I often get calls from home buyers who got the “ick” in a real estate deal when they discovered that the size of the house is different in the MLS listing than in their home inspection report. “Obviously,” they think, “someone lied on the MLS listing to represent the house as bigger than it truly is. If they lied about that, what else did they lie about?” Those buyers ask their agent, who has no idea. That agent asks the seller’s agent, who has no idea. That seller’s agent asks the sellers, who have no idea. Now the buyer is truly freaked out. The seller is annoyed. The agents are dodging phone calls.
Here’s what probably happened. In California, nearly everything in the MLS listing except the photos and the short sales pitch is automatically populated with information from the County Assessor’s Office. Size, school district, age, style of construction, tax history, crime metrics, all of that data… is automatically generated by the system from government databases. And neither the sellers, nor the listing agent, are liable for errors in government-supplied MLS information. And, none of them even have a duty to check and see if that information is correct. Because, shocker, there’s usually something obviously incorrect if you really look.
But for size, specifically, there are actually numerous ways to measure the size of a property, depending on who is doing the measurement and why. One of them is not “more correct” than another.
The Assessor’s Office cares about maximizing the size measurement of the house, to get the most taxes. They’re probably using the total building footprint. Sometimes they themselves measure the outside of the house. Often they rely on a figure provided to them by the local Planning Department, which they calculated from the permit plans when they checked to make sure the building wasn’t larger than the Zoning Laws permit.
Anyway, the point is, the MLS listing is pulling the largest possible measurement for the house straight from the government, and feeding it directly to the buyer and the buyer’s agent, without the seller or the seller’s agent even being involved.
However, people like home inspectors, realtors, construction contractors… they’re not interested in the house’s footprint. The home inspector and realtor want to know how much livable space there is. The contractor just wants to know how much drywall, trim, paint, carpet, hardwood and tile to buy. So they all walk from room to room with a laser measure, measure each room, and add it all up. That’s a much smaller number.
So which one is “right?” Doesn’t matter. Because the secret truth is this: the judge doesn’t care if someone measured the footprint and someone else measured interior, conditioned living space. The judge wants to know if you walked through the property. Because if you walked through the property, then you decided based on your own observations and spacial awareness that the house was “big enough” to justify making the offer you made, and whether one person says it’s 3,000sf and another person says it’s 2,800sf doesn’t actually matter, because no one relied on either number when they made the offer.
Now, if for some reason the buyer did not tour the house, for a good and valid reason, that’s a different matter. It happens, especially when people are transferred for work on short notice to places with a housing shortage, like California. If that’s the case, call me.
Hope that helps.
- Bill