broker squatre foot inflation

All buyers, when you see an apartment, open your mouth.
Bring your calculator to open houses. Let them know your paying attention.
I do.
It won't change unless more and more buyers bring it up.
Do your homework before you go to the open house. Use property shark, use a ruler.
When an apartment lists "1862 square feet" like a recent one I saw, I thought gosh, that must be accurate. Then on propertyshark, the building dimensions 40 feet by 42 feet (brick to brick) which includes the elevator and stairway and anything else anyone wants to offer as a defense cannot account for the magical additional 182 feet of growth.

Always look at the square feet. It's the only constant for comparing. Whatever value difference you assign for walkup vs elevator, coop vs condo, neighborhood, etc. assign it a per sq ft value.
That's a big chunk of how your tax is assessed. You should be shopping the same way.

Funny, I have an example of how buyers/renters do the same thing in the opposite direction. Today I was showing a rental for a long term client: the top floor in his townhouse. The apartment would be called 850 to 900 SF by 98% of brokers. But I don't quote square footage. So when the broker asked the "What's the Square footage?" question, I simply replied:"Well, the building is 20 X 44". The unit is the entire top floor, minus the staircase (which isn't much). The potential tenant says "oh, so it's about 600 square feet".

"Funny, I have an example of how buyers/renters do the same thing in the opposite direction. Today I was showing a rental for a long term client: the top floor in his townhouse. The apartment would be called 850 to 900 SF by 98% of brokers. But I don't quote square footage. So when the broker asked the "What's the Square footage?" question, I simply replied:"Well, the building is 20 X 44". The unit is the entire top floor, minus the staircase (which isn't much). The potential tenant says "oh, so it's about 600 square feet"."

Which would be accurate, since brick-to-brick measurements in computing INDOOR LIVING SPACE is absolutely asinine.

""Funny, I have an example of how buyers/renters do the same thing in the opposite direction. Today I was showing a rental for a long term client: the top floor in his townhouse. The apartment would be called 850 to 900 SF by 98% of brokers. But I don't quote square footage. So when the broker asked the "What's the Square footage?" question, I simply replied:"Well, the building is 20 X 44". The unit is the entire top floor, minus the staircase (which isn't much). The potential tenant says "oh, so it's about 600 square feet".""

So even conservatively allowing one foot for the thickness of the exterior walls, it's 18 X 42 = 756 square feet total. Being conservative with the stairwell (15 X 6 = 90 square feet), and now were down to at best 666 square feet, and we haven't even allowed for the INTERIOR walls.

Matt,

While you are correct about the front and back walls, party walls are rarely 2 feet thick. The actual interior width dimension is 19 feet (I have not personally measured the length because it's too much a PITA). And interior walls are part of the square footage of the apartment: or do you think if you add a closet, the square footage of the unit decreases?

In addition, this being the top floor, the 90sf for the stairwell isn't "conservative" it's overstating (I don't know if you are familiar with how most top floor apartments are configured in converted row houses: in general, you don't have a hallway to lead to the next staircase because there is no next staircase, and you also have no bottom landing for that non-existent staircase, either so an "overhang" is built over the lower staircase, adding to the interior space). In this case it's somewhere in the 40 to 60 sf range. Now what numbers do you come up with?

"Which would be accurate, since brick-to-brick measurements in computing INDOOR LIVING SPACE is absolutely asinine. "

I know what you MEAN, but "brick to brick" measurement is exactly what you DO want.

30yrs: "While you are correct about the front and back walls, party walls are rarely 2 feet thick."

My calculations allowed for 1-foot thick walls in the front, back, and sides.

"In addition, this being the top floor, the 90sf for the stairwell isn't "conservative" it's overstating (I don't know if you are familiar with how most top floor apartments are configured in converted row houses: in general, you don't have a hallway to lead to the next staircase because there is no next staircase, and you also have no bottom landing for that non-existent staircase, either so an "overhang" is built over the lower staircase, adding to the interior space). In this case it's somewhere in the 40 to 60 sf range. Now what numbers do you come up with?"

Actually, I've lived in two brownstones where the "top floor" did, in fact, have a hallway leading to the ATTIC and ROOF stairs. But even assuming what you just said, my calculations still put it at 696 square feet -- and we haven't even allowed for the interior walls.

So yeah ... it's "about 600 square feet".