Price Per Square: A Cautionary Tale
You’re weighing two homes — and Redfin and Zillow both highlight price per square foot. What looks like a baseline data point has some hidden dangers. While it’s tempting to use, it’s rarely the right baseline, and leaning on it can quietly cost you. Here’s why.
You’re never just buying the structure. You’re buying the lot, the light, the street, the school boundary. Price per square foot prices the box and ignores everything around it.
And remember: price is really just an opinion of value — built from data, yes, but data we can each read differently.
Not all square feet are the same.
Here’s the catch most buyers miss: the square footage on a listing usually comes from county records, which often fold in basements, garages, and other space that doesn’t live like true living area. So two homes can post the same $/sq ft while offering very different amounts of real, usable home. A foot of finished kitchen and a foot of below-grade space simply aren’t worth the same money — but a single blended $/sq ft treats them as if they were.
Take two homes. Both advertised at 2,400 sq ft, both $400 a foot — $960,000:
All above-grade living
Padded with the basement
It ignores the land entirely.
Same builder, same floor plan, both 2,200 sq ft at $385 a foot — $847,000. The houses are identical; what sits underneath them is not. Same structure, same per-foot price — but one address is worth meaningfully more, and the number that’s supposed to compare them can’t see the difference.
Quiet half-acre
Backs to a busy road
Bigger homes always look cheaper per foot.
A 4,000-square-foot house at $250 a foot looks like a far better value than a 1,200-square-foot cottage at $450 a foot. It usually isn’t. A kitchen, a furnace, a roof, the lot itself — these cost about the same whether the home is small or large. Spread those fixed costs across more square footage and the per-foot number falls on its own. Comparing price per foot across different sizes is comparing apples to oranges.
Now you know what’s wrong with it. Here’s the fix.
Okay, Esther — I’m smart, I love data. So what do I actually look at instead?
Great question. You don’t throw the number out — you just put it in its place: last. First you look at the things the data will never tell you, then you compare homes feature by feature, in the order things actually move value. Here’s exactly how I do it.
Start with the two things you will never see in the listing data — the ones that quietly decide whether a home is actually worth it:
Then compare the homes that matter on the features that matter — in order of what actually moves value. This is the short version of the worksheet I use on every deal:
| Feature | Subject | Comp 1 | Comp 2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Location | |||
| Neighborhood & school district | ○ | ○ | ○ |
| Land & site | |||
| Lot size, view, setting (quiet vs. busy) | ○ | ○ | ○ |
| Quality & condition | |||
| Remodeled vs. fixer · year built | ○ | ○ | ○ |
| ★ Usable size — start here | |||
| Finished, above-grade sq ft · layout | ○ | ○ | ○ |
| ★ Beds & baths — and their quality | |||
| Count, light, and which floor they’re on | ○ | ○ | ○ |
| Context only | |||
| $ / sq ft — look at this last, not first | — | — | — |
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