Block of flatsIf you have a flat for sale and want to maximize your profits, there is one trick you could use to get a better price - don’t advertise it as a flat. Advertise it as… an apartment!

To be completely honest with you, I can’t take the credit for this idea :) It belongs to Mr. K. Chipper, who read my post about types of properties in Australia and wrote to me, to elaborate on the subject:

“As an older Australian (age 68), I remember well the introduction of the word ‘apartment’ in the early 1960s, just as I was looking at buying or renting a flat. The word is USA based and was introduced to mean a luxury flat rather than something that was bigger than a flat, though you are correct in that an apartment was (generally) bigger.

Most times it was used as a selling tool to advertise a flat for a higher price. If you called a flat an apartment, you got a better price!”

So there you go, another example of how a fancy word is used to add a non-existent value to a product!

But jokes aside, I realize that for many of you English is not your first language, and that my British readers have never had a reason in their life to call a flat “an apartment”, so I decided to continue this linguistic quest and get more answers to what the difference between flats and apartments is.

And summarizing the information that I found, here are the other differences between flats and apartments:

  • A flat is on a single floor - an apartment can be a duplex (2-story) apartment
  • A flat has its own street entrance - an apartment can be only entered from inside the building
  • A flat has the entire floor to itself - apartments are many on one floor.

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