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Decoded: The Most 'Flexible' of Apartment Listings

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Welcome back to The Brokerbabble Glossary, where we take a word or a turn of phrase that seems to show up in an unreasonable number of listings and decipher its true meaning. If you have any ideas for us, send them to the tipline. Today's word: Flexible.

In apartment listings, layouts and floorplans are the only things that are ever described as flexible. You never hear, for example, about a flexible lamp. "This lamp is excellent at providing light, but it can also be used for jousting!" That would be great. What is not great is when an apartment has a tiny room, or, as in the above floorplan, a tiny not-even-room-area, that leads the whole apartment to be described as flexible. Think of all the things you could do with that space between the kitchen and the bathroom! You could put a single chair in it! And sit there! That's flexibility for you.

Another common usage of 'flexible' is when an apartment just has a huge mess of rooms with no real specified purposed. What are they all for? Who knows. Maybe this apartment is a 1BR with eleven libraries. It's flexible.

Why stop at just two bedrooms? This apartment could fit at least five. Six, if someone is flexible enough to sleep in the bathtub.

This layout looks literally flexible, as in you could bend it in half.
?Jeremiah Budin
· The Brokerbabble Glossary [Curbed]