Statistics on apartment sizes

December 6, 2012 3:15 AM

Is there any kind of listing online that gives average or median apartment sizes by country or, ideally, by city?

This is a general curiosity question, based on a few conversations about what a "normal" apartment size, and price per square metre, are in various places.

I looked around and found this article and several others linking off of this BBC article, but it refers to home sizes and new construction.

I'm curious about differences, so references that show sizes across cities in one country are great, but references that give only a single city are less so: I'm kind of hoping that someone else already did the work of compiling them.

posted by frimble to home & garden (2 answers total)

Here's another Apartment Therapy article that details how average regional home square footage has changed over time, as reported by the US Census, which also lists a number of new housing characteristics on their site. Looks like you can get regional/yearly data on a number of metrics, including square footage.

Trulia collects similar information, and lists average square footage and price on a city-by-city basis. As for aggregate data on a national scale, here is their regional map of home prices.
posted by Dr. Regardless at 5:08 AM on December 6, 2012

I don't think anyone has compiled this information in the way you are looking for. As Dr. Regardless says, in the US, the US Census Bureau collects data on new housing--although this does not really give much information about apartments as a whole since there are many more apartments that are old than new, or converted, or illegal, or whatnot. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has some more detailed data sets from the American Housing Survey which are broken down by demographics of residents as well as geographic region. At the city level, the assessor's office (which keeps data for property tax assessments) would have some information but typically this data is not easily accessible.

However, since you are in Europe, this may all be of limited use to you since housing patterns are very different between countries. If there is a source of comparative housing information for rentals internationally, I would love to see it.
posted by epanalepsis at 5:58 PM on December 6, 2012