An acre is the typical measurement of a piece of land, used by buyers and sellers to have an understanding of the size of a piece of property. Much like square footage is used by home buyers to determine the size of a house, acreage gives buyers a better sense of the size of the property, which is easier than using the lot measurements, which can vary greatly and are often not symmetrical.
The origin of the word “acre” comes from Old English – æcer, which denotes the amount of land a yoke of oxen could plow in a day, but is of Germanic origin; Acker for ‘field’.
Nowadays, most of us don’t have any idea how much land a yoke of oxen can plow, and indeed, today the measurement is a little bit more accurate! The official measurement of an acre is 43,560 square feet.
So, exactly how big is an acre?
- 4,045 square meters
- 4,840 square yards
- 43,560 square feet
- 404686 hectares
- 0015625 square miles
For the average person, a pretty easy way to understand an acre is that it is about the equivalent of three-quarters of a full-length football field or 16 tennis courts laid out in a four-by-four square.
When looking at large tracts of land, though, it can still be difficult to determine a single acre within tens or hundreds of square miles of land. To give you an idea of what that means in real property, here are a few examples of acreages:
State House, Nairobi
The humble residence of Kenya’s president rests on 740 acres of land. FYI, and strictly not for comparison, The White House in Washington, DC covers 8 acres.
The Two Rivers Mall and Garden City
The biggest mall in East and Central Africa, the one opened on Valentines, measures on a 102 acre piece of land. For Garden city, the mixed use development measures 32 acres.
Uhuru Park and Nairobi National Park
The recreational park adjacent to the CBD is 31.9 acres. Now Nairobi National park sits on a whole 28,963 acres of the 172,000 acres covered by Nairobi County.
But let’s come home…
Buildings and Houses
For commercial buildings the usable space doesn’t depend on the floor area really but for the fact KICC floor area is about 56 acres while the average Kenyan house, say a 1-bedroom, requires just about 0.009 acres of space to construct.
Article Modified from: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/David_Kreager/2344363
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