?

Because you can physically measure the space. Anything else you relied upon, including the blueprints, could also be false.

The law assumes that buyer and seller are both fully-functioning adults and know what they're doing. If you have to have 1600 ft², but buy this place anyway, then tough shit.

You can measure it, sure, but advertising a square footage that's wrong is deceptive advertising. This particular apartment is so laughably wrong that someone who really wants 1600 ft² can see right away that this doesn't meet their needs, but what about when the square footage is inflated by 10-20% and it takes an actual visit, armed with a tape measure, to confirm it?

I went to two open houses a few months ago, one advertising 647 ft² and the other 510 ft². The first one was honest -- it might have been off by 5-10% either way -- but the second wasn't really close; it was 400 ft² at the most, which my better half and I would have a hard time raising a baby in. In advertising it as being over 500, buyers who really need that much space are still being lured in to something that's not what they're looking for. The buyer's time is wasted.

Even the deceptive bogus neighborhoods like "Upper Carnegie Hill" aren't this bad. You can see right from the listing what street a building is on. Not so with size. This shouldn't be hard: register the correct square footage with the Department of Buildings and then make it an offense to advertise any other number of square feet.

There's little or no redress for the waste of shopper's time. Again, the language is "the buyer knew or should have known" that spending hundreds of thousands of dollars involves some legwork, research, analysis, and disappointment.

The DoB does record building size, for zoning purposes, and the DoF records condo size for various purposes. The DoF also records co-op apartment sizes, but it's not publicly available and was self-reported by the owners, so not much use.

That leads to the definition of "correct." Land and building surveying are standardized, so you know an acre in one jurisdiction is the same as in another, and two assessors measuring a house are going to come up with the same number. Ideally, there'd be yet another government department to establish and enforce standards for measuring apartment sizes, instead of relying on "current market methodology" or (in the case of condos) simply requiring that the method of calculation be disclosed.

I'm all for the full employment of lawyers, so anything leading to disputes and alleged offenses would be good.

Here's a good summary of the situation as it stands: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/realestate/19cov.html

The suit mentioned was Evans vs. Linton, where the buyer of http://streeteasy.com/nyc/sale/461920-coop-1200-broadway-midtown-south-new-york didn't get an appraisal until after he signed the contract (duh...) and had his case against the seller dismissed. As the legal fees skyrocketed along with his whining, he dropped his case against Elliman, too.

Interestingly, the Elliman broker is slowly learning not to give co-op ft² at all. Of her 11 current co-op listings, only four mention square feet.

That's an unusal example. I looked at a couple units at Gilsey House as they were a lot of (real) space for the money. No reason to exagerate there.
Great bones, great price per sq ft at the time.
Crappy block and no buzzer policy,you had to come down to buzz people in. Absolutely insane. I heard they recently installed a proper intercom in the building.

On square footage, funny thing is, the field of error is always on the over, no the under, even with "honest errors." It also seems the neighborhood of up to 10% over is the amount where nobody says anything or makes it an issue.

-"What should it be? It's a full floor in a 45'x97' building. I guess you could quibble about how much to deduct for the elevators and stairs, but the 4150' sounds good enough".

AT MOST, it should be 3,600. I am being generous and saying full floor so count the elevator and interior stair well. The size of the lot does not equal the size of the floor. For one, rear setbacks. Secondly, consider the fact that you can not live inside of a wall.

When you're asking someone for millions of dollars, think a 12%-15%+ margin of error on square footage is unacceptable.

The building is 45x97, not the lot. The lot is bigger. Building and lot dimensions are per the city, but of course that could be wrong.

You're going to have to use your own method of calculating ft² anyway, for everyplace you look, so doesn't much matter. Almost every condo will be by the outside-wall method, so it's simpler to use that.

Either way, basing a decision on stated ft² makes as much sense as basing it on adjectives like spacious, mint, sunny, etc.

mmmm mint!

Looks like 43 by 90 to me. You have to expect most to be 10% off.
Of course, you have to deduct 10% from the comps you use and your back to square one.

So how big is the lot NWT? You agree that the lot is bigger, so how much square footage are you giving for the setback and rear fire escape? Please enlighten me.

Separately, explain how objective data is in the same category as subjective. Next you are going to tell us that carrying charges matter as much as the feeling you get in your stomach?

Here're the city's measurements:

Building Dimensions 45.00 X 97.00 ( 4,365 Square Feet)
Lot Size 46.00 X 98.75 ( 4,543 Square Feet)

Let's say the 97' is the first floor, with the upper floors set back 7' for the fire escape. That's 4050.

If it hadn't sold already for $150K more than asking you could go measure by your own method.

It's not objective data if there's no agreed-upon standard. Absent some kind of regulation, every measurer comes up with a different number, so it's not objective.

It would be much better if borkers were required to state in exact square footage precisely how large an apartment feels.

Nycfund,

For full floor lofts, it is very common to state the building footprint as the total sq footage. If a buyer wants to exclude the walls, they can exclude from the calcs they use to decide pricing. They can always ask the seller how they calculated the sq footage, including the exterior walls or excluding. I have seen listing both ways. There is very little deceit in this case as you can easily measure it by simply checking the building dimension as nwt did. Another rationale for this: let us say you buy a piece of land with 5 others. Build a 5 story building on the lot. What is the sq footage share of each floor? If you deduct the walls, who owns the walls?

You can either fight it or adjust your pricing accordingly but do not make the mistake of using average per sq price of sales, which very likely included the walls, and apply it to your method of calculating sq footage while deciding what to bid, if you want to win the bid.

For new condos, try finding the stated sq footage by including the exterior walls. Nwt may have more expertise of this but it seems that hallways connecting the apts may be included.

this is such a painful argument.

on the one hand, buyer beware.

on the other hand, you buy a $3 can of soup and the manufacturer is required to disclose nutrient content.

hard to understand why its ok to lie about sq ft.

And the nomination for completely stupid comparison goes to ...

oh why even bother?

apparently you felt the need.

NWT, Exterior fire escapes go all the way up and all the way down, they do not start on the 7th floor. A fire escape is not 1.75 deep.

Please try again.

I wish some smart person would invent some device that would help me determine length and width.

In a suit to be filed in Manhattan Supreme Court this week, Wilkenfeld now claims the seller’s broker, Platinum Properties President Daniel Hedaya, lied to him about the sky-high pad’s square footage, common charges and real estate taxes.

He wants to be reimbursed a whopping $2.08 million — or four times the broker’s commission — plus the difference between $13 million and the penthouse’s actual value based on, among other things, the claim that it’s either 96 or 152 square feet smaller than the 4,700 square feet he alleges Hedaya said it was.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/size_matters_XufxFWWPyxb5XEE4hDHegK

Wheee, we got us another live one.

$13,000,000, and the moron signed a contract without knowing what he was doing. "Uh, Sandy was coming, and lawyers cost money." They sure do, as he'll discover.

Maybe the sale included the 240 ft² of storage units the seller bought in 2007. That plus the apartment's 4548 would be 4788. But then Hedaya would've said 4800.

http://streeteasy.com/nyc/sale/625775-condo-200-chambers-street-tribeca-new-york

Oh it doesnt look like much of a case. on the outside, it looks like the buyer does not like the agent and wants to give him a hard and costly time.

And on common charges and taxes, obviously after dec, those go up for the next year and wont match figures from an older listing....duh

Maybe someone hit on somebody's wife, but this is not about "exagerated" info.

Right, since the 2011 listing the taxes have doubled from $13-something to almost $26K, with the 421A going away in big chunks. You wouldn't think that'd matter, but maybe the $13K was a stretch.

I wish they'd hurry up and file the suit, so we can see what the contract says.

Oops, $13M.

"I wish some smart person would invent some device that would help me determine length and width."

Jokes about the existence of tape measures aside, measuring the floor area of a non-rectangular apartment is genuinely difficult and time-consuming, and how many brokers are going to stand around while you attempt it (or leave you in the building alone to attempt it)?

This is why legally-binding blueprints are the obvious solution.

But this feels like a problem that a company like Google would work on and then solve. I could easily imagine a cell phone with the camera running, carried around a room, continuously measuring distances to walls, and then coming out with a floorplan with every angle measured precisely.

>measuring the floor area of a non-rectangular apartment is genuinely difficult and time-consuming

Agreed, 8th grade geometry is a bit much to ask from a broker.

Was it Pythagoras who shot Achilles in the knee?

"Was it Pythagoras who shot Achilles in the knee?"

It was Agamemnon, burning him by focusing the sun's rays using a convex lens.

From the inside of a wooden horse.

I think.

Apparently Mr. Evans, of Evans vs. Linton, hadn't heard of caveat emptor, esply when buying real estate.

>"I wish some smart person would invent some device that would help me determine length and width."
Jokes about the existence of tape measures aside, measuring the floor area of a non-rectangular apartment is genuinely difficult and time-consuming, and how many brokers are going to stand around while you attempt it (or leave you in the building alone to attempt it)?

You are about to spend $1.75MM. Do your due diligence.