A recent study from property firm Redfin has revealed just how damaging bad grammar can be for a listing. In an online survey of 1291 people, 43.4 per cent of respondents said they would be less inclined to attend an open house if the listing featured had spelling mistakes and poor grammar.
Here’s some advice from Refin and Grammarly for writing the perfect property listing:
- Check for literals as well as spelling errors. A spell check will only pick up a typo, not wrong words that are correctly spelt. Think “walking closet” or ““stainless steal appliances”.
- Avoid capital letters and exclamation marks. A good description with some beautiful photos should be enough to get buyers’ attention.
- Break it down into bullet points that are easy to read. Summarise the highlights of the property briefly then list its main features in dot points.
- Use descriptive sentences and plenty of adjectives to really sell the property to prospective buyers. But be careful not to go overboard.
- Finally, keep it short. Property-hunters will likely be short on time. The ideal length for a property description, according to the Redfin study, is about 50 words.
Real Estate Weekly in Vancouver recently published an excellent article detailing the top 10 confusing words that they see most often used incorrectly in listings. Here is n image from the post.
They go on to explain the right use and wrong use of all of the words circled above. For example:
Principle/Principal Should be principal rooms. These are the most important ones, just as the principal is the most important person in a school. Principle is a noun that means an underlying law or assumption, as in, “It’s not the money, it’s the principle of the thing.”
Memory Aid For principal rooms, think “princi-palace” or “princi-palatial.”
Plurals Plurals don’t have apostrophes. When you turn one into more than one, just add the s or es and you’re done. Really. It’s that simple. Those quartz things in the kitchen are countertops.
Memory Aid The plural of apostrophe is apostrophes, with no apostrophe.
Read the entire article by clicking here.