Is this legal?

sorry read 'price' instead of 'pice'

Not illegal, just sloppy work on the part of the listing agent.

Yes it's illegal. It's illegal to list a price as "reduced" even if it was first increased. Never mind if it actually wasn't reduced.

Evidently, nothing is illegal when it comes to selling in the NYC RE mkt.

You can make up your own square foot calculation - without sharing it with the public; pretend your apartment is in one neighborhood when it is deep in another; openly lie to and trick buyers - and when caught, act as if they don't like it, they can look somewhere else...

It is a mixture of amateur-hour buyers and sellers and downright fraud-artist scammer sellers who act as if they can't sell anything on its real merits.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that, after the dot-com boom and bust, and the crackdown on biased equity research at brokerages, a few trillion dollars was shifted into real estate, where distortion, hype, and falsification are apparently acceptable and legal. Also it is remarkable that it is illegal to borrow more than 50% to purchase stocks but you can borrow 100% of the purchase price to buy real estate - I guess that's because real estate never goes down, so sorry I forgot that part. There actually should be a margin requirement for real estate, since the general public is being expected to bail out anyone who lost money because of leverage.

The idea of being able to lever up to buy real estate is precisely because unlike a stock, it's supposed to be your home, and it is suppose to be an alternative to rent (and most economists would argue it sounld be a cheaper alternative to rent). It was presumed people would be intelligent enough to decide for themselves what they could afford in a HOME - not an investment - and that even if it went down a bit, it would not matter because they were there for the long-term. Therefore, people shouldn't have been relying on realtors. It's a simple decision: do I like the place? Can I afford it? How does it compare to renting an equivalent place? Can I be there for 10 years?

It's the people who treated it as an investment - and let their real estate agents be their advisors - who screwed it up

How do we know what was reduced? the size of the apartment? The temperature in the apartment? The amount of moisture?