“It was adverbs and adjectives galore.” That’s how an economic research analyst at Realtor.com described the property descriptions of luxury homes in a recent analysis. In this article, Stefanos Chen of The Wall Street Journal looks at how property listings change based on the price of the home.
To sell the priciest homes in the country, some real-estate pros try their hand at prose.
An analysis of listings language by website Realtor.com found that the higher the home price, the more flowery the verbiage in the property description.
“Majestically poised along the shimmering Gulf of Mexico,” begins the 222-word real-estate listing for a $10.9 million beach home in Sarasota, Fla. It also cites the “unique harmony” of this “haven of serenity” suitable for “undisturbed reflection.”
The listing scored at a 12th-grade reading level based on the Flesch-Kincaid scale, an algorithm first applied to school-grade levels in the 1970s.
Mel Goldsmith, an agent with Michael Saunders & Co., had an in-house marketing team write the Sarasota listing. “They know how to use the buzzwords,” he said.
For its analysis, Realtor.com took a random sample of roughly 1,000 listings across the U.S. in November. To see the differences on two ends of the real-estate market, about half of the homes in the analysis were listed for $10 million or more. The rest were for homes listed at $750,000 or less.
