I had a friend recently tell me that he and his wife were house hunting and came across a house they were interested in, but discovered that the seller had included the garage square footage in their listing. I laughed and said that when my wife and I were house hunting about a year and a half ago, that similarly a seller had included the square footage of the garage in their listing as well.
For those that don’t know…you don’t do this.
In my case we were looking at homes, and our realtor scheduled a showing for one that was listed at just over $1 million and said it was 4,500 square feet, just around $225 a square foot.
The price per square foot was comparable to other houses we were looking at, but after we toured the house, I was skeptical that it was actually 4,500 square feet. It felt significantly smaller than that. a couple of days later I looked up the house on the county property tax rolls, and discovered that it was actually 3,600 square feet, 900 square feet below what it was listed as.
I contacted my realtor who in turn reached out to the seller’s realtor. He advised that the seller had included their 3 car garage sq. ft. in the overall square footage of the house. I laughed. The seller was attempting to get a 25% price bump!!!
If you looked at their asking price / 3,600 sq. ft. then the price per square foot, was around $281 a sq. ft. or 25% higher than the rest of the market!
We walked away, didn’t even consider making an offer. If the seller was going to be that unethical about listing his house, then there was no way I was going to trust anything they put on the seller’s disclosure statement.
Our realtor also filed a complaint against the selling realtor with the regional realtors association for letting his client list his home that way.
By all means list them, but separately from the actual living space. In my mind, living space should only include the original living space plus any warranted (i.e. permitted and inspected) changes/improvements that changed non-living space into living space. Or in other words, what your property tax assessment is based on.
If your basement is finished, you would normally count that square footage, but not an unfinished basement.
Your garage and your porch can be listed as amenities, but the square footage isn’t included in your listed sq. ft. because it’s not apples to apples.
I might be willing to pay a few bucks per square foot more if you have a three car garage vs. a two car garage, but I’m not paying the going market price per sq. foot for your extra 300 square feet, that’s not livable space.
Around these parts, we can"t “live” in the basement unless we have a route of exit directly from that level that isn’t “running upstairs while the house is on fire.” And unless your porch has heat so you can sleep there in the winter, you can’t live there, either.
OTOH, that toilet, sink, and shower we installed in the basement counts as a bathroom.
Been working for real estate appraisers off and on in three different states starting back in 1989 and I can say that the only square footage that can be included in an appraisal is permitted living space. If you finished the basement but didn’t get a permit, or converted the garage without a permit or turned a screen room into a addition without a permit they will not count as square footage. If they’re done well, the appraiser might mention them as “other spaces” but they won’t count in the official square footage.
A bedroom has to include a window or other point of egress that can fit an adult, AFAIK.
Isn’t listed square footage supposed to be regulated by law? Like, the square footage as it’s listed in the county appraisal? How are Realtors thinking adding a garage is ok?
Does it matter? Surely when buying a house you look at the house and you look at the asking price and you decide whether you want it or not. Whether it is listed as 4500 or 5000 feet doesn’t change the house, it either suits you or not.
Well, it is really misleading and if someone isn’t too hip on figuring square footage and has it in their heads that it’s a 4500SF house then the appraisal comes in at 2700SF with a big garage, unfinished basement and a three season room I’d guess that could pull the whole deal right outta escrow with a quickness. Not a good idea even if there’s no local law or ordinance prohibiting inflating square footage in a real estate listing.
I spent a lot of time looking at houses before I bought this one. The last thing I wanted was to go to a house and find out it did not match the listing. Please don’t waste my time by lying and trying to fluff the value of your house. Thanks ever so.
Ooh - this is one of those cultural OZ/US differences like in the “11ft bedroom” thread - right? People in the US actually use square footage as a metric for sorting out which houses to look at - and we don’t. There’s not even a field for it in the major real estate website (there’s one for land area, but half the listings haven’t bothered filling it in, so it’s totally useless)
I think the whole square footage thing is odd because a bedroom can be darn near any size so a house can have 6 bedrooms, all very tiny, or 3 bedrooms, all very big yet occupy the same piece of land.
Around here, we’d never list basement square footage, finished or not, egress window or not, unless it were one of those split level houses. The square footage plus the number of floors gives potential shoppers an idea of the footprint of the house, and including the basement would just screw that up completely.
How do you then decide which houses to look at? I would want to skip any four bedroom house that’s only got 120 meters of space, and concentrate only on houses that, say, are 350 square meters or larger. I don’t have time to look at lots of pictures; give me text that I can filter.
You can generally tell the ones that are three times the size of other houses by the fact that they’re three times the price
I dunno - I guess it’s just a different way of looking at things. Number of bedrooms is usually a pretty hard requirement - if you have enough people to fill up four rooms, then that’s what you need. Amount of money is definitely a hard requirement. Floor space is a squishy requirement - you might like 350sqm houses, but maybe you’d prefer a nice-looking 300 to a ratty 350? So you filter on price, bedrooms, bathrooms, garages … and if you like big houses, you look in the suburbs where the big houses are.
Its always been location location location for me anyhow
Sq footage has never been a concern when I am house hunting.
It’s the floorplan and size of the rooms that matters to me. I prefer walking through furnished or staged homes. That lets me see how furniture fits and gives a better understanding of the rooms useable space.
The desired price is set by the seller. Whether I make an offer on depends on how badly I want to buy the house. I’ve never tried verifying the Realtor’s sq footage calculations.
I just helped my mom buy a retirement home last year. I have no idea if the listed sq footage is accurate and don’t care. The house fits our requirements and we’ve had the bathroom remodeled to make it wheelchair accessible.
The square footage provides the additional context in relation to number of bedrooms. If I see a listing at 1600 square feet with 3-4 bedrooms I know the rooms will most likely be very small. If I see a listing at 4600 square feet with 3-4 bedrooms I know the rooms will probably be very generous. We are in a 4600 square foot Victorian that when we bought it had 6 bedrooms, all very generous in size with the exception of one small bedroom. After remodeling we are down to 5 bedrooms but all (with the 1 exception) are very large bedrooms. If this was a 1600 square foot house with 5 bedrooms you’d rightly assume the rooms were probably cramped.
I’m not a realtor nor an auditor of the county but my layman’s understanding is in our city you cannot claim unfinished basement space nor the garage as living space. For our area, there are no attached garages (old Victorian homes) so this is a moot point in regards to garages. For basements, they must have separate egress to the ground level and be finished to considered. We’ve had some spirited debates in our online neighborhood forums where an neighbor who was selling their home privately insisted their unfinished basement was valid square footage in their listing. If you’ve ever been in a 140+ year old home you know what those basements can be like! Haha!
In my understanding, in the US, there are no laws or regulations governing the listing process when someone sells their home. They can list it however they like. There are internal standards if you are a member of a national real estate agents association, that you as a realtor are required to abide by if you want to continue to be a member of their organization. But an individual seller can say whatever they want with regards to how they list their house. You might not be able to list it on an MLS site if you don’t abide by the Realtor rules.
The whole purpose of having a standard for what is or isn’t included in the listed square footage of a home, is so that you can make comparisons to other homes that are listed or recently sold and confidence that its apples and apples (for the most part) that you are comparing. How else can you know if you are overpaying or getting a good deal?
Square footage was important to me during my recent house search because it gives an apples-to-apples way to compare cost - price per sq. foot. I know the value of the land per acre, so I subtract that from the asking price then divide the remainder by the square footage to get a comparison. Then when we viewed the house and saw the quality of construction (or lack thereof) I could get a very good idea if the house was priced too high, just right or was a bargain. To give an idea, the house we bought priced out at about $76 per square foot once the market value of the land was subtracted. That was on the low end of the bell curve of home we looked at and, as validated by the appraisal, was a very reasonable price.
