by Chris Lang
on October 20, 2012
In my previous article for first home buyers I started this list of questions – and reasons to ask them, to make sure you are buying a great house for a good price. As I promised, this is the rest of them: Questions about the house: Ask: What is the size of the block? Why: […]
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by Chris Lang
on February 22, 2010
If 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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