How big is an acre, really?
An acre is the typical measure of land, used by buyers and sellers to get an idea of the size of a property. Just as home buyers use square footage to determine the size of a home, acreage gives buyers a better idea of the size of the property, which is easier than using 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 that a team of oxen could plow in one day, but is of Germanic origin; Acker for ‘field’.
Today, most of us have no idea how much land a team of oxen can plow, and in fact, the measurement is a bit more accurate today! 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
- 0.404686 hectares
- 0.0015625 square miles
For the average person, a fairly easy way to understand an acre is that it equals roughly three-quarters of a football field or 16 tennis courts laid out in a four-by-four square.
However, when looking at large tracts of land, 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 estate, here are some examples of acres:
Wrigley Field in Chicago
The baseball field plus lawns at the home of the World Series champions (how about the Cubbies!) is 2 acres.
The White House in Washington, D.C.
The home and grounds of the (possibly) most powerful man in the world measure 8 acres. If you’ve ever seen the White House in context among the rest of Washington, DC, those 8 acres look surprisingly small.
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula
UP is an awfully large area to measure in acres (it’s 16,377 square miles in area), but in case you’ve ever wondered, it covers an area of just under 10.5 million acres.
From here, the next question many people ask is “How much is an acre worth?”
The answer, of course, is much more varied than the measure of an acre. In rural Michigan, unimproved land (bare land, no buildings, no well or septic system, etc.) can be found for $2,000/acre or less, depending on the type of land (recreational, arable, lumber, etc. ), as well as the span size, and will increase from there. Specialty land (waterfront properties or commercially zoned land in the city as an example) will often be much more expensive.