Measuring Your House to Sell

Potential buyers and real estate agents will expect to see the dimensions of your home. Not only does this help to determine your selling price, but potential buyers will find it useful when comparing houses. They may also be required to present the details to mortgage companies for justification.

Buyers will expect to see the dimensions of all rooms. Always ensure that Descriptions and Measurements are a fair and true representation. Avoid misleading statements as this will only result in wasting your buyer’s time and your own.

Rooms

A floor plan will provide you with all the measurements you need for each room and will cost you between £100 and £150 to get drawn upto the RICS standard. If for whatever reason you do not have this information, then you can do your own measuring. This can be fairly easy. All you need is a good measuring tape and an extra person to help. Alternatively you could get a basic sonic measure which uses a sonic bean to take accurate measurements. Any odd shaped rooms can be measured using the longest or widest dimension. This will need to be noted after the measurement with phrases such as ‘into the bay’ or ‘at the widest’ etc.

House

Try to round measurements to the nearest inch or tenth of an inch. Pick an exterior corner of your house and measure the lengths of the walls, working your way around it. Use graphing paper to map out your measurements, one square per 1 foot measured. Your start point and end point should meet at the end of the process, if not you may have to start again. If you need to measure any walls from the inside, add six inches for the exterior wall and four for an interior wall. Any building that is not connected to the house e.g. garages, annexes, granny flats etc. do not need to be included in the measurement.

If you are finding it a bit tricky and are unsure about what you are doing, then a professional will be able to provide more accurate measurements for you and will help you survey your home. This is a small price to pay for peace of mind that all measurements of your home are correct.