House Hunting Tips: Square Footage
A lot of people house hunt with a certain size in mind – some minimum square footage that they’d like to have. In fact, so many people do it that one of the Redfin options is to limit your searches to properties within a particular range of sizes.
The data come from MLS listings, a “source deemed reliable but not guaranteed,” to quote the lawyerly footnote on the search page. It works pretty well, but I have had the experience of walking into a place and wondering, “Is this really 1790 square feet? Because it feels smaller than the 1510 square foot place I saw 20 minutes ago.”
Fortunately, the Seattle Department of Planning and Development gives me an easy way to double-check my impressions: the Parcel Data Research web site.
Specifying the address of a property within the city gains me access to official King County Residential Building Data, which includes square footage. The number I’m most interested in is the “Living” square footage, which is the finished, heated space in a home. That’s the number I use when I calculate the cost-per-square-foot ratio.
As a house hunter, it’s a good idea to double-check the county records for any place you’re really interested in. (Running a tape measure from corner to corner works, too.) If you’re not in Seattle, then search the Internet to see if your local government provides online access to property records. That way you can ensure that you’re getting the space you want.
