Buying on floor space vs bedrooms

LondonSi

Hi there, I have a question that I would some opinions on that I’m struggling with!

I am looking at buying a house in a commuter town near London. The house is quite large (3,000 sq ft) and the price per sq/ft compares favourably to the local market, coming in approx 15% cheaper per sq ft than the average property.

However, despite the size, the property has ‘only’ 3 bedrooms (albeit large rooms). The configuration is such that changing the the three bedrooms to 4 would be almost impossible. Based on bedrooms, it would be the most expensive 3 bed house around, making me think that it’s not such a great investment after all.

I have always bought property of price per sq/ft and not on rooms, but this is making me reconsider. What would your thoughts be?

Peggy0628

Do you have a large family? Do you need 3 bedrooms or 4? Personally I'd rather have 3 good sized rooms than 4 smaller ones... Larger rooms are good to accommodate build in storage etc without you losing out on living space. Nobody wants to sleep in a tiny room where there is no room to move (trust me on this, I lived in a box room in a shared house in the past and it was horrible).
Also, is it possible to convert the loft or add an extension in the future if you really need the 4th bedroom?

getmore4less

We had to go 4 bed to get the downstairs space we wanted.
There were 3beds with the large downstairs but not quite what we wanted for other reasons.

If the space works for you better than a similar sized 4 bed then the utility value may out way any investment potential.

Are you buying an investment or a home?.

trailingspouse

In the UK we tend to think more of 'number of bedrooms' than floor area. I wouldn't have a clue whether 3000 sqft was good bad or indifferent, but I have a definite view on whether I would want/need 3 beds or 4. I have no idea what the square footage of my own house is, but I know how many bedrooms it has!

Why would you buy an expensive 3 bed house? Particularly if you know you would need a 4 bed house? I wouldn't even consider it regardless of how big the house was. Other houses are available.

Rambosmum

Depends if you need 4 beds really. When we were looking we needed either 4 beds or 3 reception rooms (one extra room for a home office) so preferred floor space over number of bedrooms on the whole, but it was total number of rooms which was important to us.

LondonSi

Thanks for the replies - it's not really a question of how many bedrooms I need, but more an economic questions of bedrooms vs floorspace. It's a home, but I treat all homes as investments (it's MSE, after all), so whilst it works as a home, it also needs to make economic sense, and I've never seen a property that is cheaper than the market per sq/ft, but also more expensive than the market per bedroom.

Thrugelmir

LondonSi wrote: »

but more an economic questions of bedrooms vs floorspace. It's a home, but I treat all homes as investments (it's MSE, after all),

Bedrooms are just just rooms to sleep in. Far more importantly is the downstairs layout. The use of space and the flow. Outlook on the garden. Never bought based on floor area. Nor a home as an investment.

AlexMac

I assume you are used to overseas markets if you think in floorspace?

Although Sq M or SqFt are creeping in as an alternative to traditional UK measure of Bedrooms, in London and some developer markets?

We once helped an Italian mate / estate agent in Puglia to translate his website; he took some convincing that as he was targeting English buyers, they needed an indication of at least the potential number of rooms, as opposed to the Sq Meters of his rustic wrecks...

... and that and it was better, in the translated listings, to use the english number punctuation of comma, not full stops to indicate thousands; 25,000 Euros, not the Italian 25.000,00 which sounds like gazillions to us Brits!

Anyway good luck

Plus

I had a look around some listings locally and actually saw quite a lot of sqm numbers (some of these are new-build or almost-new-build). I think this is all to the good - there's been a trend for developers to squeeze in more microscopic bedrooms just so they can say it's a '4 bedroom house' even if those bedrooms are only suitable for gerbils.

I wouldn't buy on sqm alone but it's useful guidance as to what you get. However, what really matters is how efficiently the space is used - some people find canal boats perfectly liveable, while there are 10,000sqft houses (a lot of them American) that somehow manage to be awful soulless places with profligate wastes of space (McMansion Hell is a rather good blog about this).

Linton

LondonSi wrote: »

Hi there, I have a question that I would some opinions on that I’m struggling with!

I am looking at buying a house in a commuter town near London. The house is quite large (3,000 sq ft) and the price per sq/ft compares favourably to the local market, coming in approx 15% cheaper per sq ft than the average property.

However, despite the size, the property has ‘only’ 3 bedrooms (albeit large rooms). The configuration is such that changing the the three bedrooms to 4 would be almost impossible. Based on bedrooms, it would be the most expensive 3 bed house around, making me think that it’s not such a great investment after all.

I have always bought property of price per sq/ft and not on rooms, but this is making me reconsider. What would your thoughts be?

Are you looking for an investment or a home?


For a home I would put the priorities in the decision as:
1) Number of rooms
2) Usability of rooms
3) Layout

.,..
....
10) Total sq ft

bouicca21

My American friend does everything in sq feet. Her place is bigger than mine, but the layout of mine is better than hers. I like her big rooms but tbh prefer the way my space works.


For me it will always be how the space works rather than square footage - with the proviso that I can't bear the kind of tiny rooms you get in a lot of modern houses.