Writing a property description that gets viewings

Almost every property description opens the same way. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, north facing, close to schools. All true, all useless, because the buyer already filtered for those on the portal before they clicked. By the time they are reading your words they know the bedroom count. What they do not know is what it is like to live there.

The portal has already done the filtering

A buyer arriving at your listing has typed a suburb, a price range and a bedroom count. Everything in that filter is now the price of entry, not a selling point. Repeating it back is the written equivalent of reading out the photographs.

So the first line has one job: say the thing that is true about this property and not about the eleven others in the same search. A wraparound stoep that gets afternoon sun. A kitchen that opens onto the garden so you can watch children while you cook. A garage deep enough for a bakkie. Specific, physical, and impossible to copy and paste into the next listing.

Write the second sentence for the doubt

The first sentence gets attention. The second one has a harder job, which is answering the objection the buyer is already forming.

If the property is on a busy road, the buyer can see that from the map. Saying nothing does not hide it; it just means they resolve the doubt themselves, and they resolve it badly. Naming it and answering it works better. The bedrooms are at the back, away from the road. The garden is walled and quiet. That is a sentence that removes a reason not to view.

The instinct is to keep quiet about anything imperfect. In practice the imperfect thing is what the buyer is thinking about, and your listing is the only place they can hear an answer.

Cut the words that appear in every listing

Some words have been used so heavily in property copy that they now carry no meaning at all. Immaculate. Boasts. Nestled. Must be seen to be appreciated. A buyer's eye slides straight over them, and they cost you the space where a real detail could have gone.

A quick test: if the sentence would still be true of a completely different house, it is not doing any work. "Boasts a modern kitchen" is true of thousands of listings. "The kitchen was redone last year and the oven is still under guarantee" is true of one.

Say what happens next

The description should end by telling the reader what to do, in plain terms and without pressure. When viewings are. Whether you can do a video walkthrough for someone relocating. Who to phone. A surprising number of listings finish on a full stop and leave the buyer to work it out.

Where the photographs come in

Descriptions and photographs are read together, and they need to agree. If your copy talks about light and the photograph of that room is dark, the buyer believes the photograph. If the copy describes an open flow between the lounge and the dining area, the photographs need to show that flow rather than two disconnected corners.

This is worth checking before the listing goes live, because it is the sort of mismatch nobody notices while writing. Read the description with the photographs open beside it and ask whether they describe the same house.

When we prepare a listing we write a property description alongside the photographs for exactly this reason. Getting them from one place is the simplest way to keep them saying the same thing.

The short version

• Do not repeat the filters the buyer already used
• First sentence: the one thing that is only true here
• Second sentence: answer the doubt they are already having
• Cut any sentence that would be true of a different house
• Finish by saying what to do next
• Read it beside the photographs before it goes live