• CJ Burlingame
  September 10, 2020, 9:00 am

  The square footage is 200, not 320. It’s a 10′ x 20′ shed. Very misleading. Those lofts are not considered living area if you can’t stand up.

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  • James D.
    September 11, 2020, 3:40 am

    Well, it’s not unusual, as many real estate sites like Zillow will tell you, one of the most confusing and misleading metrics in real estate is area — the “size” of a house. This is because there’s no established standard for measuring a residential property, and everyone seems to measure square footage differently.

    For example, the square footage of a property can be measured in usually either one of two ways: gross building area and gross living area. One measures from the exterior walls and the other only measures the habitable spaces but people may still include areas that are not considered habitable spaces… Architects and appraisers often calculate square footage by using exterior walls, which may conflict with a property’s GLA figure. While for areas that intersect a sloped roof line, there’s usually allowances as long as 50% meet the minimum requirement but the rest can dip below that minimum and still be counted.

    Each municipality/area can also have it’s own specific version of the building codes, zoning, etc. While some may be below the minimum size requirements to have the codes apply to them, leaving it to what regular people may feel should be included rather than what should technically be included and/or excluded…

    Like, technically, habitable spaces should exclude bathrooms, hallways, utility spaces and closets. Along with garages and basements, in many cases even when finished, should usually not be counted. But that isn’t always the case in real estate listings.

    The actual tiny house building code from the 2018 IRC ICC with Appendix Q, puts the minimum for Lofts to just not be less than 5 feet in any horizontal dimension and be no less than 35 square feet. So doesn’t actually have to be standing height but smaller lofts should technically be excluded or have a smaller percentage counted if the whole space doesn’t meet the minimum criteria…

    So it’s something to always watch out for but isn’t unusual to see… Mind, as well, even when they get it technically right that it generally never factors how usable the space is as an efficiently designed small space can be more usable than a badly designed larger space, but the housing market is full of long list of such issues…

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