Square footage is the bane of everyone’s existence

One of the city’s biggest brokerages recently advised its agents and associate brokers to stop providing square footage with their listings.  The action followed a horrific spike in lawsuits claiming that the numbers were overstated.

Floor plan of an apartment for which the total square footage appears in the listing but without a disclaimer. The floorplan itself provides caveats.

While it’s true that there are those brokers (and any number of individuals in other situations) who will exaggerate size intentionally for the obvious reason, it is equally true that automatically generated measurements can be wrong: garbage in, garbage out.

That’s because