Floorplans when buying a house

[ReshapeWhileDamp]

As a buyer, would you tend to dismiss a house without having visited it, if you looked at the floorplan provided and thought 'no, that won't work for us, we don't need to see the house'?

I'm about to go on with an estate agent who is adamant that floorplans provided with house particulars get in the way - she thinks that they make it too easy for potential viewers to dismiss a house without having seen it, and that if there is no floorplan, just some tantalising photos and a brief spec, they are far more likely to book a viewing and then maybe consider the house on its own merits.

ALL the other estate agents we 'interviewed' said floorplans were essential and didn't act as a deterent. Which I think says something. This agent will let us have one if we desperately want, but she is definitely anti- them, and says it's based on her personal experience of selling houses.

Thoughts, please?

I always look for floor plans and am disappointed if none are provided. If your house is really 'very, very special and different' I might be tempted to go and look if there are no plans but otherwise I wouldn't. It is very, very time consuming (for both sellers and buyers) having to trek round and look at houses and I do feel that floor plans are a great help. I also think that agents who don't provide plans are rather old fashioned and perhaps a bit tight fisted - could this be the case with your agent?

I might dismiss a house if the plans aren't suitable - ie: we have to have a decent sized home office and if there was nothing suitable on the plan I wouldn't go and see the house as it is not something we are prepared to compromise on.

Tell her if she wants to sell you a house, you want to see the floorplan. There aren't many markets where it works to the buyer's advantage to have less information, and this isn't one of those cases.

I wouldn't be likely to go and view a house if there wasn't a floorplan, unless I knew the normal layout of the houses in that road and there was no reason to expect it to be different.

If there a real lack of properties in the area and I was desperate then I'd make an exception, but in my experience, if there's no floorplan or measurements then it's because the vendor is trying to hide small rooms or an impractical layout.

I tend to dismiss houses that DON'T have a floorplan.

If there is a floorplan and it doesn't work for us, I can at least work out whether we could make changes to make it work.

We didn't view some properties (or at least, ddin't put them to the top of our viewing list, and subsequently found another property) because they didn't have a floor plan. I think they are a must as most people do know exactly what they want in terms of layout- eg, we wanted either a kitchen diner or the ability to create one, and so only viewed houses first where the floor plans/photos indicated that this was a possibility.

I think they are a must. we rent, but even when looking for a new place to stay, we looked at the floor plan as we have have seen 2 bed places that where smaller than our 1 bed flat. the floor plan gives you a first visual idea about the place.

Life is never quite so black and white though is it.

The truth is, it's nice to have floorplans as it provides more information to assess the house but if it's really excellent, you'd visit it with the barest of information.

However, to have the edge, I should have thought that the more information the better.

Would be suspicious that the 'though shalt never have floor plans' estate agent is failing to embrace new ideas/doesn't have access to someone who can do the drawings for her.

I wouldn't bother to look at a house that didn't have a floor plan. It's the first thing I look at

Floor plan makes me stop and look properly at a house and think about whether or not it would work (or could be made to work) for us. I wouldn't dismiss a house because the details didn't have one BUT I might just skim over it and barely notice it on the list of houses in my area/price bracket when shortlisting places to visit.

Also gives the impression that the vendor is making an effort to sell, is using a more dynamic agent and, by association, will have looked after the house well.

ChildofThe70s/MrsJohnDeere - totally agree. Yes, floor plans always make me look at the particulars very carefuly. I too like them, as it makes me think the seller is serious.

There is frankly no point in people coming to look at your house who are just going to say - oh its too small anyway.

Better to get seriously interested buyers through the door in my view.

I have to see a floorplan. I can read all the measurements and the "hallway gives way to living room with bay window..." type descriptions but I need to see it to understand what the house is like.

We're house-hunting at the moment and have a few absolutes such as upstairs bathroom and eating space in the kitchen. A floorplan is an excellent way of seeing this.

We have looked at houses without them but only when it's been a case of estate agents ringing and saying "this place has just come on the market so we don't have details yet but it sounds right for you". A house being marketed without a floorplan would worry me as it does look like they might be hiding something...

I really like floorplans, and I think they remove a lot of people booking viewings (which are a hassle), only to say 'oh, no, we don't like it as there is a downstairs bathroom/through room/opens directly onto the road' etc. Which are annoying to say the least

My DH really did NOT want to come & view the house we now live in! It is a cobverted bungalow, so unconventional layout. DId not have a study/enough bedrooms, or a separate dining room or an ensuite etc etc.

However, I said the photo's and HUGE garden looked intruguiging. We spent less than 5 mins inside before we fell in love and broke all our budgets to buy it.

A floorplan of the kitchen/diner could not begin to do it justice as the kitchen was amazing - as were some of the other aspects that photo's helped with but you really had to see.

As a buyer, it really annoys me when there isn't a floorplan - and often you see them uploaded at the wrong resolution or too small to actually make out. It makes me feel that the agents/vendors are putting little effort into marketing the property.

The only time we have dismissed a house based on the floorplan is when the house really wouldn't have been right for us, eg the third bedroom is a tiny boxroom, and we needed three good size bedrooms. Though you could work that out from the measurements in any case - a floorplan just saves time.

I also like to see whether a house has potential to become what we want, eg whether we could knock through to make a kitchen/diner. I love looking at floorplans and visualising living in the place and what we might do to it.

ReShapeWhileDamp - it's not one of the SequenceHomes estate agents? Because I had the same argument with them. I like floorplans, floorplans give me a reasonable idea of whether a house is looking at - especially as we are picking about arranging viewings as we are trying to move 90 miles away!
I had a real fight on my hand to get them to put the floorplan that I provided (in jpeg format) which I had from the housebuilder on my particulars!!

Oh yes, Sequence Homes don't do floorplans but I think they are essential. If your house is clearly stunning and 'inviting' you should be OK but most homes aren't stunning and for me the space itself is more important than decor so I think a floorplan convinces me to visit.

If you must go with a non-floorplan agent then you must have a very details description of the rooms and how they relate to each other.

Ok, so we're mostly in favour of floorplans! Thanks, this is very helpful.

Milliways, I think that was the sort of thing the agent was getting at, that some people wouldn't look past a floorplan and then fail to view and fall for a house on own merits. But I still think most people like them, and our house isn't eccentric or going to put people off from a floorplan, I think.

CMOT, that's a good point too - yes, floorplans might deter viewings, but possibly only the ones that would be a waste of time anyway.

BouncingTurtle - um, yes, it is! One of the Sequence lot, I mean.

She said we could have one at the four week meeting if we hadn't sold by then, but I also think she will give in and let us have one if we say, ok, we'll go with someone else.

She really wants our custom, as do they all - which is nothing to do with the house, which is perfectly nice but bog-standard (hmm, I better not write the particulars myself!) but I think there's a dearth of houses on the market at the moment and they're all desperate for stock. So she knows I'm dithering between one agent who offered us very advantageous fees because we're interested in a house on his books already, and her. I'm sure I can persuade her to include one, but I wanted to know whether what she said had any validity.

Very useful, thanks!

We have seen a couple of houses that didn't have floorplans. One was a huge surprise because all the houses we'd seen that had living room and kitchen-diner you had to go through the lounge to the kitchen across the back. This particular one was side by side. Sadly we were beaten to that one.

I did use the floorplans to weed out houses that really wouldn't work for what we wanted. I'm quite suspicious of Agents who don't use them TBH.

I have to say that I more or less chose my last two houses on the basis of the floorplans!

When I brought my last house, the sale had fallen through, and we urgently needed a new house quick. We booked a load of appointments to view houses the next day, but there was one house that I saw the floorplan for and fell in love with it (knew the area was fab, could see the space on the floorplan and just knew it would be perfect). But couldn't get an appointment until 6pm that day - it was the last appointment, and all the other houses were there to match up with this floorplan and a couple of photos I had seen. Cue 6pm,
we viewed the house, I duly bought it and we moved in two months later.

We have recently moved house again, and when we were selling, I saw a house on the internet, knew the area and fell in love with the space (as shown by the floorplan). When we sold, it was the first house we saw and we bought it.

I might be a bit unusual in that I'm very good at visualising houses and I like open plan houses with fewer rooms but with a sense of space to them. I am able to see this in floorplans, whereas it is harder to see when you are just given room sizes. And yes, it might stop me viewing a few houses, but only ones I would never, ever in a million years buy anyway.

Go to another estate agent - the customer always knows best.

Reshapewhiledamp - yes I second going with a different agent.
We are now considering swapping to another agent.
I was really pissed off by the fact despite it is "no sale, no fee" we still had to pay nearly £200 up front! And they have done feck all to sell our house I know times are tough and there is a lot of properties on the market around here but I would at least expect a few viewings but we have had nothing!
And our house does have quite an unusual layout so it is a large than average sized 3 bed.
It didn't help that they gave us an unrealistic value for our property at the beginning.
The description is crap as well - no personality at all I'm sure they use a computer algorithm to write them!

Hi there,

It sounds totally unreasonable for her to dictate what you should have on the particulars, she might advise, but if you want a floor plan, you should have one, it's your money at the end of the day!

I never chase people to spend money with them, just find another, more accommodating estate agent.

BouncingTurtle - sorry you're having such a hard time with your (sequence group?) estate agent. I did get a very good vibe from mine and she did seem to really be enthused about the property. I like the other blurbs she's written about other houses on her books, and she says she's very careful and exacting about writing house particulars.

The floor plan thing is a pain. I presume that if we desperately want one and would go with someone else if we couldn't get it, she'd let us have one, so we're going to drop in this morning and put it to her.