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Where’s the Floorplan?

April 22, 2009 | By Kelley Koehler | Filed Under Home Selling 

Question from the audience: why do listings for existing homes show tons of details, maps, pictures, virtual tours, fact sheets about every possible detail – but not floorplans?

My Answer:

I do floorplans occasionally – they’d be linked along with the rest of the virtual media.  I know in some other parts of the country, it is customary to have room measurements along with the listing – in Tucson, we don’t do that, we don’t have fields in our MLS for room descriptions or measurements.

But beyond that – I have floorplans drawn when I suspect the assessor square footage is incorrect, usually in older homes.  When I represent a Seller, I want the house to be as big as possible.  If having a floorplan drawn finds 1100 square feet instead of the assessor-listed 900 square feet, then we can price that house much differently.

In the luxury Tucson market, floorplans tend to be a typical item used in marketing.  I suppose the logic is that when you sell a high-end home, there’s a larger marketing budget – but floorplans are in the $0.10 – $0.15/square foot range, so we’re not talking thousands of dollars anyway.

Personally, when I represent home sellers, I know that more often than not, people buy on emotion.  Someone who swears they’ll never buy a home without a split bedroom plan will drop that requirement if they walk into a house with the right "feel," the right view, the right light, the right everything else.  So I want people inside the house – sensing, feeling, reacting – not discarding that listing sight-unseen because the floorplan doesn’t look exactly right.

It’s the same reason I’m not a huge fan of virtual tours.  Though if I ever find home video that does an awesome job of getting people to be curious about the house, I’ll adopt that strategy immediately.

I get 25 photos, and I’ll use up as many of those slots as possible to show the house from a multitude of angles and rooms.  But the point of marketing a home for sale is to entice people to come look at the thing, in person.  Floorplans are one of those things that I think can turn people away before they look.  I’ve seen too many buyers forgive a floorplan when everything else is right.

And I know that may not be an incredibly popular answer, in this age of information-freedom where we want all our answers up front.  But it’s honest.  When I represent a seller, my job is to get real live people into that house.  And despite what we often tell ourselves, emotional reactions are a HUGE influence on our buying decisions. 

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