AIBU that calling a Dining Room a Bedroom does not make a house worth more?

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I think we need to stop considering the value of houses on the basis of the number of bedrooms, and marketing descriptions should be regulated to prevent houses from being marketed with misleading descriptions like this.

The two houses with the floor plans in this pic are in the same road, just 3 doors apart. They are both in a broadly similar state of repair.

One is correctly described as a 3 bedroom house. The floor area is 95m2

The other is actually slightly smaller at 90m2, but having put a bed into the Dining Room, and dividing that smaller floor area slightly differently, they somehow think it is worth £80,000 more than the house that is actually larger, and are marketing it as a FIVE BEDROOM house!

This is giving me the rage. AIBU?

I think you're being pretty precious about the enormous difficulty having to glance at floorplans of houses you may wish to purchase.

Not everyone will make the same use of the space and sellers are entitled to advertise their property in the manner they think will be most advantageous. Getting "the rage" because this doesn't align with exactly how you would utilise the space seems weirdly self-centred.

I think it backfires though. It pisses people off and gives the impression that the sellers are not completely honest people. And it's pointless - especially when they have hoicked the price to get into the e.g. 4 bed bracket when it's a 3 bed. The 4 bed buyers within their price bracket will, er, buy a real 4 bed which is going to actually have a proper 2nd reception room etc, and not buy the crappy smaller actually 3 bed property. And the 3 bed buyers won't necessarily have seen their house as they'll have filtered it out.

Stupid thing to do!

Floor space is a better start than bedroom numbers. Then you know the ballpark house size you are looking for and within that if there's somewhere with six bedrooms when most of the others are 3 beds you know the rooms will be stupidly pokey. At the moment all you can do is search by number of bedrooms,which as OP says is very misleading. There are fewer places to hide with square metres! We have the smallest houses in Europe, and the obsession with number of bedrooms is one reason why. Maybe most people will see through the OPs example, but it's symptomatic of how the current system misleads buyers.

MrsDimmond of course the dimensions of the actual rooms matter. Which is why if you see a 4-bed property marketed which is 2000sqm and then another which is 95sqm, it doesn't take much to work out which is likely to have bigger living space, better proportioned bedrooms! Clearly showing dimensions just makes it easier, that's all.

We went to see a development of new "4 Bedroom" houses last year, in a very beautiful spot alongside a canal, walkable into our town centre and yet the surroundings fairly rural. The show house had 3 bedrooms, two o;f them quite small though just about definable as doubles. The fourth "bedroom" was off the living area, you would have struggled to get a single bed in and in the show house it was dressed as a study. It was clear that better use could have been made of the space by just taking out its walls and giving a better shaped living room. They were priced as 4 bedrooms, but simply not. Two of them recently came onto the market again and have been for sale for ages.

No one has explained how marketing property by floor area would actually benefit anyone?

Because if you needed 4 useable bedrooms for your family and you saw a house listed as 4 bed, 1500 sq ft you would know straight away that the rooms weren't going to be practical sizes.

x-post @GymSloth!

MrsDimmond

How would the Portuguese bedroom rule work for a bungalow or flat where all rooms other than kitchen/utility/bathroom are on tbe same floor and could be used for any purpose?

You’ve misunderstood; the single storey house or flat you describe would be listed with the number of bedrooms that appeared on the plan that passed building regs and was approved for building by the local Câmara (Council) and then built and inspected.
For example we bought a terraced house in Portugal with 3 bedrooms on the ground floor and one master suite occupying the first floor, however this was sold as a T3+1 rather than a 4 bed, because one of the bedrooms and bathrooms downstairs was a later addition, created by losing an internal patio. It’s important because there are rules about minimum ratios of bathrooms to bedrooms, provision of at least one bidet and bath (or space sufficient for a bath etc). A developer wanting to build 5 bed 1 bathroom flats wouldn’t get approval the EU. So I think it’s right that a 2 bed, 1 bathroom, 1 wc flat with kitchen, sitting room, dining room, shouldn’t be sold or let as a 4 bedroom flat because a later owner partitions the dining room and bungs a couple of beds in.

I think it is bizarre that the U.K. (I include myself) doesn’t think in square feet or metres as well as “x bedroom”. I agree with a pp that there will have been industry resistance as so many recent builds scrimp on room dimensions, storage, and communal areas; front door opening onto living area with stairs leading off the room rather than in a separate hall etc...

It does annoy me and comes across as greedy and dishonest. It would put me off buying the house tbh.

My biggest frustration when moving to UK was that there are no m2 mentioned in the listings. That's the no 1 information I need. It's not the only factor but it tells me enough to se if I'll waste my time investigating anymore.

No one has explained how marketing property by floor area would actually benefit anyone?

It is much quicker and easier to search a property, and the properties are priced in a much fairer way, you wouldn't end up with a 3 box room house valued the same as a 4 "double bedroom" house.

No one has explained how marketing property by floor area would actually benefit anyone?
If a house is 70m2 and has 4 bedrooms I already know they will be tiny and the setup won't work for me and I can disregard. If It's 120m2 and 4 bedrooms then it has potential to be appropriate size for us.

Me and my bf looked for 1 bedroom flat and I know we would need a minimum of 45m2 for it to be appropriate. Since the sizes were not listed we went to view smaller places that were not appropriate. I still don't understand how they thought 29m2 being a one bedroom and not a studio is a good idea.

I am not saying the square meterage shouldn't be included in the marketing - I think it should!

But not to replace number of bedrooms. Having both makes much more sense.

But, I suppose I'm really just baffled that people seem so reliant EA marketing rather than using it as a very broad filter in their search and then taking time to read through details properly.

• Also some agents don’t routinely provide floor plans when marketing properties. Now that really infuriates me. It’s particularly bad in the case of some 18th and early 19th century terraces, which can have very odd layouts because they weren’t built with bathrooms in mind.

There are also problems with marketing properties with floor space in m2. You could have a very large 2 bedroom property with massive rooms which would be much less useful to some people than a 4 bedroom with smaller rooms. Not every property with large rooms is easy to convert - windows might be in the wrong place or non-existent, the rooms might be awkwardly located or difficult shapes.

Floor area isn't that useful sometimes. I am sure everyone is capable of looking at the very detailed plans and making their own decision. What we do need is better enforcement of the existing rules on properties being marketed as having bedrooms or similar when they are incapable of safely being used as such.

And is it a local thing to have such a massive objection to a downstairs room being marketed as a bedroom instead of a dining room? A lot of properties have large kitchen/diners and a separate dining room is an anachronism and might be very useful downstairs for a person with mobility problems.

MrsDimmond of course the dimensions of the actual rooms matter. Which is why if you see a 4-bed property marketed which is 2000sqm and then another which is 95sqm, it doesn't take much to work out which is likely to have bigger living space, better proportioned bedrooms!

Well, TBF the photo on the front would be a bit of a give away in your example ....

when we were looking at houses i had a spreadsheet where i worked out the price per sqm. it was a real eye opener.

i think the tendency to market as no of bedrooms may stem from our housing stock being largely older and so the moving of walls is more difficult (solid rather than stud) or prohibited (because the buildings are listed). whereas with a more modern housing stock, or predominantly timber framed as in the states, the number or rooms you ultimately end up with is more flexible as you can fling a new wall up or take one down relatively easily

But not to replace number of bedrooms. Having both makes much more sense.
I've yet to see an advert in mainland Europe that has only m2 and no mention on the ammount of bedrooms

Clearly both are included everywhere in one way or another mrsdimmond. It's a question of what has priority, and in the UK number of beds is the primary organising principle for estate agents. You cannot search for houses by floor area. This is what is madness!

but yes, i've noticed more and more random downstairs rooms listed as bedrooms

this for example, is not the 2 bedroomed house it is marketed as

I think the layout in terms of rejigging the kitchen is good.
But who wants a bedroom downstairs in the front. Would only work as pp said, if it was a student house and you charged different prices for each room.for a family house, would convert bedroom 5 upstairs into a bathroom ( the plumbing is directly below) and have a separate sitting room at the front, ( where the “master “ bedroom is).
As a 3 bed house, it would still be worth more with a 2nd upstairs bathroom and better kitchen.
Although it does not make good financial sense to be “ the most expensive house on the street”

Mrs Dimmond

Using very broad filters in urban areas can return thousands of properties that are unsuitable.

As a separate issue, I wish Rightmove and others would add a filter that allows searches for properties that include a downstairs bedroom and bathroom. It’s not something most people would think of, but if you have a family member with reduced mobility, it’s a nightmare searching for suitable properties, bungalows are rare and expensive, and bizarrely, not always accessible, old ones were sometimes built split level or with steep or stepped approaches. There are quite a lot of 2 storey properties with downstairs bedroom and bathroom (we own one of them) but you can’t use it as a search criteria.

Yes, bit if a typo with the 2000sqm!

I don't think anyone is saying only have one or the other - both overall size AND number of bedrooms are clearly needed.

My IL live in a 2 bed house, a house in the same road with identical footprint and original layout to theirs recently went on the market as a 5 bed house. Admittedly the IL 2nd bedroom is enormous and could easily be divided to make a 3rd bed which is what the other house had done but they had also partitioned the lounge and converted the garage to make the 4th and 5th bedroom. The kitchen is pretty small and they were left with very little living space.
Unless using as a HMO i would imagine people needing that many bedrooms would also want a decent amount of living space as well.

I always look at the sq footage of properties as well as bedroom numbers. I agree it is a shame you can’t use it as a filter on Rightmove, it would be helpful.

The only issue is that there aren’t consistencies with how EA measure square footage. Some include everything, including garage and outbuildings in their calculations; others just the internal rooms, so you aren’t necessarily comparing apples with apples.