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

[YobaOljazUwaque]

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?

4 bedroom house that is a genuine 4 bedroom house with 4 bedrooms on the 1st floor and an equivalent floor space of day-time rooms below.

Where is the rule that bedrooms must be upstairs? My parents have a bedroom downstairs, designed that way because my elderly grandmother lived with them and couldn’t climb stairs.

Our dining room is used as a playroom. How do you want me to describe it when we come to sell.

The two things that estate agents should do as standard is publish the m2 of the house (excluding the integral garage) and stop using those wide lenses that make time rooms look much bigger. That would help a lot.

As for the internet search, surely using the “reception rooms” filter would sort that out for you.

Not an annoying as a listing without a floor plan. The floor plan is the first thing I look at and I'm surprised by the number of listings which dont include one. If always makes me think there must be something weird about the layout.

BeanBag7
I hate the absence of a floor plan.
A couple of estate agents don't do them at all, I can only assume to get viewings through the door. It's a waste of time though because as I buyer I feel my time has been wasted looking at a house that has some weird extension and room configuration

@Yabbers thank you for raising that point. I was hammered on a thread about renting a house out, and it having 2 downstairs bedrooms because “you can’t have 2 bedrooms downstairs. The house was built as a 2 bedroom bungalow, with a further 2 bedrooms added upstairs. When the upstairs was added, one of the downstairs bedrooms was changed into a dining room, it has now been repurposed back into a bedroom.

I don’t know if this is a Scottish thing, But houses here are often referred to by how many rooms they have in total (other than bathrooms and kitchen). Using this way, I have a 6 room house, but in estate agent speak I have 4 bedrooms and 2 public rooms. I could very easily choose to use one of the public rooms as a bedroom, as the other public room and massive kitchen could easily accommodate the number of people who would use 5 bedrooms, so maybe we should go back to referring to number of rooms in total?

don’t know if this is a Scottish thing, But houses here are often referred to by how many rooms they have in total

Don’t think so @JudgeRindersMinder. I’m Scottish and I haven’t heard that. Seems sensible.

@Yabbers it’s maybe very local to where I live then

I guess there's nothing wrong with describing a downstairs room as a bedroom if the rooms not described as bedrooms have sufficient space for the occupants of the bedrooms to cook, eat at a table and relax on upholstered seating without being cramped. A one-bedroom flat can get away with a single living/kitchen-diner room - I have seen flats that have a single public room with a strip of kitchen units along one wall, a two-seater sofa opposite a TV, and a little bistro table with two chairs and that is OK. The same arrangement of living space with 4 or 5 "bedrooms" - really not OK.

Former HMO nearby is up for sale - pics are of it with furniture in as if it's a student house but description correctly describes the actual bedrooms and explains that one of the receptions is private enough to be a bedroom.

This sort of accuracy should apply to al listings, IMO>

but I've also seen threads, or posts on other forums, of people asking where on earth to find a smaller bed because they can't fit a regular size in a box room. There should be a minimum size requirement before you are allowed to call a space a bedroom

This.

If you cannot even fit a standard single bed in it, it's not a bedroom!

I’m Scottish, and I think the custom of referring to number of rooms other than kitchen/bathroom was how Council or tied housing were described.

Usually the rooms would be referred to as apartments as well.

Come to think of it, I’ve not seen this for a while.

@Seeingadistance you’re probably right about it being a rented house thing, I remember my flat being referred to as a 2 apartment. I’d forgotten all about it till very recently when one of my late mum’s friends spoke about my parents’ house in that way

Builders need to broaden the type of houses they sell, or give the option of changing layouts, I don’t need a 5 bedroomed house but I want the same amount of space, just reconfigured differently, so for example I would be happy with one massive bedroom, dressing room, and huge bathroom with an upstairs living area, I am sure these types of houses would make people in the “family house” think about moving because they still have the space of a big house, but are designed in a way that are much more suited to couples/ singles rather than people with children who need lots of bedrooms. I think builders are missing a trick here, not everyone wants a diddy bungalow or little flat when they downsize.

I don’t see how you can say those houses are the same. Disregarding the downstairs room, one still has 4 bedrooms and the other 3. If you have 4 children this is the difference between making it work and not. Even if the rooms are small, as long as you can get a bed in there then it’s doable.
I have a 3 bed, but I sleep in the second reception room so my 2 autistic kids can have their own rooms. The fact of being seperate matters more to me then having big rooms for them so for us that would be fine.
As an aside my bathroom is downstairs...no one had died from the awfulness if needing to walk down some stairs yet

Nobody has to die for something to be inconvenient! Our first house had a downstairs bathroom and I still love the fact that in our current house I don't have to go down the stairs, cross the dining room, the living room and the kitchen and freeze my feet on the floor tiles in order to go to the loo in the night.

Oh yes obviously if no one has died from something everyone else in the world has to love it

Downstairs bathrooms can be inconvenient for sudden-onset bouts of vomiting, but otherwise most people have sufficient bodily control that they can walk to the toilet. And downstairs bathrooms were really useful when children were small as I could bath child whilst keeping an eye on the others playing/watching TV without having to corall them all on the landing with babygates.

And a lot of houses with downstairs bathrooms have an upstairs toilet too, just in case.