Guides · Floor Plan Measurement

How Landlords Can Measure Floor Plans for Lease Pricing

Whether pricing a single-family rental, a condo, or a small commercial space, accurate square footage is the foundation of correct lease pricing. An extra 100 sq ft you didn't know about at $2.50/sq ft/month is $3,000 per year in unrealized rent. Here's how to get the number right.

Why accurate square footage matters for lease pricing

Residential landlords set rents partly from comparable units by size. If your unit is 820 sq ft but listed as 900 sq ft, you're competing with genuine 900 sq ft units on $/sq ft metrics — and may be losing tenants. Commercial leases price even more directly: monthly rent = rentable area × $/sq ft rate. A 50 sq ft measurement error at $25/sq ft/month = $1,250/month in wrong charges or lost rent.

Residential rental measurement

For residential rentals measure the interior net area — wall-to-wall. Tenants think of square footage as the space they can use, not including wall thickness. Interior measurement is what most rental comps report. Upload your floor plan to MeasureFloorPlan.com, trace the interior perimeter (inside faces of perimeter walls), set scale from any labeled dimension, and read the area.

What to include in residential rentable area

Include: All finished, conditioned living space within the unit perimeter — bedrooms, living areas, kitchen, bathrooms, hallways, closets. Exclude: Private garage (separate amenity), storage rooms outside the unit boundary, balcony/patio (report separately), unfinished basement.

Usable vs rentable area in commercial contexts

Usable area: Space the tenant occupies exclusively — their office, retail floor, private storage. What the tenant can put furniture in. Rentable area: Usable area plus the tenant's proportionate share of common areas (lobby, corridors, restrooms, mechanical rooms). Tenants pay rent on rentable area under most commercial leases. For a single-tenant building usable area = rentable area (no common areas to allocate). For multi-tenant buildings BOMA standards define how to allocate common areas across tenants.

If you don't have a floor plan

Many photographers offer CubiCasa or Matterport scanning for $100–$200. The resulting floor plan becomes your authoritative measurement source — useful both for lease pricing and as a marketing asset for tenant listings.