Square Footage Question - Vindication!!!

Back in January of this year, I wrote about a house I visited for sale. Here is the post. Basically, this house was listed as having ~2000 sqft of living space. When my wife and I visited the property, we noticed that one of the 'rooms' listed, was actually a converted garage. At first we we questioned why there wasn't a garage in the house (just 2 carport spaces outside), but then we realized that the garage was now the family room. Fair enough - garage conversions happen all the time. However, the public records continued to show the house as having ~1400 square feet, not the 2000 square feet claimed in the MLS listing.

As you'll read in my older post, I emailed the listing agent to find out what the deal was with the garage conversion and most importantly, to find out whether the conversion had the proper city permits. As I'm sure you all know, having the permits and not having the permits can really alter the sale price of the house.

Anyways, the reason for writing today's post is that since my email exchange with the old listing agent back in January, the house was taken off the market. This past weekend, it was put back on the market with a new listing agent. The good news is that the new listing agent actually put down the proper square footage - 1400 square feet. There is some reference to a bonus room, but nowhere does it say that any addition was unpermitted.

I just feel vindicated since my email exchange with the previous selling agent left me with a very bad taste in my mouth. Her response was that it was the buyer's responsibility to verify the square footage. While that may be true, I didn't think if was very professional of her to knowingly post inaccurate information if she were aware of it.

The other thing to note is that housing prices have somewhat cooled off since January, yet the seller of this house hasn't adjusted his/her price at all. Here is the house. Given the recent home sales in Orinda (and Lamorinda for that matter), a 1400 square foot, flat roofed home probably isn't going to fetch the $1M that the seller is seeking. Add in the unpermitted garage addition and I would expect the house to sell for somewhere in the low $900K range.