The Real Deal

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Playing the game of inches in measuring square footage

Considering the intangibles that can factor into buying an apartment — the hipness of a neighborhood, the beauty of a view, whether that roof deck will really become a gathering place for sunset cocktails — getting a handle on how much space there is may seem straightforward.

Yet it isn't. For condos, appraisers generally use one method, brokers prefer others, and it can be anybody's guess how developers stretch their measuring tapes (though the results are often, er, generous.)

Co-ops, meanwhile, are an entirely different beast, owing to their unique ownership structure, so square footage usually isn't included in listings. If it is, brokers admit that they often eyeball it.

Frustrated by these inconsistencies, the Real Estate Board of New York doesn't bother to include size as a criterion on ResidentialNYC, the public listings service it launched in September 2007, a spokeswoman notes.

But this customary patchwork approach may not be flying anymore. A tightening market has buyers and sellers demanding more data about apartments, including more precise square footage figures, according to lawyers, brokers, developers and appraisers.

Sellers, eager to unload properties quickly in such an uncertain market, don't want any extra quibbling to derail the sales process, so they are increasingly double-checking the sizes of units before advertising them, sources say.

And buyers, with wallets made lighter by the economic downturn, are unwilling to pay for square footage that doesn't exist, according to experts. At the same time, it's becoming a necessity for co-ops to produce hard-and-fast comparables, to vie for buyers who may also be looking at condos.

"All parties involved are paying more attention," says Max Dobens, a vice president with Prudential Douglas Elliman. His firm — like the Corcoran Group, Brown Harris Stevens and Bellmarc Realty — inserts "approximate" or "estimate" before square-foot figures in its condo listings. Still, "if you see a round number, it's probably wrong, and the right number is probably higher rather than lower," he says.

A growing fear of lawsuits may also play a part in the new exactitude.

In November, Rishi and Heather Bhandari sued Two Trees Development over a 1,140-square-foot two-bedroom condo at 110 Livingston Street in Brooklyn that cost $795,000. They claim it's 17 percent smaller than promised, a "material misrepresentation," according to the suit.

To head off a similar problem, Dobens, who was representing a seller, recently called out a buyer's broker for telling his client that an $899,000 two-bedroom Upper East Side condo was 1,020 square feet when it was actually 914 square feet as spelled out in the offering plan, Dobens says.

The buyer's broker attributed the mix-up to a clerical error, and the matter was eventually dropped without a price change, Dobens adds.

The lesson? "Best to be accurate early so it doesn't come back to bite you," Dobens says.

Cubic square footage totals are also being challenged, says Adam Leitman Bailey, a Manhattan-based real estate attorney who's currently suing a developer for promising nine-foot ceilings but delivering at only eight feet, he says.

The case involves a penthouse in the Empire condo at 188 East 78th Street on the Upper East Side. The unit was purchased by Ellen and Jim Sykes for $3.9 million a few years ago.

Though the Sykeses have since sold the unit, they're seeking $1 million from the developers, Trevor Davis and Aby Rosen, for money they claim they lost on the sale because the ceilings were too low, Bailey says.

Increasingly holding developers to task, Bailey says, will create "less reckless conduct in the market, and buyers will benefit."

In the past, developers have pumped up square-foot numbers by including elevator shafts; others tallied up terraces, says Shimshon Heskel of HMS Associates, an appraisal firm based in Borough Park, Brooklyn.

But buyers and sellers may be on to them. In the last few months, there's been a 10 percent increase in requests for pre-closing verifications, he says.

"You can't steal square footage," Heskel says. "The whole industry is going through more scrutiny right now, and that's good on the whole."

For their part, developers admit that there are sometimes inaccurate measurements, though they're typically the fault of sloppy architects, or worse, unscrupulous brokers, says Andrew Bradfield, a principal of Manhattan-based development company Orange Management.

"Built conditions can be off a bit, but if they're off by 10 to 15 percent, someone is going to figure it out," he says. "It's such a bad way to make an extra buck."

In his 22 Renwick, a 12-story condo between Spring and Canal streets in Soho, unit spaces were measured from the exterior wall, which is the rule of thumb for new buildings, as their walls tend to be thin, Bradfield says. By contrast, the square footage of converted older buildings, which can have thicker construction, is calculated from a mid-wall point.

Renwick's 19 two- and three-bedrooms, from 1,000 to 1,900 square feet, are priced from $1.3 million to $3.4 million, and 10 have sold since November, Bradfield says.

Eric Albert, the owner of State Street Consultancy, a real estate firm in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, says that a client once called him out on a co-op that Albert had promised was 850 square feet. Indeed, when the buyer went through with his own ruler, it turned out to be 770 square feet. The buyer ultimately purchased the unit, Albert says.

Typically, though, Albert sells townhouses, and he calculates simply by multiplying the building's length by width. Although that's essentially the method used by appraisers, he does it that way because he believes that much internal footage has a fundamental importance, even if it can't accommodate tables and couches.

"Most people want walls around their bathrooms," Albert says. "If there is value in that, how can you say that is unusable space?"