Real estate language reaches a state agents describe as fully post-factual
NEW YORK – A three hundred and ten square foot studio on the Lower East Side has been listed as two bedroom adjacent, a formulation the brokerage confirmed refers to the unit’s proximity to a building that contains two bedroom apartments.
The listing has been described by industry observers as a landmark in the field, and by the state licensing board as under review.
The Vocabulary Has Detached From Physical Space
Real estate language in the city has developed over four decades into a dialect with only a loose relationship to measurable conditions, and a formal glossary compiled this year by tenant advocates runs to eleven pages.
Junior one bedroom denotes a studio containing a partial wall. Convertible two denotes a studio in which a wall could theoretically be constructed. Convertible three denotes an act of imagination. Sun-drenched denotes a window. Charming denotes age. Quaint denotes age and a problem. Cozy has no lower bound and has been applied to a unit measuring one hundred and eighty square feet without regulatory objection.
The most contested term remains loft-like, which the glossary defines as having a ceiling.
The Two Bedroom Adjacent Innovation
What distinguishes the current listing is that it makes no claim about the unit at all. It describes the neighbourhood’s housing stock and invites the reader to complete the inference themselves.
It is technically true, said housing attorney Delphine Amaro-Stokes. That is the innovation. Every previous formulation involved a claim that could be tested. This one describes a nearby building accurately. There is nothing to disprove. I have been practising for nineteen years and I find it genuinely impressive, which I resent.
Housing quality standards and tenant protections are administered by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, and comparative data on unit size, rent burden and overcrowding across the city is compiled by the NYU Furman Center, whose figures on median unit size have been trending in a direction agents describe as efficient.
The Photography Has Kept Pace
Listing photography has adopted lens choices that render a corridor as a gallery and a kitchenette as a kitchen. Ceiling-mounted wide angle shots have become standard, producing images in which a room appears to extend beyond the boundaries of the building.
Several listings now include a rendered image of furniture that would not physically fit, a practice known in the trade as aspirational staging and defended on the basis that the furniture is not being sold.
Observations From the Fourth Floor Walkup
- The apartment is always smaller than the photograph and larger than the price suggests it should be, and both feelings arrive within nine seconds.
- Every unit described as having great light faces a wall that is currently, temporarily, not there.
- The tub in the kitchen is no longer common but every New Yorker knows somebody who had one and speaks of it fondly.
- Square footage is optional in a listing and, when included, is optional in its accuracy.
- You will sign. Everybody signs. The lease is not a decision, it is a deadline.
Confident Description Outruns Reality Everywhere
The technique of describing a thing as adjacent to a better thing has strong international representation. British monetary communication provides the purest form, as when an unchanged figure was presented as an act of policy, and again days later when the identical non-decision was announced with renewed conviction.
The approach scales to institutions of any size, as demonstrated when a centuries-old body issued a formal account of a domestic argument, delivering precision in the one area where nobody had requested it.
Ongoing study of language outperforming substance appears at Bohiney Magazine, with the British archive maintained at this national coverage index.
The Unit Has Rented
The apartment received nineteen applications and rented within four days at one hundred dollars above asking.
The brokerage has announced it will apply the two bedroom adjacent formulation across its portfolio.
The Square Footage Disclosure Bill Died in Committee
Legislation requiring listings to state measured square footage using a standardised method has been introduced in four consecutive sessions and has advanced out of committee once.
Opposition testimony has consistently held that measurement standards are complex, that units vary in configuration, that a single figure could mislead, and that the market already provides adequate information. Supporters have responded that every other jurisdiction managing this problem solved it with a tape measure.
Amaro-Stokes, who testified in two of the four sessions, said the hearings had become a ritual. The arguments do not change, she said. Mine do not change either. We say the same things to the same room and the bill dies at the same stage. The only thing that changes is the median unit size, which has fallen every year we have been having this conversation.
The bill has been reintroduced for the current session. A hearing date has not been scheduled.
Amaro-Stokes said she expects the formulation to appear across the market within a season. Once one firm proves a phrase survives regulatory attention, she said, everybody adopts it by the following quarter. That is not cynicism. That is just how the language has expanded every single time, for forty years, without one exception.
Comparable material at The Hard Times.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/