Realtor-Speak Run Amok In Insane Listing for Impossibly Small Studio
Could you see yourself paying $1,275 a month to live in a 100-square-foot micro-studio apartment that's "smaller than a jail cell"? What if I threw in a "brand new alcove"?
Douglas Elliman Real Estate is hoping that fancy-sounding "amenities" and a medley of shameless realtor buzz words will be enough to convince "students or young professionals who wish to enjoy the vivacity of South Harlem" to rent out this baby shoebox at 14 Convent Ave.
Offered is a brand new alcove studio with three, large, east-facing windows allowing for robust sunlight throughout the day. Floors are contemporary dark-wood, and kitchen appliances are newly-installed, jet-black. Cabinet space is generous. Bathroom is new with rainforest showerhead. The building is a gut-renovated pre-war structure with laundry in the basement and a garden for exclusive use by tenants...Studios are small, clean, with compelling renovation.
"They are like dorm rooms but more expensive," resident Kevin Mangan told the Daily News.
Mangan rents a "megasize" 250-square-foot unit in the third floor of the same building for $1,350 a month — $400 more than a dorm room at Columbia University, where he is currently a senior.
Looking to get a realistic view of the place not photographed by professional optical illusionists employed by a real estate agency, the Daily News sent reporter Simone Weichselbaum to check out apartment 1F.
This is what she came back with:
Update 7:40 p.m.: Well, the listing was removed for fairly obvious reasons (have you seen this place?), but here, for posterity, is what it looked like before the scrub: