patrick.net

Philistine says

...show just enough skin to tease, but no more.

Performance of RE agents is often measured not just on how much they sell, but also how many enquiries they get and how many viewings they get for a seller.

This is why it's in their interest to limit the information.

I'm currently selling a vacation rental that has it's own website full of information, but the RE agent did not want to link to it from their own advertisement because they want the potential buyers to have a reason to ring up for more information.

I guess there's a chance they can persuade someone on the merits of a particular property once they have them on the phone ... but at the same time wasting other people's time allows them to say to an unsuccessful seller - "sure you have not sold yet, but look how many enquiries and viewings I've got for you. I'm busting my ass here!".

I find it funny that houses are sold on location, sqft, and # of garage spaces. But then again, this is a country where cars are sold on the number of cup holders, and the size of the wheels.

The floor plan is critical to the house, but 95% of houses have no real floor plan. The sad truth is most people don't care. They like crap, and they don't know any better. If they saw a great floor plan they probably wouldn't like it. Looking at what people buy, I have come to the conclusion, they buy what they drew in kindergarten.

Hell, many realtors can't even be bothered to take 3 decent photos so they sure of heck are not going to take the time to create a floor plan mock up. (don't know why sellers don't fire such agents right out of the gate).

Floor plans are incredibly useful and critical to a house being functional or not. I think there is plenty of room to allow for quirkiness and uniqueness but there are many floor plans where I just have to scratch my head and ask "what were they thinking" or as the case may be unable to think.

I do agree that most people are brain dead and cannot even take note of how they live and how they may adapt their daily activities with a floor plan. So they purchase homes that are functionally illiterate and then wonder why they don't function well. Yes, lots of pure crap out there, new and old alike.

There is an architecture firm in our town that does floor-plans and measures houses for about $100. They are often attached to higher end listings but not sent out to the public.

I used to be a realtor and in training we were told that a call of an advertisement likely would be a person who will buy a more expensive house (they know the price when they call and are praying the house has what they want) and a call off of a sign is a person who cannot afford the house (they are praying the house they are in front of is in their price range). If you give people all of that information, the phone will never ring.

In the time I was "in the business" I found that training to be amazingly true. Unfortunately, the internet and lazy brokers have made buyers think that they can find their perfect house without assistance. They usually end up buying the largest square footage for the money (houses by the pound) because no one gets them to consider things they hadn't thought about. Another broker axiom, "buyers are lairs".

robertoaribas says

1. if you are seriously interested in a home, you will go and look at it. Serious buyers look at EVERY home that interest them in an area. If the lack of a floor plan stops you from taking 10 minutes to have a quick look at a home, you aren't a home buyer. You are a whiner on patricks...

Who said I don't do that already? I'm just wasting my time and the realtors/sellers time when I hate the home layout as soon as I walk in. It's only the largest purchase I'll ever make and be tied to it for possibly 30 years. But you're right, I should only expect sub-standard help when spending this much money.

robertoaribas says

nobody has a floor plan. I have owned literally dozens of homes, and never had a floor plan to any of them. Only the original builder/first buyer were ever provided with one, and it was probably lost decades ago.

Then make one. Get a tape measure if you have to. Draw one in crayon and guess the measurements if you must. Little things like the location of the kitchen, bedroom locations, etc. are important.

robertoaribas says

If the agent drew the floor plan, they could be sued for any inaccuracies in said plan, ergo it ain't going to happen.

Not if you write in big purple crayon: "This floor plan is not 100% accurate. It a rough sketch of what the owner believes to be his floor plan."

This suing thing has gotten out of hand anyway. What if a picture shows a wall as white and afterward they painted the wall blue? Can I now sue for inaccuracies in said picture? It's a rough sketch floor plan, as long as its clearly labeled as such
there shouldn't be any problems.

rob1 says

Performance of RE agents is often measured not just on how much they sell, but also how many enquiries they get and how many viewings they get for a seller.

This is why it's in their interest to limit the information.

Buster says

Hell, many realtors can't even be bothered to take 3 decent photos so they sure of heck are not going to take the time to create a floor plan mock up.

THIS is starting to answer the question. Just think, if websites would show all the house details, if a virtual tour was literally a virtual tour with video instead of a slideshow of 5 pictures, if people buying out of state could tour houses they wouldn't normally bother to drive 6 hours to...the need for Realtors would be greatly diminished.

Zen says

Does anyone remember the days of having to try and get a friend of a friend to get you an MLS book to see what was on the market at any given time? So now a dozen pictures, a location map, aerial photos, a description, a full set of specifications, pricing history, previous sales history and more right at your fingertips for every property on the market is not enough. Please!

Why should we not keep pushing for more information? This is the biggest purchase I will ever make, I want ALL THE INFORMATION. If it's out there, and if the middlemen are blocking it for their own greed, then there's a problem that people need to start addressing when selling their house.

More information is not a bad thing, it's a good thing. The people who come looking will just be verifying what they've already seen; I personally am more interested in houses with better descriptions and more pictures. Feels like they're not hiding anything.

There is no excuse for not having a floor plan. It doesn't take 10 minutes to look at a house. Sometimes it is a 40 minute drive each way, 10 minutes to wait on the realtor, etc. If there are 50 houses that might be reasonable in an area, then that is a lot of driving around. Floor plans are pretty important & they vary quite a lot. If they were readily available, people could more easily find the right place.
The law suit bit is not a realistic problem. Just put a note up saying that they are drawn based on tape measure, and a buyer should confirm. There are other factual things like square footage that are often listed incorrectly. I would think that would be a bigger law suit issue.

StoutFiles says

I want ALL THE INFORMATION.

You can "want" all you like, but if you put WANT in one hand and SHIT in the other, see which one fills up faster. You're not going to change the way RE agents and sellers do business no matter what you want because to sell a property it's all about location first and then getting the most potential buyers in the home to see it.

lurking says

You can "want" all you like, but if you put WANT in one hand and SHIT in the other, see which one fills up faster.

Ew? What does that have to do with anything? The first part of any problem solving is addressing the problem.

lurking says

You're not going to change the way RE agents and sellers do business no matter what you want because to sell a property it's all about location first and then getting the most potential buyers in the home to see it.

Oh, I didn't know you were King of Real Estateâ„¢ and made the rules! Personally I don't care what RE agents think as they just want to make as much money through the process, but if sellers could be convinced to ignore agents and list all their house information they would likely see more profits and begin to question the need of a 6% take from their sale.

You act like its impossible, but is it really? What would it take to change the rules of the game?

oliverks1 says

The floor plan is critical to the house, but 95% of houses have no real floor plan. The sad truth is most people don't care. They like crap, and they don't know any better. If they saw a great floor plan they probably wouldn't like it. Looking at what people buy, I have come to the conclusion, they buy what they drew in kindergarten.

Wow. It's too bad these people don't have you to tell them what they should like.

Real Estate Agents are a guild. Like any guild they jealously guard their information and create great barriers to prevent competition from providing consumers with other alternatives. Like any other profession, those with a RE license can be quality or complete crap. It's merely a hurdle.

Floor plans could easily be sketched in far less than an hour's time, with disclosures that the sketch is very rough and only an estimate. A tape measure could be used to get each room's rough measurements.

This is IMO (as a current home buying candidate) very useful information that would help determine if I, the consumer, should bother to seek more information or not. A truly consumer centric business would provide this information.

One inclined to get foot traffic and try to sell no matter what will not want you to have this info. They want to be the gate keeper on all info. This is why many RE agents are barely one step above (at times below) used car salespeople and "Whole Life is always the answer for all things financial" life insurance pushers.

The Internet is the great equalizer. Someone will publish it (unless they guild has made it illegal to do so, which would not surprise me...) and all will suddenly provide the same info or be left in the dust.

Most public property appraisal websites i've seen do have the original floorplans to view.

With a lot of the online ads I've seen I'm surprised that the first thing you noticed was "why no floor plan?" My first impressions have usually been "WTF is this?", and "did they take this with a cell phone camera?"

I believe one side effect of the housing bubble was a generation of lazy realtors who expect houses to sell themselves. My Mom (unfortunately) used a friend of the family to try to sell her house. The woman took crappy pictures, didn't provide staging advice, was late for the open house she was supposed to run, missed appointments she made to show the house, and then had the nerve to tell her that it probably wasn't selling because of the price.

Go ahead-include the floor plan. RE Offices/Brokers carry E&O

(errors and omissions) insurance for these things. It would be

useful before the tour to see if the House is even remotely what

You want, and after as You make up Your mind.

Making a floor plan seemed like an obvious step to me when we were selling our house (2006) so I made one myself (took more like 3 hours) and included a disclaimer about accuracy. People who came to see the place really seemed to appreciate it.
I had a photographer friend take the photos for the MLS, didn't trust the REA to do it.

Our agent was a disappointment regardless. What little ad space her agency gave us was discontinued after the first week on the market, as new inventory came in (those were crazy days in L.A.). Paid a $40K commission, but through it all I had to keep kicking to get attention. REA services should be fee-for service. I'd pay per showing, pay for ad space, pay (if I couldn't do it myself) for photography, plans, staging.

YesYNot says

There is no excuse for not having a floor plan. It doesn't take 10 minutes to look at a house. Sometimes it is a 40 minute drive each way, 10 minutes to wait on the realtor, etc. If there are 50 houses that might be reasonable in an area, then that is a lot of driving around. Floor plans are pretty important & they vary quite a lot. If they were readily available, people could more easily find the right place.

The law suit bit is not a realistic problem. Just put a note up saying that they are drawn based on tape measure, and a buyer should confirm. There are other factual things like square footage that are often listed incorrectly. I would think that would be a bigger law suit issue.

More information can be a bad thing. It costs money to provide information, which drives the cost of doing business up. The other thing is that you really can't tell how the house floor plan feels until you get in it. I design plans for a living, trust me, it takes years of putting a design on paper and then seeing it built before you get a real feeling for a what the space will be like when looking at it on paper. Every homeowner I have ever worked with that had plans painstakingly designed to their exact specifications, had many things that they would change if they could do it over.

So do you think you can just take a quick glance at a floor plan on your computer screen and understand what it's like to be in that space? If this is such a good idea, why not provide plumbing, electrical, grading, landscaping and irrigation plans too? My advise is to go see the house in person. Visit it two or three times before making an offer, and make sure to take along your wife, girlfriend, sister, or mother. Women are usually far better at envisioning how it will all work once you fill it with your stuff.

Zen says

If this is such a good idea, why not provide plumbing, electrical, grading, landscaping and irrigation plans too?

That does sound like a good idea! Seriously, it gives much more info about the house, at least to men. Women may not care as much. Just something about brain differences.

I've always found it funny that when I search for apartments online, they include pretty much all information I want, including *floor plans* but houses don't have it.

This was very frustrating to me too, when I was trying to buy a house out of state. Ultimately, I had to move, rent a place and then buy my house.

What is even sadder is that so many people over here are not only fine with this but also defending it. A floor plan is essential information, very important for the buyer to understand how the house is laid out. IMO, it should be included in every listing. Wouldn't the city or county have a couple? Why can't the realtor go get it by spending 30 mins and post it?

Ronnie Honduras says

Floor plans could easily be sketched in far less than an hour's time, with disclosures that the sketch is very rough and only an estimate. A tape measure could be used to get each room's rough measurements.

A very sophisticated iPhone or Android app could send out ping sounds as you walk through the house and get the size and dimensions of each room automatically, and log it on a website with the GPS coordinates of every room. Bats basically create a "soundscape" of their environment in this way. Such a phone app is probably years off, but it's definitely possible to make.

I'm in the process of buying a house, and after visiting the property, I used floorplanner.com and a google sat. view to make a fairly accurate floor plan. This allowed me to study it more and think about how it would work. (I actually think this particular layout works very nicely!)

Check it out: http://pl.an/m6442r

It was fun to play around with.

Zen says

So do you think you can just take a quick glance at a floor plan on your computer screen and understand what it's like to be in that space?

I can take a quick glance at a floor plan and know that I'm not going to want my stereo in a space, that there isn't a convenient nook for the piano, or I'm not going to fit my pinball collection.

My wife can look at it and be happy or unhappy about how close the guest bedrooms/offices are to the master bedroom.

Fewer places seen means less time+effort wasted and interaction with used house sales people

Anyone selling a house for $200K or up can spare an hour to create a floor plan.

When we bought a house, we took a tape measure and made our own rough floor plan to see how we could set it up. After we bought the house, we were given floor plan drawings that formed the basis of the tax assessment. There were also surveyer papers. It would have taken 5 minutes to scan that stuff in.

Some day most houses being sold will have a floor plan & probably use that mouseover program or something like it. It would save realtors a heck of a lot of time if people had more information at the computer. It would mean less driving around.

Ive seen small grainy jpegs of condo floorplans on realtor web pages. Not enough detail for them to get sued. Some houses have safe rooms or false walls where a 2nd floor has a passage way behind a book case to escape a robbery or fast escape of a mistress etc that they do not want disclosed to the general public where burglars can case the joint. I'm still trying to get the floorplan to Wayne manor, and thus the entrance to the Batcave.

Zen says

So do you think you can just take a quick glance at a floor plan on your computer screen and understand what it's like to be in that space?

No, but You can understand very quickly if You hate it and have no reason to look farther

Zen says

So do you think you can just take a quick glance at a floor plan on your computer screen and understand what it's like to be in that space?

I believe he meant the floor plans would cross off houses he would have no interest in. What's better, knowing right away you wouldn't want that house or having to get in the car and drive there to ultimately decide you don't want the house?

Zen says

If this is such a good idea, why not provide plumbing, electrical, grading, landscaping and irrigation plans too?

That would be awesome! For now, I'd just like the floor plan, but hopefully in the future we'll get that information too.

if a sketch is provided it cannot include the size because simple math would quickly tell the buyers, hell all buyers, that the stated square footage includes the space between the walls and other sorts of spaces. I once carefully measured my house, including the triangular sections of bay pop outs, and was still a few hundred sqft shy of the stated size from the builder.

Zen says

So now a dozen pictures, a location map, aerial photos, a description, a full set of specifications, pricing history, previous sales history and more right at your fingertips for every property on the market is not enough.

Yes, and clearly if houses were sold a particular way in the 1800s, we should continue to use those practices too.

A lot of this is about used house salesmen hiding information -- it's a cartel, and they're trying to keep it that way. Look, I'm not saying that every realtor should include a floor plan because it's not super common, but the excuses for not including one (if you have one or could make it easily) are always flimsy because the whole goal is to hide information to get more foot traffic. That's why unrenovated bathrooms don't usually get depicted in the listing. But let's get past this stupid "you'll get sued" and "it costs too much" nonsense -- simply not true.

As a former carpet and tile guy, I can promise you 80% of the people out there, don't have the capacity to actually formulate an accurate floor plan. Not to scale that would be meaningful in anyway. The best they could do is just list room dimensions,(then you'd be surprised how many get that wrong).

Which as one poster already suggested would create legal problems, if someone draws a proportionately inaccurate floor plan that mislead someone on the actual dimensions of the place. Then to do it right, someone would have to be paid to come in and measure and place the doors, hall way, kitchen and bathroom in the proper places. Just how much do you want to spend on closing costs?

If it were as easy as some of you think, then you'd think the listing agents favorite tool would be a sheet of drafting paper and a tape measure.

There already IS an app to create floorplans on the iPhone 4 and Ipad 2. It's called MagicPlan.

http://ww.sensopia.com/english/index.html

Unfortunately no Android version, which is really stupid, as those phones had all the hardware tools needed to support the software.

More discussion on a real estate site:

http://rebliss.com/blog/2011/04/18/create-a-floor-plan-on-your-iphone-with-magicplan-no-tape-measurer-needed/

"...a generation of lazy realtors who expect houses to sell themselves."

I really think this is a big part of it. Many real estate agents are rank amateurs who just don't want to do the work, or they don't know how. Exhibit A: Universally shitty photos that put houses in the worst possible light.

In boom times it was enough to just fill out the paperwork and cash the check, and the houses would sell themselves. Not so much anymore.

Buyers and sellers have always been the ones doing the legwork, since they have the biggest stake in the deal. Hopefully agents will find it harder and harder to skim money off home sales as both buyers and sellers figure out how to share information directly.

This piece of crap took me three minutes. Just a random bad layout I threw together. Yes, I could draw a professional one, but that's not the point.

It serves its purpose, it lets me know where every room is located and the general layout of the house. It isn't good by any means, but I do know a lot more about the house now. Any pictures shown will now have some context.

It cost 0 dollars. It takes almost no time. It's incredibly useful to the buyer, and indirectly, the seller. Anyone could do it. And this is just for an awfully bad floor plan, a more detailed one would be even better, but the basic layout is most important since most sites have room dimensions. .

There's no dimensions? what good is it?

I could have just said, "It's laid out like a double wide..." and conveyed the same message that picture does.

A floor plan came with my home when I bought it, actually I got all the original blue prints. The floor plan was not even accurate, everyone goes by sq. ft., number of rooms, and photo's. It only takes about two or three internal photo's to see the floor plan in your mind anyways.

Tenouncetrout says

There's no dimensions? what good is it?

Scale is not important as long as I can get an idea of the house layout. Most people care about the layout but not so much the dimensions. It is to get a rough idea so that we can visualize the house without actually visiting it. Moreover the dimensions of each room is usually listed in the MLS so it can be used in conjunction to evaluate.

The more information, more transparency the better. I don't know why such a simple point is very hard to understand.

robertoaribas says

When you are out looking at homes, opening one more door takes all of 15 minutes... hardly worth getting your pantyhose bunched up about...

15 minutes x 10 houses is more than 2 hours and if none of the layouts fit my interest, I would have done better things during that time anyway. How is this whining? I don't get it.

StoutFiles says

It cost 0 dollars. It takes almost no time. It's incredibly useful to the buyer, and indirectly, the seller. Anyone could do it. And this is just for an awfully bad floor plan, a more detailed one would be even better, but the basic layout is most important since most sites have room dimensions. .

You don't always even need dimensions. I've lived in houses of different sizes and can generally figure out the relative sizes of rooms in a house given then number of bedrooms and the number of square feet. Sometimes you just want to know what the flow is and where certain rooms are in relation to others. If you are considering a purchase on a busy street in SF (as is not uncommon in certain parts of SF), those bedrooms better be at the back of the house, for example.

Lots of Bay Area housing is composed of shitty tract homes that have been modified and expanded over the years. Some people have done this better than others and have actually hired an architect who thought about creating a good house, and some people made a hotchpotch of random additions that aren't up to code and don't fit into the house well. We've all seen these properties and can tell the difference, and a floor plan can help you evaluate this without wasting time.

More information is always better, unless you're a used house salesman.

I think the OP revealed a lot in his post: he said if he had the info he could waste less time. The statement implies that if you fail to provide it he'll go get it himself. That's something that makes real estate different that most businesses. If you're bad at advertising your furniture you're going to go out of business. If you're bad at advertising an RE listing frustrated buyers are going to come see it for themselves.

Houses aren't moving, NOT because of lack of Marketing skills, or technique, I think we should all agree on that.

Easy, partners!

Most agents don't supply floorplans for their listings because they don't have them, and people don't ask for them. Simple as that.

Here's another tip: Women buy most houses. Men give the OK. Women pay attention to ambience, feel and specific amenities (size of closets, bedrooms and kitchen). They don't want to look at diagrams.

And what's so bad about "quaint," "cozy" and other euphemisms? agents have a duty to present their clients' homes in the best possible light. They're required by law to disclose everything that would affect the marketability of the home--but not on a web presentation or property flyer. On the other hand, an agent who lies about the home or the neighborhood is a fool. Buyers figure these things out pretty quickly, and will dump a deceptive agent in a hurry.

One more thing: The person who wrote that buyers and sellers do most of the legwork on a real estate transaction has never been an agent.

Is it because no one wants to take 1 hour to draw one in MS Paint if they don't have it? Yes, yes, and yes. Most people wouldn't have the knowledge or talent to do this.

Our realtor used "Mouse on House."

http://www.mouseonhouse.com/Website/default.aspx

corntrollio says

PockyClipsNow says

then the lawsuits start right after the sale for fraud, mis representation, etc.

Not true. The key is adequate disclosure. If you say "floorplan is approximate for visualization purposes only, please measure the rooms yourself" you would adequately protect against lawsuits.

Disclaimers do not prevent lawsuits.