How to draw a floor plan for a listing: step-by-step guide

Drawflat is a free online floor plan maker that runs in the browser. It draws schematic 2D plans of apartments and houses: walls, rooms, doors, windows, furniture and the area of every room. The result is a clean image for a property listing, not a construction drawing.

It is made for people who need a readable plan quickly:

• real-estate agents and agencies preparing listings
• owners selling or renting out an apartment
• landlords who keep plans of several units
• small developers and builders who need plans for their marketing
• designers and renovators who want a quick schematic before the real work

For working drawings or permit documents you need CAD. Drawflat covers the step before that: a plan a buyer or a tenant understands at a glance.

Most listings start from a plan you already have: a developer’s brochure, a scan from the building’s documents or a photo of a paper plan. Open the editor and upload it as PNG or JPG. It appears as a faded underlay, and you trace over it.

Then set the scale with Known size. Draw a line along a wall whose length you know, from the inside face of one wall to the inside face of the other, and type the real length, for example 3.5 m or 12'6". Every size you trace becomes exact. No dimensions on the plan? A standard interior door is about 80 cm wide.

You can skip the scale and still draw, but the export then warns that the areas are approximate.

Choose Walls and pick a mode in the panel on the right: Wall (W), Room (O) or Balcony & terrace (B).

• Wall: click from corner to corner. Type a length and press Enter for an exact wall. Hold Shift for 45° steps; press Enter or double-click to finish.
• Room: drag, or click two corners, to draw a room of four walls at once. Or click a corner, type a size such as 4 x 3 and press Enter. Shift draws a square.
• Balcony & terrace: start on a room’s wall and click the railing of a balcony or terrace, corner to corner. It is drawn as a thin railing, not a wall.
• Sizes are measured inside the walls. A room typed as 4 x 3 is 4 × 3 m inside, and a wall’s length is shown on the room side: the length you would measure with a tape. A wall with no room beside it is measured along its centre line.
• A room appears by itself as soon as its walls meet, and shows its area.
• Drag the square handle on a wall to bend it into a curve. Double-click a wall to split it. Thickness has presets for outer, inner and partition walls.

Snapping keeps corners on the grid and walls in line with each other. Hold Ctrl (⌘ on a Mac) to place a point freely.

Choose Openings, hover a wall and click. D places a door, N a window and A an arch.

Choose Furniture and objects, pick an item in the catalogue on the right and click on the plan: beds, sofas, tables, a kitchen, bathroom fittings and even a cat. R rotates the item and X mirrors it.

Select a room and give it a name in the panel on the right. The name and the area are printed in the room.

Marks add text labels and symbols for what is around the home: north, sun, sea, forest or park, entrance, playground, kindergarten, school, shop, transit and parking. T places text and R rotates a mark.

For a size on the plan, choose Marks, then Dimension: click a wall, or two points, then move the mouse aside and click to place the dimension line. The dimension follows the walls it measures when you move them.

The Ruler (M) only measures: hover a wall or click two points to read a length. It adds nothing to the plan or the export.

Open Export, choose PNG or SVG, a size and a background: paper, white, warm, cool or transparent. The underlay stays out of the image unless you turn on “With the underlay”.

• PNG, Listing: 2000 px on the long side. The default, sharp on any listing site.
• PNG, Large: 3000 px, for print and zoomable galleries.
• PNG, Small: 1200 px, for messengers and email.
• PNG, Square: 2000 × 2000 px, for social posts and sites that crop to a square.
• SVG: a vector file that stays sharp at any size and opens in design tools.

You can also copy the image and paste it straight into a listing form or a chat.

The plan is saved in your browser automatically as you draw. To keep a copy or move it to another computer, choose File, then Download .json, and open the file later with File, then Open. The file holds the drawing itself, so you can change it and export again.

There is nothing to install. Drawflat runs in Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge on a computer, a tablet or a phone. On a touch screen you draw with a finger and pinch to zoom. On a phone you can download the exported image or copy it and paste it into a messenger.

Planoplan, Floorplanner and RoomSketcher build 3D views and interior visualisations with furniture catalogues. magicplan is a mobile app for measuring rooms on site with the phone’s camera. They do more, and take longer to learn.

Drawflat does one job: a clean 2D plan for a listing. It opens in the browser with no sign-up, traces over the plan you already have and exports an image in minutes.

Need 3D or an interior render as well? Use Drawflat together with AI. Export your clean 2D plan as PNG and give it to an AI image or 3D tool, which can generate a 3D view or an interior visualisation from it. Drawflat itself draws in 2D; the AI step happens in the other tool.