How do You Find the Square Feet of a Property?

Our Pricing post last year covered different ways you can price a cleaning bid, including a deep dive into our method. It boils down to guesstimating time and using that time to calculate your rate. We never price a rate per square foot for many reasons. 

The above said, if you've seen my replies within these Facebook groups on pricing, you'll know I often ask for the square footage. Why? I haven't see it your location. I can walk into any location and instantly know, even without knowing the sqft, how long it'd take to clean. I've priced over 1000 properties and you see and learn patterns over time. But if I'm helping someone, and if I can't see it, then square feet is the only alternative (aside from asking you how long it'd take YOU to clean).

We also track sqft for internal metrics. We always want to know our production rate. Your production rate is your total square feet divided by the time for 1 person to clean that square feet. That gives you a production rate of  X square feet per hour. Maybe one day I'll do a post on our average production rate by niche. And who knows, the way government is getting involved, you might not have an option NOT to track your own square feet and production rate. 

So, the purpose of this post is to share different ideas to come up with total square feet if you don't know it. 

Here are some ideas to find square feet within any property:

Measure It. You can use laser devices to measure wall to wall. Measure the distance from wall to wall and repeat the process perpendicular to the first measurement, and then multiply both numbers together. That gives you the area within any room.

Count Tiles. You can count tiles. Ceiling tiles are often 2ft by 2ft. If you count 10 going one way and 12 going the other way, then that's 20ft by 24 ft or 480 sqft feet assuming the tiles were that size.

Ask your Prospect. You can ask them. Now, you may not always get an accurate answer. But you can trust but verify by using a different method to come up with sqft.

LoopNet and CoStar. These two sites will often reveal the sqft of any property that has been sold or leased. Sometimes there's a broker pitch or sales sheet that clearly reveal the sqft. Sometimes you really have to dig for it. 

Find the Architect. If the property was recently remodeled (in a major way) or is a new property, architects will often highlight their achievement on their website. So if in your google searching you run across the architect, take a look. They just might have the total sqft.

Google the Address. You can find a lot of info just by googling the exact address. Most of the time you'll find other sources mentioned on this list. 

Visit their Website. Sometimes you might have a school or church and it's not uncommon for them to list the sqft. Many organizations lease out an auditorium or hall. Once you have the sqft for one space then you can infer to the total space if you did a walkthrough. For properties like office buildings, they have a website or page for that building and it's not uncommon to find square feet.

Stacking Plans. Some property managers in office buildings keep stacking plans. These show total square feet broken down by suite. Makes finding sqft very easy.

Public Records. You can go to your municipality's website and usually each city/town has a tax assessor. That tax assessor often uses sqft and you can find it on there. If you google the address and find resources like Zillow, you can often find sqft. They pull it from these public sources. 

Google Earth. Hop on Google Earth. There's a measurement tool in the lower right corner. You can use that to get a rough sqft estimate.

Compare and Contrast. You've been in a lot of buildings. If you know the sqft of one location, and a second location is identical to the first, then you can infer that both buildings' sqft would be about the same.

I hope this helps you in your fact-finding mission to find the square feet.

Next on Deck: Finding Leads - TV/Radio Stations (Coming 1/29/25)