By John Engel
This is a lost art. I am referring to the property description field on the multiple listing service. The New Canaan MLS limits agents to 500 characters while the SmartMLS allows 1500. Letting agents say three times as much does not seem to be making much of a difference. Uninspired is uninspired. A mashup of abbreviations is worthless and gets the reader no closer to understanding why this house.
Harsh you say? Few buyers read agent descriptions when viewing a listing online. Forty percent of shoppers don’t get past the first photo. They take in the photo first and then they view the property’s statistics (according to an Old Dominion University study that tracked their eye movements.) This is probably why Zillow buries the description way, way down the page below the property facts, Zestimate and comparable homes. Because we suck at copywriting.
Is there hope for the future of listing descriptions? Tom Gorin has written the very best listing descriptions in Greenwich since 1973. What can we learn from Tom? First, Tom writes in complete sentences. He leads the reader from the front door, through the formal rooms in a predictable path and pointing out the exceptional features of each. The language is rich and sometimes emotional, as if Tom is really connecting with the house. If the purpose of the listing description is to provoke a showing, then striking an emotional chord with the reader is the first step:
Scale down with great style! Enchanting 1933 stone and half-timber Tudor, a near town hideaway on .65 acre overlooking a brook. Few but interesting rooms include a smashing, sunny, living room with soaring, beamed cathedral ceiling, field stone fireplace and triple exposures through large casement windows; an updated eat-in kitchen with an adjoining small office and a large dining room or family room. The second floor is all master suite, featuring the bedroom, sitting room, large, new marble bathroom and new laundry. On the lower level, a walk-out pine paneled family room, home office or guest bedroom has a full bath and a second laundry. Exterior features include a heavy, slate roof, a fieldstone deck and assorted ornamental gargoyles and carved stone crests. Who says scaling down can’t be fun? And it is just minutes from Greenwich Avenue.
Tom has painted a word picture so well (in only 831 characters) that I can see the house. It’s not only a slate roof, it’s a heavy slate roof. Tom’s using these cues to communicate the overall quality. If the roof is so solid, so must be the house.
More effective listing descriptions come from imagining the likely buyer in order to write a more focused description. For example, if the home is larger-than-entry-level your likely buyer will come from Generation X. I said, “likely buyer”, not ideal candidate. While steering is illegal, and there are forbidden words we can’t use, we know certain features of the house are more likely to resonate with buyers looking in this market.
The listing description will most likely be read on the Internet. In his seminal work, “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug we learn the first law of Internet usability: the viewer should be able to “get it” without spending any effort thinking about it. Every question “adds to the cognitive workload, distracting our attention from the task at hand.” As far as needing more characters to do it Steve says no, “Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.” That does not mean removing all of the vowels, leaving the reader to ponder “3550 SF, 4 BD, 4.5 BTH home with W/D and WIC,” Acronyms, abbreviations and ALL CAPS are hard to read and make us stop and think unnecessarily.
Don’t waste valuable space repeating facts found elsewhere on the page:
Remodeled 4 bedroom house with 2 Full Bathrooms, Approximately 1,739 square feet of living space, with Separate Family Room, Formal Dining Room, and Formal Living Room in an excellent family neighborhood.
This description contains 31 words and 30 of them are wasted. The only word that matters is remodeled because the facts are found elsewhere. The agent would have done better to describe specifically what and how it was remodeled.
“Freakonomics”, the bestseller by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner gets more specific on which words to use and which to avoid. In studying 100,000 home sales in Chicago they learned that agents exert influence through the listings they write: Fantastic, Spacious, Charming, Great Neighborhood and ! (exclamation point) are listing description terms that correlate with a lower selling price. Five terms that correlate to a higher price in their study include Gourmet, Maple, Corian, Granite and State-of-the-Art. While some of those terms may appear strange to us today (for example Corian or Granite, because tastes change by location and over time) the message is clear: stay away from empty, ambiguous adjectives and use specific physical attributes wherever possible.
Finally, a word about ChatGPT. Beware. Until you’ve trained the machine to speak like a human, adjusting attributes like “Temperature” (the creativity of the response) and “Top-P “ (less predictable) you’ll get exaggerated fluff like this:
Nestled within a lush .31-acre oasis, this enchanting Colonial masterpiece embodies the perfect blend of opulence, comfort, and convenience. As you step through the grand entrance into the warm embrace of the sumptuous living room, you’ll be greeted by the crackling melody of the fireplace, setting an enchanting tone for intimate evenings and festive gatherings alike.
If you’re going to use ChatGPT, train it to write like Tom. Don’t repeat. Be specific and structured.
Notes from the Monday Meeting: We talked about seasonality in the market, buyer fatigue, and diminishing rate sensitivity, nothing we haven’t said before. The consensus is that this is seasonal slowdown (showings, offers, open house traffic) within what continues to be a long-term bull market. This week we dusted off our individual (one-page) business plans to see if we are each at the level and type of business (buyers or listings) we planned in January. While dollar volume of sales is down year over year, it is higher than pre-pandemic.
John Engel leads The Engel Team at Douglas Elliman in New Canaan. This week we took team photos, and the New Canaan Library proved to be the perfect background: forward-looking, sleek and modern combined with the traditional stacked stone walls unique to Connecticut. The team made 3 property videos this week because we all know June is when New Canaan blooms and looks its best.
