[plants]

This is awesome! StreetEasy is how many New Yorkers find apartments. In the past few years, it has been flooded with AI-staged apartments. The AI stagings warp the room to fit furniture that would 100% certainly not fit there. It’s deceptive, and I’m glad it at least requires disclosure now (although I wish it were fully banned)

[filoleg]

Not going to lie, I wish they also added a square footage as a legal requirement too.

It is entirely baffling to me as to why, but NYC is the only major city in the US I've ever lived in where it is genuinely a problem. In all other cities, I had no issues with that, pretty much every single posting online had square footage.

Meanwhile, on StreetEasy (and other platforms listing NYC rental units), looking for apartments is a major pain, because majority have zero square footage info. And then it turns into a pure guessing game that becomes super annoying, because an apartment I might be interested in is listed only as "1 bedroom", but just looking at the pics it is impossible to gauge whether it is 400sqft or 900sqft. Knowing that info would have made it much easier for renters, and I cannot think of a logical reason to not provide that information.

[pclmulqdq]

There 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.

[cr1895]

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...

[Laurel1234]

Back in the third world I remember my parents looked up the reference price per m^2 in the area and would divide the price by that to estimate the size.

Advertised amounts would be off by 20-25%. When you confronted them about it realtors would just give you the real number, I guess most people wouldn't go through the trouble so it was worth trying for them.

[hdgvhicv]

Regulations? That sounds very anti freedom.

[preg_match]

We largely have these regulations in the US too (at the state level), we just don't reuse them. Naturally there are rules about what is livable versus what is not. A balcony is not. A room with no windows isn't even a bedroom. That kind of stuff.

It would be truly trivial to then just transform that to calculating square footage, and many states do just that. But not all. It's a problem of motivation, not necessarily ability or cost.

[9dev]

Right? Germany too. I wouldn’t even have thought this could be a problem…

[ExoticPearTree]

In some countries, like a poster mentioned, they include the “built” size, not the actual liveable size. Sometimes the balconies are included in that, and it is misleading. Two bedrooms in 900sqf liveable is one thing vs 3 bedrooms in 900sqf built area including balconies.

[rsynnott]

... Huh. This actually explains something I'd been confused about before; people on this site claiming that a 1000sqft apartment was small. Which, I suppose, if you include the entire footprint of the apartment including balconies, sure. It would never have occurred to me to do it like that.

[tstenner]

Until you measure the apartment later and find out that a) it's much smaller and b) it doesn't matter because you rent the apartment as seen, not as advertised.

[9dev]

Well, in Germany at least - if the living space differs drastically, that is at least 10%, you can lower the rent accordingly and make a demand for a refund of the entire rent you overpaid since you moved in - and you probably should also make a second case for damages due to purposeful deception.

A consumer doesn't buy anything from a business "as seen", that is not a thing over here. There are binding rules to protect consumers from malevolent sellers or landlords, and legal obligations you can't subvert by tricking customers into purchasing something different from what was advertised.

[cr1895]

Maybe it’s different for rentals but you’d think the banks would also want accurate data on the properties they’re mortgaging…and cities for tax revenue…so strange!

[everforward]

For big commercial rental properties they probably don’t care because it doesn’t really push the property value.

I don’t think it really changes the property value because those interior walls are usually cosmetic and not load bearing. If the bank has to foreclose, the next buyer will be well aware they can strip those walls out for nothing relative to the cost of buying the building.

I’m doubtful it pushes the tax revenue for the same reason, everyone is already evaluating based on what it could be.

Smaller units are probably just not worth the effort to manage. It’s a lot of over head to start auditing old duplexes where the owner has a property or two and isn’t a giant company with a whole compliance department.

[pandaman]

Why? Banks and cities only care about the price. They also want price to be under and over estimated respectively, neither would want the accurate price, even less so the accurate area.

[jfrbfbreudh]

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.

[filoleg]

If you are hesitant to mention it in the comments, please consider at least putting it in your profile bio. This sounds like a genuinely useful tool that I would personally want to use myself.

[jfrbfbreudh]

Done. Enjoy!

[kirubakaran]

Do mention your app! HN only frowns upon astroturfing. If you disclose that it is your app, then it's fine to link to it.

[59percentmore]

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.

[luckman212]

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.

[JoshTriplett]

The normal definition of square footage I've seen typically includes hallways and stairs. (Though often not garages.)

Personally, I wish we would normalize including exact floor plans with measurements.

[hirsin]

They mean the apartment building hallways and elevators. As in, if you summed the square footage of all the apartments on a floor, you'd get a number greater than the actual dimensions of the floor, because the common areas are counted multiple times.

[close04]

That shouldn’t be the case. In some cases it would also be ridiculous, when the common areas are larger than the apartments themselves (corridors, elevators, technical rooms, etc.). They do include the proportional square footage corresponding to each apartment. But this is still very misleading because some buildings have a lot of common areas that can double the advertised size of the very small apartments.

[JoshTriplett]

Oh, I see. Yeah, that's false advertising. "Square footage" of a dwelling should only include your own private space, not any common areas.

[hirako2000]

Could include the size of the pavements fronting the building and the basement with those trash bin also are shared space.

[bpicolo]

They also often include external square footage like balconies which warp it.

[hbarka]

> and I cannot think of a logical reason to not provide that information.

The reason is simple. Omission is deception.

[LgWoodenBadger]

If it had a “good” square footage, it would be touted front and center. Because it’s not, you know it doesn’t.

I see this all the time with motorcycle PPE. If something was CE A, AA, or AAA rated, it’d be at the top of the description/specs. When it’s not, I know it’s not so I just move on.

[preg_match]

Where it gets tricky is when the good people and bad people start working together because they both sell bad products. What I mean is: purposefully not advertising your good traits front and center, so that your worse product then "shine" more. And then everyone catches on and all your signals are gone. It happens sometimes.

[drivingmenuts]

I wish that e-bike ads had the classification. The bike classes are well-defined AFAIK - it's the class legality that's regional, if any. Right now, they're actively helping riders skirt/evade the laws.

[sidewndr46]

I'm pretty sure if they stopped skirting the laws, it'd eliminate a decent cohort of their customer base. Watching someone come through a pedestrian area at 45 mph on a "bicycle" that clearly is an electric motorcycle is pretty interesting.

[moron4hire]

Holy crap! How do they stop at that speed with those thin bicycle tires?

[doginasuit]

No value is essentially "smaller than you would find acceptable."

[owl57]

> just looking at the pics it is impossible to gauge whether it is 400sqft or 900sqft

Those are not good pics. Probably* for the same reason, to hide size and maybe something else.

*Depends on culture and I don't know about NYC. I've seen another landlord's market where quite a few landlords just post one or two useless photos — and even heard advice to pay attention to such postings as they're definitely not prepared by a professional agent.

[therealpygon]

Wouldn’t it be easier for streeteasy to simply stop allowing 0 sq ft listings/innacurate listings? Maybe allowing people to report listings that are inaccurate and banning repeat offenders? If the market feels that strongly, the pressure on the company would be easy to achieve?

[KennyBlanken]

> I cannot think of a logical reason to not provide that information.

Because it's to an extreme degree a landlord's market and thus none of them have any incentive to do more than the bare minimum?

Even if it was listed everyone would "stretch" things by including closets and the like. The only way it would work is if the city did the measurements and maintained a database...but then you'd have people bribing the inspectors. they already do it over fire code.

Renting an apartment should require at a minimum registration, inspection (fire code - window/egress, detectors, and ideally an extinguisher and fire blanket), proof of insurance, and some sort of bond per unit that the city holds onto and uses for emergency code compliance repairs.

[whateveracct]

> Because it's to an extreme degree a landlord's market and thus none of them have any incentive to do more than the bare minimum?

okay let's change that? seems bad

[stevekemp]

It's a landlord's market because there are not enough properties, if there was a larger supply the tenants would be able to make choices and defacto reject bad options.

How do you change that, short of building more?

[amarant]

In Europe we've used regulations. There's standardised ways to measure area of an apartment/house, and it has to be included in any ads and contract of sale/rent. If the actual area doesn't match what's in the ads/contract the landlord/seller will be in trouble. I saw a news article once where the landlord,iirc, had to return all rent money to the tenant. The tenant had lived there for a while(memory is fuzzy, I think it was years, but don't quote me on that) and in the end only paid for electricity.

I hear you guys like suing eachother in the states, seems like this kind of regulation would suit you just fine!

[stevekemp]

The parent was talking about it being a "landlords market" and wanting that to be changed. I asked how that might be possible.

Improving advertisements to make them accurate, detailed, and directly-comparable is obviously a good thing. But does not change the market in favour of the tenants; the status-quo exists because of a lack of properties. That means no matter how bad the advert(s) tenants have to choose one available. If there were a surplus of properties then it would be a tenant's market.

(I'm in Europe!)

[Symbiote]

Require advertisements for property to include the floor (and ground) area.

[9dev]

…and define rules for the measurement taken, like no stairs, count areas below roof sloping or outside on balconies etc. with a lower factor, exclude shared areas and cellars/attics, and so on.

Not measuring correctly, not publishing the measurements, or publishing incorrect measurements outside an error margin gets counted as deception. Offer a simple reporting contact point to citizens to report landlords or offers that violate this regulation without a lawsuit.

[preg_match]

Advertising is already a pretty strict domain by necessity. We used to allow just about every lie under the sun in advertising, and it was universally bad. We systematically broke that down one by one over many decades, and we're still doing it! I mean, these days you can't even sell tobacco without saying "hey we're trying to kill you btw".

This is a very well-trodden path, I think.

[stevekemp]

While that would be useful it would not change it from a landlords-market - which is what the comment I replied to was about.

[cr1895]

Why isn’t regulation and enforcement a solution? Why must the city be the ones to measure spaces?

How it works in plenty of other countries…

[culopatin]

Square footage is very much a lie in San Francisco as well

[evolve2k]

During the press conference he finished with a light joke that was something like “after all it’s meant to be Street Easy not Street Hard”. I assumed that was an app, your post unintentionally closed the loop for me!

Agree AI modified listing make no sense to allow; regulation here is making up for platform failure.

[gorgoiler]

I tried searching for Flatbush on streeteasy.com and typing “Fla” into the neighborhood typeahead gave me:

  Chelsea
  [blank]
  Flatiron
  Murray Hill
  Flatbush

Delete the three letters and search for “Bush”:

  Chelsea
  Chelsea
  Chelsea
  Murray Hill

Street Hard indeed.

[eloisius]

Apartment hunting is an unpleasant chore I haven’t had to do since 2022. It hadn’t even occurred to me that AI slop would be the norm. I really have lived to see man-made horrors beyond my comprehension.

[qurren]

The motivation is good, the implementation sucks.

> requiring disclosure of AI-altered listings

So all the landlords will just disclose it and everyone will continue to be deceived. Just like every other picture on Meta platforms these days says it is AI-edited. That didn't make the feed any better; it's still a feed full of disclosed AI crap.

Why is this mayor so fucking chicken to just BAN AI-altered listings altogether? Have jail time and $1M fines for it. Fines big enough that you would risk losing your property altogether. We need more real leaders.

[idiotsecant]

Relax. This post is wildly aggressive for no reason.

[rjh29]

Choice of tone can communicate the same thing as 3-4 paragraphs of calmer discourse. Should we ban the use of tone? Personally I appreciated it and the frustration was palpable.

[qurren]

I'm just tired of regulators realizing the right things to regulate but not implementing them correctly.

Job postings must include a salary range? Who the fuck thought of that? Did they even ask a mathematician whether providing the min() and max() would be useful rather than mean(), median(), and std(), which is what the law really should require?

[sokoloff]

How many people who are considering hiring their first few employees have an idea of what the minimum they’d likely pay and the maximum they’d likely pay for those new positions? Almost all.

Now how many could even tell you the rough definition of standard deviation, let alone be able to give a value for it? Almost none.

As an applicant for a single opening, it’s not obvious that standard deviation is helpful either.

For normal people, I think that min and max are the two most practical and understandable measures.

[qurren]

> As an applicant for a single opening

You're nitpicking at details. I'm sure you're smart enough to figure out how to write it so that this isn't an issue, but it seems you're more interested in "taking the other side" rather than thinking together about how to increase job compensation transparency.

Here's the problem with minimums: Companies posting ranges of $100K-$900K. Yes, I've seen them.

Here's a hint for everyone else: For small companies and single openings they can just aggregate mean/median/std by job level (E5 average, M1 average), or aggregate horizontally by team (HR average, ops average), whatever. Anything to increase transparency. If you're criticizing the math instead of building on the math, you're clearly against job transparency.

[sokoloff]

I’m in favor of transparency (and consistently argue for that and act accordingly inside my own company). I’m against adding information that will confuse far more people than it will help.

A company listing $100k-$900k per year for a role that’s not commissioned sales is exhibiting malicious compliance and should be dealt with directly as such rather than adding an additional nearly useless measure to somehow help smoke that out or avoid it.

[runako]

> Companies posting ranges of $100K-$900K.

Yes, this is extremely Netflix. The "fix" for this is to mandate that they can no longer post an ad for engineers, but rather they have to post separate ads for each engineering role. Maybe this is better, maybe not. If a person applies to L4, are they allowed to be hired at L3 pay? Will that confuse people?

> For small companies and single openings

levels.fyi chooses not to publish some comp datapoints because there's too little data, which means publishing the data is tantamount to publishing an individual's compensation.

I hear you on the goal, but the details are tough.

[master-lincoln]

we need less normal people

[sgerenser]

For many tech jobs, that still wouldn’t help much. Salary alone is often half or less of total compensation. They’d also need to include stock grants and bonuses for the comparison to be meaningful.

[qurren]

Good point. Absolutely include mean, mean, std of stock grants, bonuses, and sign-on bonuses by law as well.

[runako]

Caveat: I am pro more transparency in compensation data. But it's hard to do right.

> mean(), median(), and std()

play this out a bit, and you'll quickly realize that there are infinite ways to game this. Something like levels.fyi only works because levels are a thing, and they are consistent across a relative handful of companies (most tech workers do not work at those companies).

And even levels.fyi won't publish salary data until there are enough data points at a company to prevent such publication from inadvertently publishing how much an individual person makes. This makes it less useful for (say) a senior looking for a job at a non-tech or small firm.

[vitorgrs]

I wish there would be a similar thing for food as well. In my country (Brazil), food apps such as iFood are FULL of AI images. Worse is that iFood don't allow reviews to post pictures, so you get very blind asking it.

Now Didi came (99) and Keeta, and they at least allow users to post reviews with pictures.

[Eridrus]

It's super annoying, but this is a total nothing burger because he doesn't actually have any power to do anything here.

This has also been a problem long before AI with "virtually staged" apartments.

[kennywinker]

> he doesn't actually have any power to do anything here.

Landlords in nyc are doing business in nyc, which means the city can regulate them, does it not?

[Eridrus]

The Mayor is not a dictator and can't just make up laws or regulations.

He can probably get DCWP to engage in the normal rule making process, but at most this is probably going to get some AI disclosure somewhere, which is what we had for "virtually staged" lies.

[weakfish]

It’s directing the city to treat it as false advertising in existing law if I understand correctly

[Eridrus]

Right, which is why all we're going to get it a label saying that AI was used (or maybe landlords will try to fly through on the label of "virtually staged" that they've been using).

Existing law doesn't have the authority to ban all AI images as inherently deceptive, and DCWP isn't going to be spending a bunch of time prosecuting individual images.

I agree with Mamdani that these images are often deceptive and misleading and sifting through the bullshit is annoying (and was annoying with virtually staged images too). It's just not going to go anywhere. The energy would be better spent on zoning and building code reform.

[evil-olive]

> The energy would be better spent on zoning and building code reform.

you've constructed a false dichotomy here.

the government of a city with ~8 million people is capable of doing multiple things at the same time.

[enraged_camel]

I take it you are a lawyer specializing in NY real estate law, then? Would be interesting to hear a more detailed analysis if so.

[sidewndr46]

I hope they don't figure out virtually all housing is photographed with those weird lenses and the colors are enhanced digitally

[kennywinker]

What do you call a reverse slippery-slope argument? “All images are edited, therefore ai editing is ok.”

Degrees of alteration matter, pretending ai images are the same as color retouching is dumb.

[TurdF3rguson]

Yes I'm sure he's talking about disclosure. California has this law state-wide.

[Eridrus]

I agree, we're going to get a little warning label, just like the "virtually staged" labels that are already there and nothing of consequence will actually change. That is why I say this is a nothing burger.

[TurdF3rguson]

But that label does serve a purpose. Plenty of people don't know that there's even such a thing as that.

[thenayr]

Why are you so certain of this? Oh it was a problem before so we should just keep doing nothing even though it will almost certainly become exponentially worse with AI? Love this plan.

[Eridrus]

I am so certain of this because I was not born yesterday and this is not my first time paying attention to (NYC) politics.

Politician makes a grand statement they do not have the authority to meaningfully act on to get headlines, DCWP issues a weak sauce disclosure rule and the news cycle moves on because this is not actually anybody's priority.