Comment by clark_dent
4 days ago
The issue is how the MLS (multiple listing service) allows listing of condos/apartments/etc. Since each unit has no actual land to itself, they're allowed to list the total land that the complex sits on for each unit. There's also basically no oversight or correction on what gets listed, so listing agents have no reason to be accurate or perspicacious.
Everyone then scrapes or subscribes to the MLS data. It's why you have a dozen identical realty sites: Zillow, Realtor, Redfin, Trulia, etc.
That's exactly it, thanks for explaining it better than I did. I ran into this early with Vermont ski-resort condos: every unit "had" the acreage of the whole resort. The lot-size field just doesn't fit condos well. The site already hides acreage on listings typed as condos and flags units that resolve to an association's common parcel, but some condos come through typed as townhouses or single-family, and those slip past. Checking the claimed acreage against the actual parcel size is the fix I'm working on.