The height where the view arrives

Ask a broker who works a single tower what the floors are worth and you will get an answer about sightlines rather than elevation. Floor stands in for view, and the two part company at whatever height the building opposite stops blocking the water. Below that line the units face masonry. Above it they face the bay. The broker can usually name the floor. The question is whether anything else can.

What has been measured, and what the measuring ran into

The most careful work on the American side is Conroy, Narwold and Sandy, published in the International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis in 2013, built on 2,395 condominium sales in downtown San Diego between mid 2006 and mid 2011. They found about 2.2% added to sale price per floor level, and the shape of it matters more than the size: the effect was quadratic, with price increasing at a decreasing rate above the mean floor level, and a spline specification placed the largest shift between the 5 to 8 band and the 9 to 12 band. The penthouse premium, worth about 4.35% when floor level was left out of the model, disappeared once floor was controlled for.

Then comes the sentence that should be read twice by anybody building valuation software. The authors could not separate the floor effect from the view effect, because data limitations prevented them from considering factors such as noise level and ocean views. They say so plainly. A floor coefficient estimated on 2,395 sales in a coastal downtown may be carrying view, noise and height together in one number, and there was no way to pull them apart.

The view side has been measured separately. A 2026 study in Buildings examined 352 secondary market transactions across six Hong Kong estates between 2015 and 2024 and found a full view worth about 22.3% more than no view, a partial view about 11.4% more, and the step from holding a partial view to holding a full one about 9.7%. Different market, different stock, and the magnitudes do not transfer to a US tower. What transfers is the shape. View behaves as categories with large gaps between them, not as a dial.

That study treated floor level as a linear control with a coefficient of 0.002, described as a small positive marginal effect. It did not test for non-linearity, used no floor bands or splines, and listed the interaction between view and floor band as future work. So one paper found the floor effect bends and could not see view. The other measured view and held floor straight. Nobody has joined them, and the reason is not a shortage of statisticians.

What the record holds

Two fields carry the raw material and they sit in different parts of the schema. EntryLevel is defined in the RESO Data Dictionary as a numeric field that describes the level within the structure, SFR or a unit in a building, with Unit Floor Number listed as its synonym. It is a number, suggested maximum length four. View is defined as a view as seen from the listed property, and it is a multi value string list carrying thirty eight standard values including Bay, City, City Lights, Downtown, Ocean, Panoramic, Ridge, Skyline, Territorial and Water.

Read the two definitions together and the gap is plain. One field says fourteen. The other says Water. Neither says that Water begins at eleven in this stack and at fifteen in the one facing the next building along, and no third field exists whose job that would be. The View field carries no numeric amount and no quality rating, so a unit with a sliver of bay visible past a parking structure and a unit with the whole harbour in front of it carry the same word.

What a tower sale turns on	Where the record puts it
Which floor the unit sits on	EntryLevel, a number
What kind of view exists	View, one or more of thirty eight words
How much of that view the unit gets	Nowhere
The floor at which the obstruction clears	Nowhere
Whether the stack faces the clearing or the obstruction	Nowhere

The guidance asks for something the vocabulary cannot express

Fannie Mae's condo appraisal section, carrying the same language since April 2014, requires the appraiser to analyse the project as well as the individual unit and to pay special attention to the location of the individual unit within the project, the project amenities, and the amount and purpose of the owner's association assessment. The requirement is sound and it is also unresourced. That same section does not address view at all.

An appraiser is therefore told that where a unit sits inside a building matters to its value, and is handed a record reporting the floor as an integer and the view as a category. Whatever bridges those two has to come from the person writing the report, out of their own knowledge of that tower, and then be expressed as a dollar figure on an adjustment line with a short reason beside it. The guidance governing that figure requires adjustments to reflect the market's reaction to the difference between the properties, and names paired sales as one method among statistical analysis, modelling and other commonly accepted approaches. A tower with eleven sales in a year will not produce the pair. The reaction is real and the evidence for it is thin, which is a different problem from the one usually described.

Why the automated versions get this specifically wrong

A model trained on transaction records meets floor as a continuous variable, because that is the shape of the data it was handed. Continuous variables invite a linear coefficient, and the published literature has mostly obliged, which means the habit is inherited rather than invented. A linear coefficient prices the eleventh and twelfth floors as two steps of equal size when the San Diego spline says the big move sat between the 5 to 8 band and the 9 to 12 band. The error is directional rather than random. It understates the units that have just cleared whatever they needed to clear and overstates the ones immediately below them, and those are the two groups a listing agent is most often asked to price against each other.

This is Context Blindness™ in its most literal form, given that the missing information is a sightline. It is also worth naming the limits on this side of the fence. CMAflow does not read floor. The adjustment grid works on size, bathrooms, bedrooms, age and condition, and if a report of mine ever implies that floor was weighted, that sentence is wrong and the number behind it never saw a storey. A tool that cannot see a variable should say so rather than describe it.

What an agent can do that a record cannot

Treat the break as a fact to be established rather than a figure to be derived. In a tower with enough history the sales either side of the clearing floor will show it, and the agent who has worked the building already knows roughly where it is. Writing that down in the report, as a sentence naming the floor at which the view arrives and what the sales on both sides of it did, turns private knowledge into something a seller and an appraiser can both read and argue with. It will not come from the data. Two peer reviewed attempts and a national data standard say as much.

How much is a higher floor worth in a condominium?

The best measured answer comes from Conroy, Narwold and Sandy, published in the International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis in 2013, which examined 2,395 condominium sales in downtown San Diego between mid 2006 and mid 2011. They found roughly 2.2% added to sale price for each floor level, and the effect was quadratic rather than straight, with price increasing at a decreasing rate above the mean floor level. A spline specification placed the largest shift between the 5 to 8 band and the 9 to 12 band. The penthouse premium disappeared once floor level was controlled for, which suggests the top floor advantage was the height effect all along.

Does the MLS record which floor a condo unit is on?

Yes. The RESO Data Dictionary carries EntryLevel, defined as a numeric field that describes the level within the structure, SFR or a unit in a building, with Unit Floor Number given as its synonym. It is a plain number with a suggested maximum length of four. The record therefore knows the unit is on the fourteenth floor. It carries no statement about what the fourteenth floor is worth in that particular building, and no field exists for that purpose.

How is view recorded in listing data?

As a label. The RESO View field is defined as a view as seen from the listed property and is a multi value string list with thirty eight standard values, among them Bay, City Lights, Downtown, Ocean, Panoramic, Skyline and Water. It records which category of view exists and nothing about its quality or extent, with no numeric amount and no rating attached. The category boundary it cannot express is expensive: a 2026 study in Buildings of 352 transactions across six Hong Kong estates put a full view at about 22.3% above no view, a partial view at about 11.4%, and the step from partial to full at about 9.7%.

Stacks, sightlines and the floor where the masonry ends are not exotic variables. They are the ordinary mechanics of pricing anything taller than four storeys, and a data standard with thirty eight words for view has no way to hold any of them. The number in the record is honest about what it knows. The risk sits in the sentence somebody writes underneath it.

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The Independent Agent
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