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How RealType.ai Helps You Write Listing Descriptions that Sell

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Who Likes Writing Real Estate Listing Descriptions?

If you’ve ever read a real estate listing description, whether it was for an apartment or a single-family home, you’ve probably wondered why they are generally so poorly written. Run on sentences, inaccurate information, exaggeration/puffing, misspellings, all caps, etc… the list of things that would make your English teacher shudder goes on. It makes sense though - who really likes writing listing descriptions in the first place?

There are certainly some managing brokers who do a better job than others. Some make their teams of real estate agents use a template to ensure consistency. Some have dedicated internal teams to write or proofread descriptions before they go out. Some even hire third-party, professional copywriters to ensure the best possible descriptions every time. But those things cost time and money. Quality costs time and money.

We created RealType.ai to instantly generate real estate listing descriptions that are extremely high quality, consistent in tone and style, comply with fair housing laws, and are cheap and nearly instantaneous to produce. Below are 4 reasons integrating RealType.ai into your listing process will help you deliver higher quality listings for less time and money.

Write Real Estate Listing Descriptions Faster

When we surveyed single and multifamily real estate brokers, we heard that writing a good listing description typically takes around 30 minutes for a single-family home, and listing descriptions for apartments take about 10-15 minutes to write from scratch.

For apartment buildings, leasing agents usually copy the descriptions from other units in the same building, which is a time saver. However, this often results in incorrect information being copied over (e.g. copying the description for a unit with a recently renovated kitchen into one where the kitchen hasn’t been renovated in years), which can lead to a negative experience for potential renters. Additionally, we heard across the board that higher-end homes take longer to write descriptions for (more amenities and rooms to describe), and brokers are more likely to engage a third-party writer to ensure high quality listings for them because the commissions are so large.

These don’t sound like massive amounts of time or money, but when you consider the roughly 7 million single-family homes and 22 million apartments listed each year in the U.S. – that’s a lot of time writing listing descriptions that could be spent with clients. Moreover, we heard from many brokers and operators of “For Sale By Owner” listing sites that writing descriptions is a part of the process where people pause, second guess themselves, and procrastinate. Just like writing essays in school, right? These pauses delay getting listings to market, which delay properties getting sold. Time is money, and the time to generate listing descriptions can really add up for managing brokers.

With RealType.ai, you can generate a listing description in a matter of seconds, and if you don’t like the style of the first description, you can get generate a different description in a single click. These are well-crafted descriptions with robust local market data, including descriptions of locational amenities and overviews of the neighborhood. The level of detail we include in our listing descriptions would take the average broker years of experience in a market to learn, and again, you get it in the click of a button.

Write Higher Quality Listing Descriptions

How many times have you read a listing description with inaccurate information, run on sentences, ALL CAPS and other grammatical errors? Did you like reading that description, or did it bother you? We spoke with dozens of homeowners and potential homebuyers about what they hate in listing descriptions, and the same themes emerged over and over again:

  1. Cut the Fluff – No one wanted to read a long description with a ton of extra prose. Phrases like “Welcome to the home of your dreams!” or “This is a once in a lifetime deal in a great neighborhood!” weren’t helpful or appreciated. People have less time than ever these days, and the homebuyers we spoke with preferred listings that were concise, well-written, and helped them visualize the space, almost like a guided walkthrough of the property.
  2. Stop the Puffing – In real estate, the practice of exaggerating a listing’s positive qualities is known as “Puffing”. Suppose you see a listing for a small, poorly maintained bungalow, built in the 80s, with peeling siding and a patchy yellow lawn… but the listing description goes on and on about how “cozy” and “rustic” the home is without a single mention of the dilapidated appearance. That’s puffing, and people hate it. Homeowners indicated this type of exaggeration made them think of a stereotypical used car salesman and detracted from their trust in the listing agent.
  3. Stick to the Facts – This may sound like a no-brainer, but your real estate listing description should be accurate. If the home is just barely 1,000 square feet, describing the property as “spacious” is dishonest. Setting unrealistic expectations sets the stage for an unpleasant walkthrough, wasted time and a deterioration of trust. Instead, brokers should admit to the home’s flaws and turn them into positives or provide recommendations about how to fix them.
  4. Pick up an English Book – Everyone we spoke with was turned off by punctuation errors, misspellings and poor grammar. The presence of spelling errors made people perceive the listing agent as unprofessional, and problems with wording and punctuation make the listing itself hard to read. These are very fixable things, but they are still issues in a large volume of real estate listings.

RealType.ai delivers high-quality listing descriptions by pulling comprehensive neighborhood and property data to inform descriptions, highlighting the important features of the property and neighborhood in a concise manner, tailoring those descriptions to local market practices, and describing the property in a walk-through style flow that helps people effectively visualize the space.

By analyzing millions of listings across the country, we were able to analyze which listings sold quickly and which ones stayed on the market, and our machine learning models adapted their style to capitalize on this. More importantly, our descriptions are continually retrained on real-time listing data, meaning descriptions are optimized for the best way to describe a listing in each market. The way you’d describe a listing in rural Kansas is very different than how you’d describe on in New York City, and our algorithms pick up on these local differences to deliver the highest quality descriptions in any market.

To test this quality, we put 10 listings from one of our clients side-by-side with AI-generated listing descriptions from RealType.ai in a survey, and asked homebuyers to rate which description they liked more for each property. A full 87.2% of the time, they chose RealType.ai generated listing descriptions over the ones written by the actual listing agent!

Write More Consistent Listing Descriptions

For real estate brokers to create a cohesive brand, it’s important to use consistent and professional marketing materials. Real estate listings are often the only work product a potential buyer or seller may see, and making sure they are written similarly across different offices and agents is critical. When we spoke with real estate managing brokers, we heard a few different strategies real estate brokerages use to ensure consistent listing descriptions:

  1. Use a Template – Many brokerages use a template or set of guidelines for writing real estate listing descriptions. This helps ensure that all descriptions follow a similar format and include the same types of information.
  2. Hire Designated Writers – Some brokerages said they assigned a designated writer or team of writers to handle all of the listings for the brokerage. With a dedicated team writing all the descriptions, it’s easy to keep them consistent in terms of tone and style.
  3. Use a Content Management System – A content management system (CMS) can be used to store and manage all of the listings for a brokerage. This helps make sure all of the descriptions are consistent and up-to-date, and changes can be made to multiple listings in one place.

Fortunately, RealType.ai can generate descriptions that are consistent in tone and style without the need to hire a team of writers or implement a content management system. Our platform can be used by agents on individual properties, or it can be integrated into the pipeline for a brokerage to auto-generate descriptions where people work.

Write Listing Descriptions that Always Comply with Fair Housing Laws

Fair housing laws exist to protect individuals from discrimination based on characteristics such as race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability. It is illegal to discriminate against individuals on the basis of these characteristics in the sale or rental of housing. If a broker or agency is found to have violated fair housing laws in a listing description, they could face significant fines and legal action. The legal costs of defending against a fair housing complaint can be substantial, and a fair housing violation will also damage the reputation of the broker or agency, making it difficult for them to do business in the future.

What’s more, from our conversations with the administrators of multiple listing services (MLS), we’ve heard there is an army of “listing trolls” who specifically look for potential violations in listings and extort brokers to pay them or be reported. They scour listings and look for things like “Good for Families” and “No section 8” and send out legal sounding letters telling brokers to pay them to go away. The MLS’s spend a ton of time and resources trying to help brokers fight the trolls, combatting hundreds of these letters every year. It’s certainly one of the highest-risk areas in real estate.

With all the risks associated with fair housing violations in listings, it’s crazy how few guard rails there are in place to prevent issues. Some MLS’s use software that identifies troublesome keywords in listings, but they don’t leverage machine learning to cover cases where the meaning is potentially discriminatory even when those words are absent. And these are the cases the trolls know how to exploit.

RealType.ai is trained to avoid using language that could be considered discriminatory or offensive in the descriptions it generates. We painstakingly reviewed thousands of listing descriptions with violations, built a database of terms that should be avoided, and trained our algorithm to avoid using discriminatory language from Day 1. Additionally, fair housing laws often require certain information to be included in real estate listings, such as whether the property is accessible to people with disabilities. RealType.ai is trained to include this information in the descriptions it generates, helping brokers ensure compliance with fair housing laws.

Using RealType.ai gives managing brokers the comfort of knowing all of their listings will be in compliance with fair housing laws, and will not exclude or discourage certain groups of people from considering the property. And at $1 per listing, it’s certainly more cost effective than getting sued for a fair housing violation!

Learn More About the RealType.ai Automated Listing Description Generator

RealType.ai was designed to generate real estate listing descriptions that are extremely high quality, consistent in tone and style, comply with fair housing laws, and are cheap and nearly instantaneous to produce. You can try it out or learn more about the product from the resources below:

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