Once confined to the realms of the professionals

Once confined to the realms of the professionals, floor plans have recently become a valuable tool for everyday consumers. Go to any online property market portals or visit any high street estate agent, and you’ll find floor plans included in the specifications of almost every property on their portfolio.

The Importance of Floor Plans

It’s been proven that including additional media to the basic description of a property for sale generates up to 50% more interest from people browsing online. Floor plans in particular play a large part in this figure, because potential buyers are not just using those floor plans for informative purposes, such as whether the rooms will be big enough to fit their existing furniture. With the current lack of properties available on the market, buyers are looking at floor plans as a way of imagining what alterations could be made to a property to suit their style of living – for example, knocking two smaller rooms together, installing a cloakroom or even looking at the possibility of extending.

These days, estate agents have access to state-of-the-art floor planning software, ranging from basic 2D black and white drawings to accompany their properties to interactive 3D floor plans that their clients can customise by dragging, dropping and resizing various items into the plans to help visualise plans for furniture, fixtures and fittings.

DIY Plans

It’s the interactive side of floor planning that has really taken off – not just to aid in the buying and selling of properties but for people to plan and redesign their own homes, too. Those who have bought and had a brand new kitchen installed may well have been shown a floor plan created by their kitchen designer with all the proposed units in place, and they have probably been shown a 3D rendering of their dream improvements. Now, with the availability of online floor planning, anyone can create their own floor plans quickly and affordably for their own use. There are plenty of free, no-frills apps online fit for the purpose, enabling ordinary people to approach builders and designers with better visions of their proposed home improvements.

The need to create their own floor plans has become essential for estate agents, too, especially where a property comes up for which there are no previous floor plans or current floor plans available. Being able to draw plans online, then, especially when time is of the essence, requires software that can put together a set of plans of a professional quality using an intuitive interface quickly and without fuss.

Bringing together the ability to create rooms by stretching the area to the right dimensions, a clever tool for drawing out irregular shapes, and a bank of drag-and-drop items such as doors, windows and other fixtures and fittings, the plan of an average-sized house can be completed in as little as five minutes.

This is a good investment of time that will generate a significant increase in the amount of interest in a property.