Marketing 3 bed house as a 4 bed…

[ViaRia01]

… or any number of bedroom…. when the “4th bedroom” is in fact downstairs and would ordinarily be a dining room or additional reception room.

Does this annoy anyone else? Have you ever done this? Why do people do it?

OK, I know people do it to try to make their house seem more desirable. But it’s just a really slimey thing to do in my opinion. Buyers are not stupid, they can see just how many actual bedrooms the place has. But what it does do is waste everyone’s time when you filter the website for 4 bed or more and keep finding 3 bedroom houses with a separate dining room.

I’m not including bungalows in this obviously, nor chalet bungalows, bungalows with loft converted to a second storey. Barn conversions are also off the hook.

My own house was sold to me as a four bedroom (the fourth bedroom is downstairs and has a small skylight but not windows, it is very small, more like the size of a utility room and it is situated right next to the kitchen, exactly where one would expect to find a utility room). When we sell it, we will market it as a 3 bed with a downstairs office.

I think the proliferation of property programmes now means people expect a lot more in terms of presentation/staging of a house and are unable to use their own imaginations to see potential.

because it helps.

Many people have no imagination and find it difficult to imagine the right use of the space.

That's why most cheaper show homes have under-sized furniture. Buyers get a floor plan, but still often don't wake up to the fact that their normal size furniture won't fit, or look great.

Clutter translates as lack of space. Plus if people can't be bothered to dress up their house a bit for selling, there's likely to be a lack of maintenance behind too.

Cheaper show homes often have no doors either. Which also creates an illusion of space.

I think it depends on how many reception rooms there are overall.

In a 3 bed/3 reception room house, I see no problem in marketing it as a 4 bed...you still have a living room and dining room.

I do dislike seeing a '4 bed' advertised when it's 3 first floor bedrooms then kitchen, living room, dining room only - if you need to fill 4 bedrooms it's just not enough living space when you're left with just kitchen and living room.

We have a 3 bed with kitchen, dining room, big lounge and small lounge downstairs. We use the smaller lounge as bedroom 4 and it's no issue at all.

When I look for houses now, I refine my search to 3+ beds even though we want 4 because there are always a few 3 beds with 3 reception rooms in the mix.

I take all marketing with a pinch of salt and make up my own mind based on space and layout.

When I’m looking at property the number of bedrooms doesn’t influence how I gage prices, I look at how our family would want to use the space.

A downstairs bedroom is good for elderly and disabled people. Often it's like that as the owner got older and couldn't do stairs.
I've got a room that's not downstairs, and would be a bedroom if it had a bed in, but it doesn't. It's a sitting room. I guess I could market it as either br or reception? If the room doesn't at least fit a single bed plus storage etc then it should be called a cupboard. Lol.

I am, like many other pp, a huge fan of a floor plan. I think houses should have to have a mandatory floor plan, with accurate measurements, on all listings.

People don't do it their estate agent does.

One of my friends houses was advertised as a 3 bed. It was actually an extended 2 bed with a downstairs shower room and with another room next to it that was the "bedroom" on the floor plan.

That room was actually too small to use as a bedroom but the front room was large enough and separate from the large open plan living room/dining room/kitchen.

Basically you need a floor plan.

Yes this was a huge bugbear of mine when we were looking. In particular when you could see that last time the house sold it was marketed at one bedroom less.

Theres a particular EA in our area who are terrible for this.

When we were looking there was an agent who we found to be regularly sailing close to that line between positively selling and outright lying. They wasted so much of our time. We decided not to look at any more of their properties and when we came to sell we wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole.

It's common when describing a do called dormer bungalow. It's a bit mad because how is it a bungalow when it's got an upstairs.,Take advice from the estate agent and go with what you feel comfortable with.

We bought a house with a 4th bedroom downstairs. Lovely and big and great for guests. We also had an office, large kiting room, large dining room, large kitchen and a sunroof downstairs.
Current house has 4 bedrooms and 2 large extra bedrooms on 2nd floor but not building reg approved....but that's how we bought it.
It just depends on how it's marketed.

I agree OP this is really infuriating and I've seen even worse. We have a smallish 3 bed house and occasionally I browse the local property market to see what I could theoretically upgrade to. I once saw a house smaller than our current house advertised as 7 bedrooms - each of the 2 double rooms upstairs had been subdivied into 2 tiny singles. The downstairs front room was a bedroom and they had also converted the loft. It was set up to be a really unpleasant and crowded HMO.

I think the problem is with the idea that house prices should be based on number of bedrooms at all. In other countries they market homes according to the number of square feet of floorplan and that seems much better. If I buy a 4 bedroom house I want a downstairs that is appropriately sized with plenty of sitting room and dining room space to accommodate everyone.

But it's been well know for decades if not centuries that estate agents are totally untrustworthy and everything is a lie so this needs to be the starting assumption. I would be unlikely to view a property where I hadn't seen a floorplan yet for this reason. Even if there's no floorplan on the specific listing it's usually possible to find a floorplan of one of the houses on the same road with the same design with a bit of searching on zoopla which archives historical sales listings.

A kiting room sounds amazing!

Well my house could have five bedrooms and two of those are downstairs. It was a bungalow that now isn't so they would have been bedrooms. What else would I call them?

You need to look at all the floor plans, this isn't the only ridiculous layout issue so there's no shortcut to looking at the plans.
We needed a home office that could double as an occasional guest bedroom - we'd have been happy for that to be a downstairs 'bedroom' (maybe even preferred it). Similarly we needed to weed through all the 'dining rooms' or 'snugs' to see if any of those would make a suitable office. It's frustrating but unless you're looking at studios or very standard 2up2downs you have to scrutinise the plans.

I bought a house with a dining room/4th bedroom. The previous owners converted and extended the garage to be a bedroom for an elderly relative which can only be accessed through the kitchen. It's actually a lovely room and bigger than two of the upstairs bedrooms. I had a lodger in there for a few months. When I come to sell I will market it as four bedrooms and put a bed in there as that's how I bought it (it was definitely a lived-in bedroom when I viewed the house) and buyers can make up their own mind

Oops...sorry....
Living room....and sunroom 🤣

We have quite a large house which has 2 obvious bedrooms downstairs, another large room downstairs next to kitchen ( was marketed as a dining room) but also 2 large attic rooms with large skylights.
The ceiling is not quite high enough for them to be registered as bedrooms but we used them for that anyway. We use the dining room as a second living room.

So all in all, we were able to buy a large house for 2 bed prices.

If it works for you it doesn’t matter how you use the rooms.
Its sleazy to try to market a utility/ box room as a bedroom though.

If the downstairs room is big enough to either be a bedroom or a second living room then I don't see an issue with it being marketed as a bedroom.

It annoys me when an estate agent classes a room as a 'double' bedroom because it can just about fit a double bed in but no other furniture. Or the owner has split a double room in two but you can barely fit a cot in it.

I think it's fine - I need 2 bedrooms and an office so I search for 3 beds. Would be great if one was downstairs. I can hardly search for 2 beds and hope there's an extra room not mentioned!

Do the attic rooms meet fire regulations for bedrooms? That would worry me if the house wasn't sold with those rooms listed as bedrooms.