4 ms·
Yeah, I do have to agree with that. I look at home prices even outside of Manhattan and it is absurd. Like $300k for a 1 bedroom 500-sq ft apartment.
by madamelic 9y ago
Yeah, I do have to agree with that. I look at home prices even outside of Manhattan and it is absurd. Like $300k for a 1 bedroom 500-sq ft apartment.
- barrkel 9y agoTo put that in perspective, 700 sq ft (65 sq m) is above average total usable space in a London 3-bed two-storey house. (75 sq m is the notional English average for a 3-bed, but in reality that includes bathrooms, hallways, stairwells, and other unusable internal space. When buying a house in London, I wrote a scraper that extracted room dimensions, and 55 to 65 is a much more realistic range.)
- humanrebar 9y agoU.S. realtors and agents often include bathrooms, hallways, awkward nooks, etc. in their numbers as well.
- 13of40 9y agoThe finished square feet are tracked by the government, for tax purposes, and yes, they tax your bathroom and closet, even if it's shaped weird. Measuring and omitting those when selling your house would be a huge headache just for the purpose of ... screwing yourself out of potential buyers?
- yardie 9y agoAs a counter-example, for France anything under 5ft is not counted. Areas under the stairs, that edge area of slanted ceilings, areas above a loft can't be counted. You can include it but the official number is footspace that is standing height.
- criddell 9y agoMy realtor described it as everything under air meaning that if the space is heated or cooled, then it's counted. So the garage is out, but bathrooms and hallways and closets are in.
- madcaptenor 9y agoThat's not exactly correct - part of my basement is heated/cooled but I'm pretty sure that doesn't count towards square footage (at least, the appraisal didn't count it). Are you somewhere where people don't have basements?
- criddell 9y agoGood point. Yeah, I'm in Austin and there are no basements here that I'm aware of.
- ghaff 9y agoUsually it's about finished vs. unfinished. I've never thought about whether my basement is heated or not. I mean it doesn't have radiators but that's where the furnace is and if the basement got too cold that would be problematic because of pipes. But it's very unfinished :-)
- sjg007 9y agoIt's anything above grade.
- matthewowen 9y agoUK houses are almost all multi-floor. Less so in the US. Stairs waste a bunch of space.
- gozur88 9y agoI don't think it's completely unreasonable, particularly in the case of bathrooms. Larger bathrooms (to a point) are nicer than smaller bathrooms, and that should be reflected in the square footage.
- giobox 9y agoThe UK is notorious for building homes with tiny rooms in my experience. I've often felt personally that the housing market there is too obsessed with bedroom count as a metric for comparison rather than actual usable square footage. My father's house in the UK was built in last 10 years and promises 5 bedrooms, I've often thought that knocking this down to 3 and making reasonable sized rooms would have made for a much nicer home. I imagine it also would have knocked however many thousands off the seller's asking price as well though... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/property/10909403/British-homes-are-the-smallest-in-Europe-study-finds.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/property/10909403/British...
- barrkel 9y agoOh I fully agree. My scraper made up a list of properties that could be sorted by a balance of commuting distance and size - I was particularly interested in a larger place given how small the standard is. I ended up with a 3 storey, 4 bed 120 sq m town house with garden + garage 35 minutes motorcycle ride from my workplace, or 55 minutes if I have to take train + tube (which I very rarely do, because waiting for the train sucks if it's delayed or missed).