alt Hacker NewsThere is square footage on many NYC listings, but it’s wrong. They often have the square footage of the total area occupied by the apartment, including all the interior walls and columns that can take 20% of the area away.
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I didn’t know the square footage of my apartment until I had built an app that utilizes LiDAR to actually measure it. Broker told me 650 square feet - it’s precisely 505 square feet.
(Won’t advertise my app, but you can find many on the iOS App Store).
Would be nice for StreetEasy to have some kind of third party verification about apartment size claims.
Louis Rossmann has a number of videos from the period when he was searching for retail space in Manhattan. He would take a laser measure and verify listing info himself. The sf on listings was almost universally not just wrong, but audaciously wrong. "Whatcha gonna do about it?" wrong.
Don't forget about those common areas too! I've seen many cases where hallways, elevators, and stairwells were included in the square footage numbers.
They also often include external square footage like balconies which warp it.
Wild. In Netherlands (and I assume other European countries as well) there’s a regulatory norm for how spaces should be measured - what counts as liveable, non-liveable, etc. It’s so much fairer and clearer for everyone involved.
https://www.nen.nl/bouw/beheer-en-onderhoud/oppervlaktebepal...