Portland Floor Plans Sell Homes

Article thumbnail

Portland buyers these days are more likely than ever to see a floor plan for any given home. That’s because with the new Home Energy Score policy, many homeowners are getting a complimentary floor plan with their energy score and passing it on to potential buyers.

Home Buyers Want to See Floor Plans

The National Association of Realtors 2017 report on Home Buyers says that 55% of home buyers found floor plans useful, the third most important information home buyers were looking for after pictures and the actual description of the home itself. Floor plan desirability beat out virtual tours, neighborhood information, and more.

A floor plan is a bird’s eye view of the home, offering a perspective that’s difficult to find in photographs and even 3D or video tours. Floor-plan-literate home buyers could potentially save themselves a good amount of time touring homes that simply won’t work for them.

Laser Accurate Floor Plans

Our preferred home energy score provider, OrderHomeEnergyScore.com, owned by Stephen FitzMaurice, creates professional, accurate floor plans using industrial grade lasers and software. For $159 you receive the home energy score to satisfy the city of Portland’s policy, and a PDF or two of a really good floor plan, that can be used to advertise the home (easy online booking). If you are only looking for a Portland metro area floor plan the charge is $99 for most homes (call to order). The picture attached to this article is a sample of their work.

3 Extra Reasons Floor Plans Help

  1. Floor plans help put things into perspective. Professional photographers are great at making a home look spacious, well lit and generally enticing. There’s no artistic angle to a floor plan: It simply tells how rooms, entryways, hallways, stairs and other elements of the home are laid out. Most floor plans also include dimensions, and numbers don’t lie.
  2. They provide an easy point of comparison. Not sure if you should tour home A or home B first? There are probably different features that are attractive — a great kitchen in one, but an extra bathroom in the other. With a floor plan, you can quickly and easily compare the two homes. Sometimes, you or your real estate agent will be able to tell right off the batt if one isn’t going to be to your liking.
  3. They are chock-full of data. The floor plan will tell you the size of every room and every space in the house. Will your California King bed fit with room to spare? Will the spare bedroom have enough wall space to contain your home office furniture? Are the hallways wide enough for wheelchair purposes?

How to Read a Floor Plan

You don’t need to be an architect to read a floor plan. In fact, you don’t even have to be a real estate agent! All homes are pretty much built the same: Walls divide the space to form rooms, doors dictate how people flow through them. Floor plans have special markings for each.

  • Walls. Usually, the floor plan will indicate an exterior wall with a thick black line, and interior walls with a slightly thinner line.
  • Doors. Like windows, doors are drawn as breaks in the wall lines, but they will have a much lighter line coming out at an angle from the wall to represent the actual door when it’s open. The curved line in between shows the sweep of the door.
  • Stairs. Stairs are indicated on floor plans by a series of parallel lines in a narrower space between walls.
  • Rooms. Some floor plans give each room a name: “bedroom”, “kitchen”, etc. Others leave it up to the viewer to interpret.
  • Dimensions. On the floor plan, you might find the room dimensions in the center of the room under the name. Or, the dimensions will be written in line with the walls. The dimensions will usually be in feet and inches with a dash between. For example, 12’-3” written along a wall means that wall is a little over twelve feet long.

Visualizing the Home

Now comes the fun part. Once you know what the lines and numbers on the floor plan are talking about, you can actually use them along with the home’s pictures, to visualize the home.

Start by locating the front door to the house on the floor plan. Which way does it swing open? Visualize opening the front door and entering the front room. What do you see from here? Many Portland homes have an open floor plan, meaning you’ll see a living area, dining area, and probably the kitchen beyond that. Others may open into a foyer and provide a choice of routes to take. What happens if you take a right? A left? Go up the stairs?

Talk with your Real Estate Agent about floor plans.

Floor plans are one more useful tool to help sell a home in Portland. We recommend asking your local real estate agent about it. If you’re looking for top 1% listing agents in town, or top 1% buyer’s agents in town, check us out!

Let's Connect
Contact us.

What My Clients Are Saying

You're looking to buy a house and reading reviews because this is a major decision. We entered the market to purchase a home very inexperienced and skeptical. We now own a house thanks to Stephen and his network. Stephen will be our first choice whenever we decide to buy or sell a property in the future.

George