Square footage exaggerations - examples

I think your calculations are a tad shy, and you're not including the bathrooms and the closet space, which appears ample. Still, though, I agree 1400SF is a stretch.

This one seems to be about 250 sq.ft shy of the 950 sq.ft. claimed in the listing.

http://www.streeteasy.com/nyc/sale/307242-coop-16-west-16th-street-chelsea-new-york

It's easy to add up the length of the bedroom, kitchen and living room (48 ft.) and multiply by 13.
I generously guestimated the bump out of the foyer/entry at 7x10 and added 70sq.ft.

this is a great one. i looked at a similar unit in the same building a couple years ago and they were saying it was 800 sf also. when i measured out 650, the broker said "it feels like 800 sf".
needless to say, i "felt" like i was being screwed.

http://www.streeteasy.com/nyc/sale/194210-coop-250-west-27th-street-chelsea-new-york

oh yeah, there is a 70 sf storage area, that is about 2 feet high, so maybe they were including that also?

is there some method to hold these guys accountable?

if you want me to come measure out a space for you, i would love to, just to hold these guys accountable, this is so wrong especially when this is the main matrix for valuation outside of location.

I saw that one - ridiculous

I'll repost this one. Way off and much smaller
http://www.streeteasy.com/nyc/sale/320222-coop-41-jane-street-west-village-new-york

cccharley - that one takes the cake. Probably 50% overstated.

As for my original post, I added up the rooms and got something like 850SF, so I grossed up 250SF for the bathrooms and closets. I also tried calculating based on sides of the whole space and came up around 1100SF. That said, I am not great at calculating SF, so may have been off.

what if you simply measure the floor plate? for example I was just shown an apartment for rent that says 2200 sq feet. its a loft- a rectangle. i measured the floor plate 60 feet long by 20 feet wide. isn't that 1200 sq feet? yes I feel dumb asking this, but how can you get up 2200 feet.? what am i missing?

"if you want me to come measure out a space for you, i would love to, just to hold these guys accountable, this is so wrong especially when this is the main matrix for valuation outside of location."

Just for fun, I have been known to show up at open houses with tape measure and calculator.

Here is an exmaple of what appears to be a 'lets-see-how-badly-i-can-screw-you' approach to selling real estate: http://www.bellmarc.com/search/profile.asp?list_num=E2172063T#

I have tried counting the square footage based on the floorplan provided and I come up with 750-800. Maybe (a big maybe) 900. The place is advertized as 1100. It is advertized as a 2 bedroom, but I see a bedroom and an office. As far as I can tell from the floorplan, there are 1.5 bathrooms, not 2. Any thoughts? Am I reading this correctly as a gross misrepresentation, or is there something that I am missing?

Ukrguy, I see two bedrooms and two baths. But I agree with you on the square footage. Even multiplying the entire 30 feet by 34 feet square (which it's not), at best you'd get 1020 square feet. Allowing for that portion that doesn't exist inside the apartment, you're right ... perhaps 900 square feet.

But I'm sure it "feels" like 1100 square feet!

Ok, at least we agreed on the square footage. By the way, I mentioned one bedroom and an office, because that is what it looks like to me. Maybe if I visited the place, I would change my mind, but it does seem to be an office. As to the other bathroom (once again, I may be misreading the floorplan here) the other bathroom is a toilet and a sink. Anyway, I am not trying to trurn this into a debate. The bottom line is that it seems someone is about to buy imaginary 200 sq feet.

I just posted this on an earlier thread:

I inquired about a property that is listed as being 613 square feet but when I saw it, it was obviously smaller. I asked the broker about it to which he replied, "Well the 613 square feet includes the 25 square foot storage unit in the basement."

Since when did they start including the storage unit in the basement as square footage IN the apartment? And then these guys want to whine b/c sales are down. Guess what brokers you're not helping the situation by lying about the square footage of an apartment--you are only making it WORSE!

I always do the math when I see a floorplan of a condo I'm interested in. And it seems that it is always overstated. The majority of the time the difference is not material. But I don't believe I ever seen one that's been understated.

Check out this. Now this is not a huge overstatement but still. http://www.streeteasy.com/nyc/sale/386296-condo-440-kent-avenue-williamsburg-brooklyn

I've even tried to account for the space the walls are taking up and can't come up to even 800 sq ft.

Guys - the square footage of any individual condo unit also includes a pro-rated portion of all of the common space in the building; hallways, lobby - every single square foot of any given building in assigned to the respective units. The footage of any unit will never equal the actual size of that respective unit therefore. This has always been the case with condos, it is the industry standard, it is well known and accepted universally.

I'll defer to people more expert in this matter then myself, but I've often been under the impression that shares in many coops I've looked at are based upon square footage in the building. I have looked at places primarily in the 550 to 900 square foot range, and I'm usually struck by the fact that the number of shares in the coop are usually about 100 to 150 less than the stated square footage in the ad. For example, I looked at one place recently that was advertised as 666 square feet, yet had 575 shares in the coop. Does anyone know if I am assuming correctly about square footage and coop shares?

sisyphean, that'd be unusual and just happenstance. The original sponsor would've come up a total number of shares that'd let them reflect differences between lines and between floors. E.g. of two lines with the same square footage, the one at the corner might have more shares than the other. Then the increment in shares from floor to floor within the line might vary. There's really no rule to it.

Not that sponsors don't make mistakes, sometimes because the person doing the figuring couldn't get inside all the lines. E.g., the increment may progress from bottom to top without accounting for a view opening up. In my building, the top couple of floors in one line have WBFPs that aren't accounted for in shares.

sisyphean, you are correct, but it's not always an exact 1:1 ratio between square footage and shares.

sailor -- no, you are wrong. The FACT is that there is NO "industry standard" and every developer does it differently. This has been discussed on SE before. Some developers are more conservative than others, and there is NO consensus on what common areas are included or excluded in calculating square footage. "Every single square foot of any given building" is not any kind of industry standard in NY or anywhere else. Each indivudual developer would come up with a different set of numbers for the same physical building. Feel free to Google "measuring square footage in condos" if you'd like to educate yourself before giving definitive (and wrong) answers.

newbuyer
your estimation matches what I came up with (1130 sq ft).
It's very simple. When you click on the floorplan of a property,find a room dimension (easiest when you have a room that has a 10 foot dimension ) and control + mouse roll to adjust the size where that 10 foot dimension matches 1 inch on an in hand ruler.
Than measure the footprint (outer walls) so there is no mistake on what the biggest this apartment can be.
There is no reason an ad should be off by more than 10/15%.
It is particulary amusing when full floor apartments measure bigger than the footprint of the building!

And regardless of standards or lack thereof, greater than the footprint (exterior walls) numbers violates the decency standard.

sailor be wrong--his calculus applies only to commercial footage, which is a complete ripoff--often the sum of square footage on leases in comm'l bldgs exceeds greatly the total perimeter sq footage of the building

residential has always been footage of the apt only--may be calced from the exterior of perimeter walls but has never incl common areas etc

sounds like some load of shlt served up by a deceptive broker, when footage on a given apt is way overstated--in genl those in the business hate any reference to sq footage as it allow for good comp work--they don't like comp work--they want buyers to fall in love with props and buy them

This one on 112th Street in Harlem http://www.streeteasy.com/nyc/sale/429623-condo-203-west-112th-street-central-harlem-new-york is listed at 1,807 square feet when on Property Shark, the property is listed at 1440 square feet. Out and out deception.

-they want buyers to fall in love with props and buy them.

This is a good point Ubottom & I have definitely experienced this approach from agents but what they don't understand is that most people, especially those with substantial cash reserves in the back, are not stupid enough to 'fall in love' with props and or storage units or even the condo itself. If it's over priced and the seller won't come down, I walk.

NEXT!

And this is actually one arena where my experiences with Core Group were good.
Their listings (the few I saw) were fairly accurate on the square footage listed.

my experience is that with new construction the sq footage is often quite accurate-and core markets new props gen'lly no?

Um yes and no, I would say Core Groups new constructions are higher end products and for that reason won't play around with footage.
I've seen new construction, Cantor Pecorella (I think is the name?)as an example along with others that were outright false.

But given the recent thread on Core Group, let's give them a prop for something good.

BTW it was Alchemy properties I was thinking of.

http://www.oculuscondo.com/pdfs/10A.pdf

PHA is supposed to have 1285 sq ft interior. If that 16 by 16 foot room is correct, this apartment can't be bigger than 950 sq ft!

If more prospective buyers start to walk in with laser meters ($100 at home depot) rather than approaching the purchase purely on emotional grounds, some of the square footage inflation will reduce.

truthskr10, PHA is 1285 "approximate square feet" per the condo declaration, which any potential buyer would of course read. That's measured from the outside face of exterior walls to halfway through interior walls, which is pretty standard for condos, so you can compare apples to apples.

NWT, didn't some developers start adding the percentage of the common areas to the square footage of a unit? then it wouldn't be apples to apples. new construction square footage doesn't seem that consistent to me.

None of the condo declarations I've read indicate that. I could've missed it, but they all seem to use the same boilerplate. I've never actually printed a unit floorplan to scale and measured to see whether it jibes, either, but would if looking at condos.

NWT
Sorry but the walls arent't 15 feet thick.
Anyway, I measured the outside footprint of the floorplan.
If you take the square of the apartment, it appears to be;

16 by 48 = 768
master bath 8 by 10= 80
15 by 6 = 90
entrance 10 by 4 = 40

Total 978 square feet....at best.

Hallways and elevators are included in commercial properties, not residential.

203 west 112th exaggeration -- have to watch out for the listing agent Eric Mclendon

truthskr10, you need to measure by a scale. Take the depth of the kitchen counter and call it two feet. That makes the main block about 18 x 50. (The 50 makes sense, also, in that the lot is probably 100' wide and the penthouses are each half.) Then don't forget to add in the upper floor of the stairway, which counts as interior space.

Looks close enough to 1285 for me. Not that it matters. If you liked the place it wouldn't signify whether it was 1000 or 1300 or 1400.

I know what you're talking about, Joe. I don't understand how some agents don't lose their licenses by blatantly giving misinformation about properties. Can you believe 203 W. 112th at $1.3million. You'd have to be brain dead to cough up anything close to that for that property.

NWT
I did, it's quite simple, you adjust your screen so that 1 inch represents 10 feet, then measure away.
I did better. I was at this property. I counted off 14 of my feet wall to wall. Yes, I'm a size 13.That makes it 15.16 feet. So the depth of each wall coming out to 16 or 16.7 or whatever
And it's 4 penthouse units not 2.
I didn't forget to add the stairway, it's because it's not addable. It's not a seperate staircase. The stairs are in the apt living room going up.

And of course sq footage matters. When a bank lends money they want to know how many square feet.
Taxes? How many square feet? New Kitchen floors? How many square feet? Paint the walls? How many square feet.

And of course if you like a place you pay more or whatever, but in the end you'll only pay so much more.......per square feet.

1285 square feet from 1000 is a 22% difference. The difference between how much the market has declined the last 6 months.

And if it weren't crucial, then maybe we would see some floorplans that are undercalculated by 20%?

And according to propertyshark, the building dimensions are;

Bldg dimensions 70 ft x 80 ft
Lot dimensions 100 ft x 103.25 ft
Corner lot No
Stories 10
Buildings on lot 1
Has extension No
Has garage No
Year built n/a
Year last altered n/a

I can't believe I'm defending some developer and their architect, but here goes.

Look at the little key plan in the corner of the floorplan. The two side-by-side penthouses together are the width of the 100' lot.

Try a tape measure instead of your feet. If the dimensions given on the floor plan are that far off, there must be somebody to report the developer to.

The stairway enclosure at the second level counts as interior space, even though the only floor is the little landing.

Banks go by the square feet in the condo's declaration. They do not go surveying apartments, measuring thickness of walls, etc.

NWT

LOL, I can't believe how far this debate has gone as well. I think we both have "last word" disease. :)

At least we keep it civil.I appreciate that!

Look, I must have been inside 100 apartments for the last 4 months. Ive also dealt with commercial space most of my adult life. You can walk into a space after a while and have a feel for it's size. This apartment is small. It's about the size of my current space at 1000 sq ft.

And the stairs, well, it's just stairs that eat up part of your living room. If that is assigned interior space the same way a loft bedroom or office is, then that is a travesty.

I can see your point of view on everything except one. The width of the 100ft lot. It is not built to 100ft.

Lengthwise is not greater than 80 ft.

Same on the 8th and 9th floors.
http://www.oculuscondo.com/pdfs/08-09A.pdf
40 ft long

http://www.oculuscondo.com/pdfs/08-09D.pdf
40 ft long

That would make the outer walls 10 ft thick.
Certainly would feel comfortable in the building during noreasters.

And there would be no reason then not to list the buliding dimensions as 100 by 100.

This one might take the cake:

Listed at 1761SF, it would be lucky to be 1200. That would be a 45%+ exaggeration, but I think it's worse.

Love the "convertible 3" as well. I am sure lots of people want to pay $2MM to have a windowless living room.

Welcome to manhattan, you must be new.