So I’m not quite sixty years old, and a pastime at my age is reading articles like this one: The Most Affordable Places to Retire. I mean, I wouldn’t want to live most of those places, but let’s check it out anyhoo. Then as I click through this clickbait article, I come to Huntsville Alabama. Sounds nice: rockets and stuff, so let’s check out the housing on Zillow. And I find that virtually none of the for-sale houses in Huntsville list square footage. A very few new construction houses.
Why would this be? Are they all hiding the square footage from the taxman or something? If you list the footage as 1200 sqft and it’s really 1201, can you get sued by someone for reasons?
What bothers me is that when they list it they may or may not include basement area. Obviously, you don’t include an unfinished basement but what about a fully finished basement with a bedroom and full bath? In my townhouse, do you include the lower level that is at street level with entrance from the garage and walkout to the back patio so not technically a basement, but not included because the front door is up a set of steps on the middle floor. When this floor is a third the size of the house I think it matters. Personally, I think that they should include square footage of each floor.
Everything varies by state, I can talk about New Jersey.
Not only does the listing generally show square footage of the house but you can dive into the public tax records and get the exact square footage of the house, the basement and attic if usable. Also the exact dimensions of the yard.
Example for Monmouth County, NJ https://oprs.co.monmouth.nj.us/oprs/External.aspx?iId=12
The County or State website might have the equivalent.
The Property card on this site is wonderful once you get use to the abbreviations on the drawing. I pulled one up at semi-random and see it has City Sewer & Water. The road is paved, the ground is level.
Has Aluminum or Vinyl siding. Shingles for the roof, Concrete block foundation.
A Room Count, Year built, Livable area then by story so as an example 1500sq’ livable, 700’ 1st floor & 800’ 2nd floor.
Basement 700sq’, Finished 360’
Detached garage 590sq’
The house has Forced Hot Air for 1500 sq’ & AC for same using combo ducts.
It has a 1 4 fixture Bath & 1 3 fixture bath.
Deck of 200sq’
Patio of 350sq’ Vinyl Pool 500sq’
Wow, I find it absolutely nuts that a house listing wouldn’t contain something so basic as square feet. I’ve lived in California for 30 years, and I have never seen that. I can see not being required to list square feet, but I’d think someone with a, say, 3500 sqft house for sale would want to shout about that square footage to attract buyers. But in Huntsville? Nope, nobody wants to tell you. It must be prohibited in some way otherwise it makes no sense.
Many years ago, some people made a fair amount of money in lawsuits that relied on exact measurements. Therefore, many real estate brokers in Alabama just stopped supplying data on the number of square feet.
So big OOPS for the OP: the Zillow listings link is for Greensboro NC, not Huntsville. Greensboro has the problem described above: no square feet on Zillow. I must have mixed up the towns clicking through the “best places to retire” clickbait article.
Anyway, the question remains: why no square feet in Greensboro? Is it what Meriwhether describes?
It’s possible but I doubt it. That seems like a very spurious lawsuit unless one Company/Broker was found to be systematically inflating the sizes. It which case the other brokers shouldn’t have felt a strong chill to drop useful information that is probably part of the public record.
I have friends looking for a house, and they’ll even talk to each other using the square footage: “So, I still like that 1800 sq.ft cape cod by the dog park…”
So I just did a check. On Trulia, when I pull up Freehold, NJ I see some houses have the square footage listed on the Bedroom & Bathroom line and some don’t.
For Greensboro, NC almost none* of them do. That is really weird. In my town almost every house has a square footage listed.
It looks like New Construction generally has square footage in Greensboro, NC.
Dear Og, the price of that took my breath away. You couldn’t get a 500sq ft condo for that in my area. And that house would be close to $1million.
As for basements, I’ve always understood the rule to be that one cannot include square footage which is “below grade.” Mainly because the rules were set in the days before finishing basements and adding ducted HVAC were ever done.
The shocking thing to me is when the listing doesn’t include the lot size. I see that in about 1in 5 listings anywhere I am looking. To me, in Real Estate what you are really buying is the land. Any building is just an improvement upon it. I’m not saying a good improvement isn’t useful, but it’s not the permanent value you are purchasing.
I occasionally check out Zillow listings around the U.S. (a hangover from our house search days awhile back), and Greensboro is an outlier when it comes to being coy about square footage. If you look further into specific listings they often do list at least a range for the square footage i.e.1900-2300 sq. ft. or sq. ft. for individual rooms. Maybe there’s a local ordinance in play.
Sometimes other locales omit square footage for certain listings, usually when the place is a dump or selling at auction.
A favorite listings trick in general is to state lot size in square feet instead of acres or fraction thereof. Makes the lot seem adequate, or so they think. Oo, 6,800 square feet! Sounds better than .16 acre.
We had a fun one this past year. Red Bank. NJ got super popular, especially with first time buyers fleeing the NYC and the cities of North East Jersey. So properties in neighboring Middletown were listed far too often as Red Bank.
On the lots being in acres or square footage. It seems like the rule of thumb is anything under 1/4 acres is listed in square footage.
Florida has a different slant: A LOT of people use their garage as a living space so you never know if the square footage listed is sans garage or not.
Five or so years ago, my gf asked me how many square feet our house was. I found the blue prints and calculated the numbers for both floors. Turns out she only wanted our main floor, so I gave her those numbers. She worked with the numbers and told me I had to be wrong.
So, I grabbed a tape measure and measured. I got the same numbers as the blueprint gave. She again insisted there was no way I was correct.
Turns out she was shopping for carpet, plugging in my numbers for square feet where she needed square yards.
^ Warning to all: We bought some carpeting a few years back and as I was checking the bill of sale I noticed figures like “14.5” and “19.4” and it occurred to me that those figures might be .5 of a yard/foot and not 5 inches. I asked the salesperson, who was calling to order the carpeting from the warehouse and she hung up to check and it turns out they were ordering 14 ft., 5 inches when it should have been 14 ft., 6 inches. Not a huge difference, but still.
When I was house hunting in DC a couple decades ago, nobody listed square footage, which struck me as odd (I knew it was common practice in CA). My agent acknowledged that other areas did this, but DC didn’t. She didn’t know why and acknowledged that it was useful information.
Fast forward to today and Zillow lists sqft in DC. The value for my house is within a handful of what I’ve measured (for the two floors above grade).
2872 ft^2 of Total Living Area according to the Guilford County Property Summary and Tax Appraisal Information.
If I can find it, a real estate agent should be able to use it. All they would be doing is using the number the government has on file.
My only thought is if you have interior updates that might not be on a permit, you wouldn’t want to advertise that. Maybe this is normal in the area, and both in the buyers and sellers interest. An after-the-fact finished basement would never be discovered by the tax man.
