Blogue · 10 octobre 2026 · 5 min de lecture

Floor plans for listings: why buyers want a 2D plan and what it costs

Why buyers want a 2D floor plan on a listing, what a good one contains, and what it costs: $50 for a condo, $100 for a house, $150 for large or prestige properties. When to order it and where to place it.

A buyer scrolls through thirty photos of a house and ends up with a question no photo can answer: how do these rooms actually fit together? That is the job of a floor plan. For a listing in Quebec, a measured 2D floor plan is one of the cheapest additions you can make, and one of the few that changes how buyers behave. Here is why buyers want a 2D plan for a listing, what a good one contains, and what it costs.

The three questions photos cannot answer

Even an excellent gallery leaves gaps, and the gaps are the same on almost every listing.

How do the rooms connect? A bedroom photo does not say whether the door opens onto the living room, a hallway or the bathroom. For a family with young children, whether the bedrooms sit together or at opposite ends of the floor is not a detail. It decides the visit.

How big is it, really? A wide-angle lens shows a room honestly but exaggerates the feeling of space. A plan with dimensions gives scale back. Buyers start measuring in their heads: does our bed fit, does the dining table fit, where would the desk go?

What is not photographed? Hallways, corners, closets, the space under the stairs. They are not beautiful, but they are square footage the buyer pays for.

There is also a side effect brokers value: a plan filters showings. A buyer who understands the layout before driving over arrives already convinced, or does not come at all. Both outcomes save you time.

What a good 2D floor plan contains

Not all plans are equal. A hand sketch or a rough drawing from photos can do harm, because it plants doubt about the rest of the listing. A plan worth publishing has:

• Room dimensions in feet, readable without zooming;
• A layout drawn to scale, with walls, doors and windows in their real positions;
• One plan per level, basement included when it is finished;
• A north arrow, so buyers can picture the light;
• Two formats: a PDF for printing and presentations, and a JPEG for Centris and social media.

The plan is measured on site during the photo session, not guessed from the pictures. One practical test is legibility on a phone: most buyers open a listing on mobile, and a plan with tiny labels will never be read by the people it is meant for.

Which listings benefit most

A plan is useful everywhere and decisive in a few cases.

• Unusual layouts. Split levels, additions, L-shaped floors, rooms that open onto each other. Without a plan, "interesting" becomes "I don't understand" and the buyer scrolls on.
• Multi-storey homes. Whenever there is a staircase, the buyer has to rebuild two floors in their head. One plan per level does that work for them.
• Condos. In a building with several similar units on the market, size and layout are the only objective differences. The plan lets buyers compare for themselves.
• Rentals and income properties. An investor reads the plan as a financial document: size, number of bedrooms, how the unit is laid out.
• Vacant or to-be-renovated properties. The buyer must imagine beyond what the photos show. The plan gives the structure to imagine on.

What a floor plan costs

Price follows the size of the property, because size and number of levels determine how long the measuring and drawing take. At Dimension 360, as an add-on to a photo package:

The plan is a separate line from the photo package (our packages guide shows what each size includes, and the full price list shows every item). For context, $50 on a condo listed at $400,000 is a fraction of one percent of the price, and it can save several showings of buyers who did not understand the layout.

2D, 3D and other formats

Other formats exist on the market, including 3D plans and 3D tours produced by other providers, usually quoted on request and varying from one supplier to the next. We do not offer them. We focus on the 2D plan for a simple reason: a buyer needs to measure, not to be impressed. A dimensioned 2D plan can be read at a glance, printed without losing detail, compared from one property to the next and carried to a showing. We look at the trade-offs in our comparison of 360 tours, Matterport and video.

When to order the plan

At the same time as the photos. The plan is measured during the photo visit; ordering it afterwards means a second trip, a longer delay and another round of coordination with the seller or tenants. The best moment to decide is when you sign the listing and pick the package, not the night before the shoot.

Then publish it from day one. The first days of a listing carry most of its attention, and a plan added a week later is seen by only a fraction of the buyers who would have wanted it.

Where to put it in the gallery

The plan explains the layout; it is not meant to seduce. In most galleries it works best after the interior rooms and before the backyard, or at the very end. For a duplex, a triplex or an unusual layout, put it earlier, since buyers will be asking "where is everything?" from the third photo on. Our guide on how many photos a listing needs shows where a plan fits in the count.

Three mistakes to avoid

• Treating the plan as an extra for big houses. The return is proportionally higher on a condo, where layout is the deciding factor.
• Publishing an unreadable scan. A blurry or hand-drawn plan without dimensions is worse than none.
• Burying it in the attachments. The plan is a marketing image. Put it in the gallery where the buyer's question arises.

In short

A measured 2D floor plan answers the questions photos cannot: how the rooms connect, how big they are, and what sits between them. It costs $50 for a condo, $100 for a house and $150 for a large or prestige property, and it should be ordered with the photos and published on day one. The site and the booking exist in French and in English, and the plan is one checkbox away.

Add a 2D plan to your next shoot in the online estimator.

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Photographie immobilière · Photo et vidéo par drone · Vidéo immobilière · Plan d'étage 2D

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