[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.

[Kwpolska]

Are there no property taxes in the US? And how do you know if the price is reasonable without knowing its relationship to the property size?

[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?

[pandaman]

Very slowly. Stopping is not as a big of an issue as cornering though - not only they don't have adequate traction for the speed and mass but they also don't use the front brake. Which is great as the trails which are fun to ride because of all the bends are also e-bike free other than old people riding their pedal-assist bikes at 15 mph.

[LoganDark]

My e-scooter reaches 45 mph (advertised as 53). Normally, you would stop using the brakes or regen.

[pasc1878]

What thin bicycle tires - they are much thicker than normal.

However yes they are a problem.

[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!)

[amarant]

Well, no, but it prevents fraud, which seems to be the bigger problem. A honest dominant force is better than a fraudulent dominant force.

[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