Square footage: What buyer sees, buyer gets?

There have been a number of calls to the Hotline recently that involve measurement problems.

Suits are filed when the “actual” square footage fails to conform to the measurements published on the MLS. In my experience, most suits are resolved against the purchaser for a variety of reasons:

1. The Agreement of Sale, unless modified, places the risk of square footage discrepancies on the buyer.

2. Despite what numbers were posted, the buyer actually saw the property and purchased what he saw.

3. Standards for measurements vary.

There are Fannie Mae guidelines to measuring gross living area and gross building area, as well as different approaches taken by the American National Standard Institute (ANSI) and others. No wonder there can be confusion.

The lesson here is that buyer agents must underscore that their clients are acquiring what they see and not necessarily what they read, at least in terms of measurement. An alternative approach is to modify the agreement so that a seller warrants specific gross building or gross living area, in which case the standards for measurement should be included in the agreement.

The documents we use are replete with reminders that buyer agents tend to ignore. On the back of page two of the agreement is a statement indicating that representations of square footage are estimates only and the bottom of each page of the MLS indicates that the information is not guaranteed. These reminders are here for a purpose. Don’t fall victim to a matter of size.

I’d like to hear from you. What do you do to avoid these problems?