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 for the most accuracy. Matterport is the leader in 3D property scanning technology, and we are one of Matterport’s top 10 enterprise partners. 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. 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.
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.
Report Summary
Report – Floor 1
Report – Floor 2
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. Therefore, our floor plans are adaptable to any property, unlike the other floor plan producers. 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, segmented out between living and other 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 consume.
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, 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 for each 5000 square feet of space scanned and measured. 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. 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.