How PropDetect knows which room is which

When a listing has a floor plan, the analysis starts there. The plan is read to establish the rooms that exist, their names, their approximate sizes and their relationships: three bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen at the rear, a through lounge. That structure becomes the skeleton of the whole refurbishment schedule, and the floor area it implies is cross-checked against the EPC record.

The floor plan matters because photographs lie by omission. Agents photograph the best rooms most and the worst rooms least, and a schedule built from photographs alone would inherit that bias. The plan says what exists; the photos say what state it is in.

Each photograph is then matched to a room on the plan, using what is visible: the fixtures that identify a kitchen or bathroom, window positions, flooring continuity between shots, and the plan geometry. Bedrooms are distinguished from one another by size and features rather than guessed at random, and exterior shots are routed to the facade and garden lines of the schedule rather than forced into a room.

When two photographs show the same room from different angles, they are treated as one room seen twice, not two rooms, and the condition judgement uses everything visible across both. Where a garden or facade appears in several shots, the estimate works from the set as a whole.

Plenty of listings, especially the distressed ones investors care about, ship without a plan. The analysis then builds the room list from the photographs and the listing facts: bedroom and bathroom counts from the listing, room identities from what each photo shows. The EPC floor area anchors the overall size.

This works, and it is honestly second-best, so the report treats it that way: room assignment from photos alone carries lower confidence than assignment against a plan, and the analysis says which basis it used.

The hardest case is the room that exists on the plan but appears in no photograph, which on a tired property is rarely an accident. Skipping it would understate the refurbishment exactly where the risk is highest, so unseen rooms are priced from the evidence available: their size from the plan, and the general condition the photographed rooms establish. A property whose visible rooms are dated does not get pristine invisible ones.

The report marks estimated-not-seen rooms explicitly, so you know which lines came from evidence and which from inference, and every line stays editable when your viewing fills the gap.

Room assignment is the unglamorous step that makes a photo-based estimate mean anything. Tools that skip it can only price at whole-property level, a rate per square metre applied blind, which is how a sound three-bed and a gutted one end up with the same number. Pricing element by element within correctly identified rooms is what lets the estimate say a kitchen is fine, a bathroom needs replacing, and the third bedroom needs everything, which is how builders actually think about a job.