An acre is the typical measurement of a parcel of land, used by buyers and sellers to understand the size of a property. Much like 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 widely. and they are often not symmetrical.

The origin of the word “acre” comes from Old English – æcer, which denotes the amount of land that a yoke of oxen could plow in one day, but it is of Germanic origin; Acker for ‘field’.

Today most of us have no idea how much land an ox yoke can plow, and in fact the measurement is a little 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 is roughly three-quarters of a football field or 16 tennis courts arranged 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 diamond plus the home garden of the World Series Champions (how about the Cubbies!) Is 2 acres.

The White House in Washington, DC

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.

The Upper Peninsula of Michigan

The UP is a tremendously large area to be measured in acres (it has an area of ​​16,377 square miles), but in case you 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 size of an acre. In rural Michigan, unimproved land (raw 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 size of the tract, and will go up from there. Special land, such as a waterfront property or a commercial area in the city, will often be much more expensive.