Want To Sell A Property? Include a Floor Plan

Living in suburbia and being a housing junkie, I am always amazed at how rarely homes for resale do not include a floorplan in their marketing efforts. Looking at new construction, these builders almost always have a floorplan available for their clients. Think they are not in the business of selling homes?

But a typical real estate agent will never get near a floor plan in their marketing information. I am sure that this has to do with liability and disclosure, but if I am a buyer, I want to see the whole package. I want to know what I am buying, not a well laid out picture that is enticing but does not tell me about the space I will be in for the next 10 years.

So why are floor plans not included? Are you going to think the client will not notice a lack of closet space when they look at a home? Show them the home upfront and you will be amazed at how many more people will be interested instead of guessing what the property may be, they know what it is.

The builders sure have, and also those who sell apartments in New York.

A floor plan shows the entire unit, not just part of it. In other words, floor plans reveal what photographs often do not: the proportions of rooms, the number of rooms and the traffic flows among them. A buyer can instantly see, for instance, if the kitchen is conveniently situated near the dining room, whether bedrooms open directly onto the living room or whether a trip to the bathroom will involve a walk through a bedroom.
“When you look at a floor plan, it is the apartment standing there naked,” said Gerald Makowski, director of marketing at Halstead Property.
Floor plans are starting to move into three dimensions, a real help for those who have trouble visualizing physical space. Some developers show elevation plans, where you can pick a floor from the side view of a building and then highlight a particular unit. More customization is likely as technology improves.
Outside New York, however, floor plans are rarely used as marketing tools by brokers who are reselling houses, although they are more likely to be used by builders of housing developments, who include floor plans as one of the many tools on their Web sites.