Dirty real-estate tricks

I’ve now noticed this enough while perusing real-estate listings that it qualifies as a trend.

Let’s say an apartment is located on A Street and 1st Avenue. (All street names purely fictional.) There’s a subway stop called “B Street,” but it’s located on B Street and 10th. So in order to get there from your A and 1st apartment, you would have to walk one block down to B, then turn and walk nine blocks to 10th. Inevitably, dishonest real-estate agents will advertise this apartment as one block from the subway, because it’s one block from the same street where the subway is, at some other point, located.

On a related note, my favorite Craigslist trick is sneaking the name of a more-desirable neighborhood into a listing so it shows up in the search results. You’ll be searching for apartments in Chelsea, and you’ll find an ad for a studio in the South Bronx that says, “We also have apartments in Chelsea!”