Certified Square Footage + GLA

Certified Square Footage + GLA from HomeDiary PRO. The industry’s first floor plan that comes with a guarantee of accuracy, or your money back for the addon. With the Certified Square Footage + GLA from HomeDiary, we will guarantee that the property’s size as represented by the Gross Living Area, or GLA, is at least 99.5% accurate. This means you can know the size of the property before you list it, or before you buy it. Individual room measurements should be either spot on, or off at a maximum 1 to 2 inches. Note, even with a human doing a hand measurement and drawing, room measurements can be off 1 or 2 inches due to variability. In short, it is a floor plan that can be relied upon for the listing and even for home improvement projects, as it represents an “as built” floor plan at the time of the property scan.

We scan the property using a Matterport Pro camera or in some markets an iGuide Planix camera system for the most accuracy.  Matterport is the leader in 3D property scanning technology, and we are one of Matterport’s top 10 enterprise partners.  iGuide is the leader in Canada where several provinces require accurate floor plans when a property is listed for sale.  The requirement there is at least 98% accuracy, and iGuide is stated to be 99.5% accurate, as it uses a lidar system to create a point cloud of the layout, which gets converted into the floor plan. While we can scan using a 360 camera, it is not as consistently accurate, and therefore the certification of square footage is limited to using a Matterport Pro camera or iGuide. It takes longer to scan, and it takes longer to create the certified square footage floor plan.  Therefore, there is a small extra fee for the addon.

You can read more on FloorPlan Accuracy here and see a comparison of various scanning methods, and why some of the more popular methods are NOT reliable sources for floor plan square footage, or even room dimensions.

 

Certified Square Footage + GLA Report

View a sample report you get – this is added to the virtual tour as a download, and it is also available in your account where you can view and download it – just go to Stories/Media and scroll down to documents.

Download a Sample Report

With the Certified Square Footage + GLA addon, we provide both the gross living area, or GLA, and the gross internal area, or GIA:

  • GLA – this is the total above grade (i.e., the ground) living area that includes the external walls as part of the calculation, as defined by the ANSI® Z765-2021 standard for drawing floor plans. We use a default wall thickness of 6.5 inches standard, but it can be changed if we know the exterior wall thickness. For example, and all brick exterior house should have 10 inch thick walls, so we can adjust for that if we know the exterior wall thickness. Therefore, our floor plans are adaptable to any property, unlike the other floor plan producers that only use 6 inches.  Other, non-GLA areas will be provided as well. For example, a completely finished walk-out basement is technically an area that does not qualify as being part of the GLA of a property, so it would be shown as other living area square footage.  However, some areas across the country may allow you to show total living or heated area which would include this data in the total living area for the property.  GLA is used by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to standardize properties for loan portfolios, so appraisers calculate this number when they create an appraisal for a loan. It is also typically what the county property tax assessors use for tax purposes. 
  • GIA – this is the total interior square footage of the footprint of the property, both living and nonliving areas.  This is the area from paint to paint of the inside of rooms and spaces.  Think of it as the “useable” square footage because this is the area you can actually live in and use. Note it does include the area of basements and attached garages as well, whether finished or unfinished.

As part of the HomeDiary Certified Square Footage + GLA addon, you get GLA and GIA, as well as individual room measurements and each space’s square footage.  This is great for homeowners that want to plan a remodel, like re-carpet a room, or the whole upstairs, as all of the data is there in the printed plans, but it is also unlocked in the 2D/3D floor plan model of the home.  If a homeowner claims the home from the tour, or has this done as part of HomeDiary’s services, then they have access to the 3D model and can use it to plan any kind of remodel or update. It’s like having an HGTV-like floor plan, but for their own home.

In the floor plan layout below, you can see the bathrooms, which are tile or marble, were excluded from the area calculation to get just the carpeted rooms in just a few clicks.  The result is 1985 square feet of carpeted areas for the second floor.  With an accuracy of 99.5% or more, it is great, reliable data to use for any kind of home improvement project – carpet, tile, painting, drywall and even furniture & decor planning.

Terms of Use

HomeDiary’s Certified Square Footage + GLA addon is an additional service fee to any FloorPlan or 3D based tour service. The HomeDiary team will scan the property with a Matterport Pro camera or iGuide camera, and the Production team will create the floor plan pursuant to the ANSI® Z765-2021 standard for creating floor plans. The additional addon fee is currently $100 (in most markets) for each 5000 square feet of space scanned and measured, unless noted. Additional buildings requiring an additional scan will be billed an additional $100 per building for each 5000 square feet of space scanned and measured, charged separately.

HomeDiary will certify that the Gross Living Area square footage calculated will be at least 99.5% accurate based on a true source, or your money back for the addon fee (the normal service fee is not refundable since that has additional utility beyond the addon). You agree by ordering the Certified Square Footage + GLA addon that the maximum liability HomeDiary will incur for the Certified Square Footage + GLA addon will be the service fee paid for such addon, currently $100 as stated above (it may be different in your market). In the event of a dispute or issue, please email legal@homediary.com with the details of the issue, the order ID, the property address and information about yourself.