Meteora Real Estate Development: how to read a floor plan properly

Buyers compare apartments by size and price and glance at the plan. But two units with the same square footage can let for different rents and keep tenants for different lengths of time, and the reasons are all visible on the drawing.

Five things to look for

• Circulation. Corridors and passages are area you pay for and cannot use. A plan with a long internal hallway has less usable space than its size suggests. Trace the route from the front door to the bedroom and see how much of the flat is spent getting there.
• Where the balcony area sits in the number. If the headline size includes a large balcony, the interior is smaller than the comparison implies. Check whether the plan states them separately.
• Wall length for furniture. A living room with three doors, a window and an opening has nowhere to put a sofa. Count the uninterrupted wall runs — this is what makes a room work or not.
• Structural columns inside rooms. Common in tower plans, immovable, and they dictate furniture placement permanently.
• Whether the bedroom takes a real bed. A "second bedroom" that fits a double with no space to walk around it lets as a study, and tenants price it that way.

Things that matter more than they look

• Storage. Its absence is the most common tenant complaint and the cheapest thing for a developer to omit. A plan with no cupboard and no utility space is a plan that loses tenants at renewal.
• Kitchen type. Open plan photographs well; a separate kitchen holds smells and mess. In a small unit the open one usually wins; in a family unit it often does not.
• Where the bathroom door faces. A WC visible from the living room is a small thing that puts people off viewings.
• Laundry provision. A washing machine in the kitchen is normal; nowhere at all is a problem.
• Orientation on the page. Find north, and work out which rooms take the afternoon sun. In this climate a west-facing living room is a cooling bill.

How to use this when comparing

Ask for the dimensioned plan, not the render. Measure the largest uninterrupted wall in the living room and the bedroom. Check whether the stated area includes the balcony. Then compare like with like — and remember that the efficient plan will out-let the inefficient one at the same rent, every year you own it.

What else to check

• Achieved rents in the cluster, from live listings — in JVC competition sets the rent, and a good plan wins the tenant at that rent.
• Service charge per square foot, which you pay on the inefficient area too.
• Escrow, Oqood, the contractor and the delay remedy.
• The area-variance clause, and which measurement convention the stated size uses.

Based on live rental listings for the district and standard off-plan documentation practice.