Square Footage Difference

Why are you worrying about this? Looking a gift horse in the mouth?
Didn't you ever measure your own space? Go get a tape measure.

ha nice proverb ph41....why am i worrying about this? finally have relevant posting thats all and because everyone has access to previous sales due to this website and other public access forums i dont want to create a blacklash with sellers saying we want x amount of $ more and we are changing the sq footage now compared to before, credibility is important especially for sq ft as i have seen some joke claims of sq ft on other listings and pigs do get slaughtered

Toj, The biggest reason for difference is whether the full width of exterior walls is included or not. New condos typically include the full width of non- shared exterior walls and perhaps some of the common space ( i have even seen double height living room counted as double the floor sq footage). Interior walls are always included in the total sq footage. It is not a rocket science to take the floor plan, laser meter costing $100, and calculate the sq footage. If you are not confident in your ability to do basic measurement and math, an appraiser will do it for $1000 and will tell you measurement with and without exterior walls. In addiion, look at same line apts in your building and what they stated. The buyers are smart enought to have a reasonable estimate of sq footage as long as the dimensions on the floor plan support it. You can always include the exterior walls in the dimensions and show it that way. You always have the choice not to include the sq footage in the listing unless your apt is larger than typical 3 bed room apts.

That is the real estate agent's tape measure, which is a little shorter than most. Their foot is a size 6. For better or worse, people generally do not add up the measurements of internal rooms, but take the outside perimeter of the apartment and calculate total square footage. Generally, this makes sense since you own everything inside whether there is a wall or not. Moving walls cannot add or subtract to this math.

Most condo offering plans take this a bit further and measure from the inside of the exterior walls, which might not sound like a big difference, but it adds up quickly (a 25' x 50' with 6 inches of wall cavities along the perimeter is 75 sq feet inside the walls). Worse, many real estate agents simply measure the square footage from the exterior of the building, and/or fail to subtract little things like elevators and fire stairs. This can result in massive overstatements of apartment size -- the concrete walls in my building, together with the internal studs and drywall collectively are about 2 feet thick. So, each 100 feet of exterior wall "adds" 200 sq feet to the apartment. Like magic. Trust me.

I rented an office a few years ago on a big empty floor and we put up the walls that actually created our office. I have measured it no fewer than 12 times. Including carpeting it etc. It is 826 feet exactly, and you can screw around with that number and get it up to about 905 feet if you measure to the outside of the windowsills and so forth. Anyway about four months ago the manager of the building came to our floor and was just visiting and he told me he had architect measure our office and it was 975 -USABLE- feet. He was adamant that his architect confirmed this was a FACT. I explained to him that he was simply, utterly, completely wrong. You can figure out the relevance.

First, yes knocking down will add to the measurable square footage. This is probably why developers favor a measurement that simply factors the length and width of the apartment footprint. Most people come to terms w square footage when getting estimated for putting in wood floors or carpeting, this number is the "carpetable (not a real word) square footage. It will be lower--the larger the apartment and the more walls the greater the total impact.
If you are sure of your number, you are prob looking at a combination of that factor and
some calculation errors made by previous owner. Enjoy! As you know, it usually goes the other way.

Check out Episode One of Doug Heddings' TV series from a few years ago. Heddings has been a student of square footage issues in NYC and it's a lot more complex a topic than you might think!

http://heddingsproperty.com/video-channel/

Whatever walls you knocked down allowed for whoever is (now) measuring it to probably not measure "room by room" and then add SF. I bet they are doing overalls and then adding in exterior walls - that alone will get you a big bonus SF wise.

For example, when I moved into my coop, I surveyed the interior as we were going to renovate, it came in higher than the appraisers SF and lower than the listing agent (they were saying 1000 SF, I was saying more in the range of 890-900), the moment I added in the exterior walls and the bathroom chase wall I was getting around 975-1000. So think of it was gross vs. net SF.

And if you're worried, what everyone else has said - do the calcs yourself.

Guywithcat - I am not an expert, but I do know that with COMMERCIAL rentals its common for LLs to add a pro-rated portion of the common space to your own private space. So in your case, my guess is the LL automatically adds 7-10% of each tenants square footage to the "total" SF.