Calling all real estate agents, it's time to become grammar Nazis.
A new study by Redfin, popular online real estate portal, and the grammar experts at Grammarly, the proofreading website, found that typos, spelling mistakes and grammatical errors are one of the top turn-offs for home hunters and buyers.
For the study, Redfin and Grammarly analyzed 106,850 luxury listings in 52 metro areas in 2013. All the homes were listed for $1 million or more. It also surveyed 1,291 people online to find out how important listing description grammar was to them.
According to their analysis, perfect listing descriptions - full sentences without grammatical or spelling mistakes - sold three days faster compared to their faulty counterparts. Also, the listings fetched 10 percent more than their listed asking price!
Of the 1,291 people surveyed, 43.4 percent said they would be less likely to view a home if there were grammar errors in the listing. While most of the respondents said photos were the most important factor while buying or looking for a house, 87 percent of them agreed that a "perfect" listing description was "extremely" important or "very" important.
"When buyers are browsing homes for sale, everything about the listing has an impact on their experience. Photos grab your attention, but the listing description fills in the gaps by helping a buyer understand what photos can't," according to Chad Dierickx, a Redfin agent from Seattle.
So what kind of errors do listings usually have? Some examples:
- Homonyms (words with the same sound but different meanings) mix up like
"New stares [stairs] lead to finished basement with wreck [rec] room for you're [your] kids to enjoy."
- Obvious typos like "Master bedroom with walking [walk-in] closet" and "Perfect home for smell [small] family"
- All caps listings, which are hard to read and feel like someone is screaming at you.
"It's ubiquitous in this business. Bad grammar, misspellings, stray commas, missing periods-it's all part of listing descriptions," Mickey Conlon, associate real-estate broker with Core in New York told The Wall Street Journal.
"You can get a sense of what the transaction will be like based on the listing description. If it's exceptionally sloppy, then it's a warning sign of a potentially sloppy transaction," Conlon added.
The survey also found that the preferred number of words in a listing description was 50. A listing description that has that many words usually sells within 90 days of hitting the market and that too for a higher asking price.
However, the Journal also gave a flip side to the results of the study. Citing several agents, who've had luck selling homes with "not-so-perfect" listing descriptions; it reports that the same rule doesn't apply everywhere.
It notes that some Multiple Listing services (MLS) have character limits and abbreviations need to be used in descriptions there.
The real estate property dictionary has also been diversifying. In another study, Redfin found that the property lingo a real estate agent uses in one city may not work in another.
