The bigger, the better ? more so when ?bigger? comes at the price of a smaller variant of the same. That is your motto when you are shopping for your home.

One seller offers you a 1,200 sq ft apartment for Rs 15 lakh. You ask another person ? he tells you that he will give you 1,500 sq ft at the same price.

Spoilt for choice? Definitely not. Someone has to be mindless not to opt for the second option. So you sign on the dotted lines of the agreement paper and lo and behold, become the brand new owner of a 1,500-sq-ft apartment at a price of Rs 15 lakh, a gain of a neat 300 sq ft at no extra cost.

For those who have not sealed their fate yet, please take a closer look at the agreement paper and find out which of the following areas your builder is offering ? carpet, built-up or super built-up?

Yes, you read it right ? there is an area over an area and an area over that. The concept of ?area? is one of the vaguest terms in the housing industry. And some unscrupulous builders and sellers exploit this ambiguity to the hilt.

Carpet area does not hold any hidden agenda as this is the term everyone understands and assumes to be used as the measure while purchasing or selling a house.

It tells you exactly how much space you will have in your home and is literally defined as the exact area within the inner faces of the walls. To put it simply, if you had to lay out a wall-to-wall carpet in your house, how much space would it cover? That?s your carpet area.

Built-up includes the area occupied by the walls of your home in addition to the carpet space.

To top it all is the super built-up area and this is what builders often talk about.

It is a term that takes into account the built-up area, including the carpet space, and the common spaces, which can be further divided into two segments.

First, common spaces on each floor, including the share of the lobby, staircase, elevator and the corridor outside an apartment. Secondly, common spaces of the building, including the terrace and rooms for security, electric meters and pumps.

The confusion arises over the fact that what is exactly included under this definition is left to the discretion of the builders. Some include only the common space on each floor, while others use those of the building too.

The total area of these ?extras? is taken into account and divided by the number of apartments in proportion to their size. For example, a building may have four flats per floor with different built-up spaces. The built-up areas of the four flats may be 1000, 2000, 3000 and 4000 sq ft. It means that the proportionate shares of net floor space among the four flats are 10, 20, 30 and 40 per cent, respectively. Now, if the common space on the floor is 400 sq ft, it should be shared among the four flats according to the proportion of floor space enjoyed by them.

Therefore, the super built-up area of the four flats on a floor becomes 1040 sq ft, 2080 sq ft, 3120 sq ft and 4160 sq ft, respectively.

You can well imagine how much inflated the gross area shall become if it is quoted while taking into account the common spaces of the whole building.

So, if you are given a quote for a 1,000-sq-ft flat and the area referred is the carpet area, you have a huge living space. If it is built-up area, you have lesser space and if it is super-built up, you compromise heavily on the living area. In fact, the actual carpet area may just be around 600 sq ft compared with the 1,000 sq ft quoted by the seller.

So when comparing quotes, speak the same language as your builder and compare carpet area to carpet area, not carpet area to super built-up area.

If a builder gives you a quote for 1,200 sq ft, ask immediately whether it is the carpet or the super built-up area. If you get another quote for 1,500 sq ft super built-up area, ask what the carpet area is. Then compare the two carpet areas.

There is no fixed ratio of super built-up to built-up or carpet area. The market practice is that the ratios are on the super built-up area and are marked down.

That means, if the super built-up area is 1,000 sq ft and the carpet area is 800 sq ft, then the latter is 80 per cent of the super built-up area.

Generally, the ratio of super builtup to carpet area in the market is 70:30. But unscrupulous builders may go as low as 60 per cent.

So a quote on a 3,000-sq-ft apartment could mean a carpet area of anywhere from 1,800 sq ft to 2,400 sq ft.

Always ask the seller exactly how much the super built-up area and the carpet area amount to and ensure that this breakup appears in the agreement of sale.