Which Condo Floor Plan Holds Its Value at Resale?

Published 12 November 2026 · By Jatin Dua, Broker of Record, RE/MAX Quantum Realty

Two units in the same building, same square footage, same floor, same exposure, listed within a week of each other. One sells in nine days and the other sits for two months and takes a price cut. The difference is almost always the plan.

Floor plan is the most durable thing about a condo. You can change the flooring, the kitchen, the paint and the lighting. You cannot move a load-bearing wall, add a window, or make a corridor shorter. So of all the decisions you make at purchase, this is the one you are most stuck with — and the one resale punishes most reliably.

Here is what the market actually rewards.

The single biggest factor: usable wall and window

Square footage is a poor measure of how a unit lives. Two 700 square foot two-bedrooms can be completely different homes.

What matters is how much of the floor area is usable:

• Wall length you can furnish against. A living room with one long uninterrupted wall accommodates a sofa and a television. The same room with a door, a closet and a passage interrupting three walls does not.
• Window width relative to room width. A bedroom with a window across most of its width feels like a room. A bedroom with a narrow window in a wide wall feels like storage.
• How much is corridor. Long internal hallways are floor area you pay for and cannot use. In smaller units this is the difference between a plan that works and one that does not.

When you are comparing plans, mark the furniture you actually own onto them. It is a five-minute exercise that eliminates half the candidates.

What holds value

Split bedrooms

Two bedrooms on opposite sides of the living space, rather than adjacent. This is the most consistently rewarded feature in the two-bedroom market, because it works for roommates, for families with a child, for a couple with a guest room, and for anyone working from home. The buyer pool is simply wider.

A real second bedroom

With a door, a closet, and a window. A “den” that is an alcove off the living room narrows your resale audience dramatically, and the gap between a two-bedroom and a one-plus-den is wider on resale than it was at the builder’s price list.

A kitchen with a view out

Galley kitchens buried against an interior wall were standard for years and are now a drag. A kitchen that opens to the living space, with sight lines to the window, consistently outperforms.

Squarer rooms

Rooms close to square furnish well. Long narrow rooms do not, whatever their area.

Two full bathrooms, properly placed

In a two-bedroom, a second full bathroom matters. An ensuite that can only be reached through the primary bedroom in a unit sold to roommates is a known weakness.

Storage inside the unit

A real front hall closet, a linen closet, somewhere for a vacuum. Buyers notice its absence within thirty seconds of walking in, and a locker in the basement does not substitute.

What costs you at resale

• Bedrooms with no window, or with a window borrowed from another room. These are hard to finance in some cases and hard to sell in all cases.
• The bathroom door opening into the living room in full view of the sofa.
• A washer and dryer stacked in a closet off the kitchen with no door that closes properly.
• Columns and bulkheads mid-room. Structure you cannot move, in the middle of the space you want to use.
• Balcony access through a bedroom only.
• Very deep units with a single window wall. The back half is permanently dark.
• Angled or curved exterior walls. They look dramatic in the rendering and they defeat ordinary furniture.

The test that takes two minutes

Stand in the plan — or in the unit — and ask four questions:

1. Where does the sofa go, and can two people sit on it facing a screen?
2. Does a real bed, with two nightstands, fit in each bedroom with room to walk?
3. Where does a dining table live, and is it in a passageway?
4. Where do coats, shoes and a vacuum go?

A plan that answers all four comfortably will outperform a larger plan that does not. I have watched it happen often enough to say it plainly.

The one-line version

Buy the plan, not the square footage. Split bedrooms, real windows in real bedrooms, a kitchen with a view out, squarer rooms, and storage inside the unit. Those are the features that are still there in ten years, and they are what the next buyer will be comparing.

These are general observations about how plans affect saleability, not a valuation of any specific unit. Value depends on building, floor, exposure, fees and market conditions at the time of sale.