Some real estate agents are now trying a different method in getting the priciest homes out of their inventory, and it's not home staging, nor offering crazy incentives, Stefanos Chen of The Wall Street Journal reports.
Real estate website realtor.com conducted a listings language analysis and found out that the property's price tag greatly affects the listing's property description. The analysis has shown that the pricier the home, the more flowery verbiage are used to describe the property, and that luxury agents are penning purple prose to close deals.
"Majestically poised along the shimmering Gulf of Mexico," were the introductory words for a 222-word property description 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."
Using a 1970's algorithm used for school-grade levels called Flesch-Kincaid scale, the Fla. Listing scored at the 12th-grade reading level.
Agents responsible for the said listing were an in-house marketing team from Michael Saunders & Co. tapped by agent Mel Goldsmith. "They know how to use the buzzwords," he said.
Realtor.com conducted the analysis by taking a rough sample of a thousand listings from all around the country in November. To make the comparison between both ends of the real-estate market, properties ranging around $10 million made up half of the analysis samples. While the other half was composed of less expensive homes ranging around $750,000 or less. In the analysis, sentence and word lengths were put into consideration as well as the number of syllables; high price $10-million listings achieved median scores of 11th-grade reading level on a 12-grade scale. Meanwhile, homes that are at the lower level of the price spectrum or those at the $750,000 range garnered a much lesser median score of seventh-grade level.
Javier Vivas from Realtor validates that when talking about top-dollar homes, "it was adverbs and adjectives galore." According to Vivas, the purple prose of luxury agents is a sign that they bank on persuasion, while agents for moderately-priced homes attack by being matter-of-fact.
"Anybody who is going to spend over $10 million, they've got the money," said Miro Copic, a marketing professor at San Diego State University. "Now they need to be romanced."
