Should bedrooms dictate price, asks Nigel Lewis of Zoopla Property Group
Do you remember the battle to keep imperial measurements such as the foot, pound and inch rather than use Europe's metre, kilogramme and centimetre?
Then you may also remember that imperial measurements eventually lost out to metric.
But one metric habit we haven't adopted so easily is measuring our homes by their floor size, rather than how many bedrooms they have.
Go house hunting in France for example and it's often difficult to find out how many bedrooms a house offers; local agents look at you in Gallic wonder when asked.
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But what's the problem – that's just the way our strange Euro friends do it, right? Well, no. Using the number of bedrooms as the main measure of a property's price is the most inaccurate way to work out its value for money, many people believe.
For example, the average price per square metre in England for a detached house is £25 while a flat is double that – £51 a square metre, research by property website Zoopla.co.uk shows.
This shows how apartments are relatively poor value for money because although they are usually smaller than houses, they're twice the price per square metre.
So, if in a town the average price per square metre is £1,870 and there are two million-pound homes for sale there (one of which is for sale at £3,080 per square metre while the other is £1,990) then which would you say offers the best value?
Spare a thought for anyone buying a home in central London, though – where homes are currently selling for £7,876 a sq metre.
So will we ever adopt this way of working out a property's value? Not without pressure, it would be fair to say – but new rules that force those selling to publish more information may soon change that.
Comments
by Bonkim2003
Wednesday, October 03 2012, 10:25AM
“Although October 2011, the Halifax/Lloyds TSB Bank report
http://tinyurl.com/8g6c4da
gives a flavour of house prices across the country and the scale of prices in the TIG report (apart from the typo) appear to be in line.”
by Bonkim2003
Wednesday, October 03 2012, 10:21AM
“Matt1006 obviously a typo X 100 I would have thought. The figures are national averages I am assuming and there are many towns particularly in the North with very low house prices compared with the Southern cities or Glos.”
by Matt1006
Wednesday, October 03 2012, 9:47AM
“The 6th paragraph down states "...the average price per square metre in England for a detached house is £25...". Where did that figure come from? It's miles out. At that rate, a 300 sq. m. house (which is a sizeable property) is on average £7,500. Even if it was £25 per square foot, the same large house (3,228 sq. ft.) works out at just £80,700.
Bit further down it states "...in a town the average price per square metre is £1,870...", which would make a 300 sq. m. house £561,000. Still on the low side for a large town property. And totally contradicting what it says 2 paragraphs earlier.
Not quite sure how Zoopla have come up with these figures, but they seem somewhat erratic to me. Or have TiG made a right balls-up of reporting it???”
by Bonkim2003
Wednesday, October 03 2012, 8:44AM
“ideally floor area should determine value - but it is all to how people look at houses, developers squeeze ever more numbers of rooms within a given floor area and greater profits. Even council tax, insurance, etc, follow numbers of rooms rather than build area.”
by daveofglos
Wednesday, October 03 2012, 8:11AM
“I'd dearly love to convert one of my bedrooms to a dressing room but that would reduce the number from 4 to 3 - this very problem has been stopping me doing this.”