The Effect of Representation Format on Consumer Preferences for Apartment Layout Attribtues

Understanding built-environment products using visual representations such as floor plans can increase the value of layout attributes in consumer evaluations. Using this premise, the importance of apartment layout attributes represented by floor plan formats and text formats were compared. This was achieved by using stated preference experiments to evaluate respondents’ preferences when comparing representations of dining space and layout orientation attributes. Although the layout attributes were found to be more important to respondents when represented by text formats, respondents’ ability to read floor plans was evident when they were trained about apartment layout attributes that were difficult to grasp.