House Shopping Rants #1: Marble Lobbies
A ridiculously large amount of time and web real estate is spent lovingly displaying artist's renderings of the inevitable marble and chrome detailed lobbies with 20 foot ceilings. And then you get half hearted line drawings of the layouts of the actual suites with minimal information about them beyond the square footage. Given that I'm interested in buying a place to live, and not a place to hang out and chat with the equally inevitable 24 hour 'concierge' (by which they mean an underpaid, unqualified security guard in a black turtleneck), I fail to see the attraction of these mammoth lobbies.
No one hangs out in the lobby of their condo building. Sure, it might impress your guests for about 2 seconds before they hop on the elevator, but they're pretty likely to notice that while your lobby has leather furniture and 20 foot ceilings and marble walls, your actual condo has IKEA, claustrophobia and scratches in duralex semi-gloss because you're paying maintenance on a lobby you never even see (since you enter via the parking garage) instead of using that money for something you might actually enjoy.