Floor plans trigger 21.7% more homebuyer interest than those without

Metropix, the leading supplier of floor plan based products to the residential estate agency market, has today released new findings that emphasize a continued increase in the use of floor plans by estate agents in the marketing of residential properties, and the resulting impact the plans have on home-buying consumers.

Analysing data from Mouseprice.com, the free-to-list property portal, it has identified an increase in floor plan usage by a minimum of 17% over the last two years. In addition, those listings that are published with a dedicated floor plan are 21.7% more likely to have resulted in a user submitting the “Contact Agent” form than those that do not offer a floor plan as standard. It is also worth noting that these figures do not include any floor plans that have been uploaded to the portal as a photo file only, meaning these statistics could in fact be much higher.

Brian Farrell, managing director of Metropix believes that agents are likely to receive less interest in a property if minimal information is provided upfront, as users may instead chose to ignore the details and look elsewhere; “Instead of users contacting agents to obtain more about a property, it would instead seem to have the reverse effect, meaning consumers are more likely to look elsewhere,” explains Farrell. “From talking to our customers, agents using floor plans typically find that viewings are of a higher quality as the buyer already has a good idea of the property’s credentials and so are already more engaged with what the home has to offer them.”

Added Selwyn Lim, director of Mouseprice.com: “These findings clearly emphasize the need for agents to provide as much property information as possible when marketing it for sale and floor plans appear to be extremely popular with prospective purchasers. Our data shows the same pattern emerges with regards to photographs and letting properties – where fewer photos are presented, the agents receive a lower number of leads. Therefore, with the market conditions as they are, it makes sense for agents to provide floor plans and photos as standard – from our findings, those that do would certainly appear to be more successful than their counterparts who do not.”

Mouseprice.com is owned by Calnea Analytics, a statistical consultancy to banks and financial institutions specialising in the field of automated valuation models (AVMs). Among other accolades Calnea Analytics is the statistical consultant to HM Land Registry and the creator of the official Land Registry House Price Index.

For more information regarding Metropix, visit metropix.com or telephone 0845 838 5355. For more information regarding Mouseprice, visit mouseprice.com.