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.

You're totally right. It is slimy. Wastes so much time clicking into things and discovering they're actually 3 bed.

None of my kids are Harry Potter so I want an actual upstairs room for them all.

I think it depends on circumstances, if there's two normal sized reception rooms downstairs and they've advertised one as a bedroom yes that's frustrating as it's not a bedroom. it'd be living room and dinning room.

In my house we use one of the downstairs rooms as a bedroom but there are three other reception rooms downstairs one being a large living/dining room. For us wouldn't make sense to have four reception rooms on a floor plan for a regular home (normal house just downstairs has been extended to the max) so we would advertise that as a bedroom if we sold the house.

To be fair, DD has managed her whole life in a bedroom with no room for separate storage. She uses door hooks and underbed drawers, with a few dresses in a shared wardrobe elsewhere.

She did have the option of moving into older sib's former room a couple of years back but decided to stay put.

I also get fed up when the third or fourth bedroom is about 6ft by 7ft. I think for it to be a working bedroom it needs to be at least 7x11 or similar. I have what they call a 2.5 bedroom house. The third bedroom is off the second one and is 6x8. You could get a bed in it but not a cabin one due to ceiling height. It made a great place for a cot bed and is now a snug. You shouldn't really mark et it as a bedroom - when I moved in it didn't even have a window -but I imagine many modern estate agents would call it a third bedroom to increase viewings.

I've viewed houses where the upstairs "box room" is big enough to fit a bed but not much else. Well not if you wanted to be able to shut the door.

For me a bedroom should be

• off a hall, not another room
• usually upstairs
• big enough to fit a bed and a chest of drawers
• have a window

A room with an en suite downstairs would probably be a bedroom because having an en suite off a dining room would be odd.

If you put 4th bedroom/dining room /office then surely people can choose

I like it though, because I would like 3 bedrooms and an office. If I look for 3 beds I have to open each one and try to see if it's got an extra room.

I had to pay "bedroom tax" when it came in because the house I'd already lived in for several years was classed as 3 bed, one of those being the downstairs parlour room.

100% with you

I don't mind if it's actually a bedroom but if calling it a bedroom when there's no dining room it doesn't count!

Thing is in some houses it’s deceptive the other way. So I would say our house is a 4 bed (all doubles) with a study but the exact same house on our street is set up as a 6 bed.

Our top floor bedroom is 20’ x 14’ so can be split to have 2 kids rooms up there and the study is 7’10 x 10’ so plenty big enough to be a single bedroom as well.

We only have 2 living rooms downstairs (kitchen/dining/living and separate living room) plus a washroom and a utility where others on street have 2 living rooms plus kitchen plus dining room. Same floor area just different layouts.

It seems to make little difference price wise when the houses are sold so clearly people can look at the potential options and not what’s currently there. Certainly we’ve altered our house extensively since moving in.

We had this when we were looking for student accommodation. We looked at one house that said it was 5 bedrooms. 3 bedrooms upstairs, 2 downstairs with interconnected sliding doors. The 2 downstairs bedrooms were supposed to be a living room and dining room.

It's nothing new. My parents bought a new build in 1980 marketed as a 4 bed. The 4th bedroom which eventually became our dining room was right next to the front door and would have required a wall to be built to separate it from the hall and the hall would have been pretty narrow. My mum always insisted it was a 4 bed! Presumably the builder would have put the wall in if requested. There was another bedroom on the ground floor which was off a small corridor with a shower/ bathroom next to it. The lounge diner was pretty big over 23 feet long and about 16 foot wide.

Ds's bedroom is like that but he seems to like it as I've offered him mine but he wants to stay put. We had a cabin like bed built over the bulkhead and he does have a large built in cupboard - and lots of hooks on the door etc.

When you say Shed; you mean garden room right?!!!! 🤣😉

The floorplan is usually a slight giveaway 😀

Reminds me of a "bedroom" that could only take a single bed lengthways. If you sat on the bed, your feet would be across the doorway.
There's upwelling thwn there's taking buyers for mugs.

I have noticed this recently and I do find it misleading. If I needed 4 bedrooms, I would expect those 4 bedrooms to be upstairs. I don’t expect to have a “4 bedroom” house with one bedroom downstairs at the front of the house where I need a lounge to be!

I imagine this practice is particularly infuriating for parents who are trying to find a property suitable for their family, and don’t want their child in a room downstairs. I also don’t see the benefit of a family home having one less downstairs room.

I'm surprised that so many people are so stringent about bedrooms having to be on the first floor or above. Also that so many people think a dining room is an absolute necessity or even a priority - surely unless you're lucky enough to have a very big house they aren't that common? Most houses I've been to, even quite large ones, tend to have a bigger kitchen/diner as the norm rather than a completely separate room, which seems quite old fashioned.

I've just gone through all of the places I've ever lived, and 8 out of 10 of them had bedrooms on the ground floor - and of the 2 that didn't it was so small it literally only had one downstairs room (living/dining/kitchen combined) so would have been physically impossible!

Weird that so many people think it's so mind-blowingly unusual that they actually think listing a room in the context it's currently being used is somehow deceptive!

You can just put child upstairs. Young children can share rooms until one is able to sleep on another floor, or parents can sleep downstairs. No big deal. Some houses are three storey so bedrooms are split across two floors.