Listing language, translated

A FOUNDRY COMPANY FIELD GUIDE · NO. 02

Real estate listings run on a small vocabulary of words that have drifted from their dictionary meanings. Six of them do the heavy lifting, and each one is describing something specific. Here is what they are describing.

Cozy means small

Well proportioned, sometimes. Small, always.

The practical response is a tape measure and the dimensions of the furniture you already own. A sofa that fits your current living room is a fact, and the listing photograph is not. Measure the wall the sofa has to go against, then measure the sofa.

A wide lens does the rest of the work. Listing photography is shot wide as a rule, because a wide frame gets a whole room onto a screen, and the side effect is that every room arrives larger than it lives. The word is the listing agent telling you what the lens could not.

A character home is an old home

Character lives in the trim, the plaster, the door hardware and the window proportions, and it also lives in the wiring, the plumbing stack and the age of the roof. Both halves come in the same house. A buyer who loves the first half and budgets for the second half is buying well.

The word is a signal to read the mechanical section of the listing twice and to ask when each system was last replaced. Age is not a defect. Age nobody has kept up with is a different matter.

Motivated seller is an invitation to negotiate

Somebody has a reason to move that is stronger than their reason to hold out. A job in another city, a property already bought, an estate being settled. The word is placed deliberately and it is placed to be read.

Negotiate, then, and do it politely, confidently, in writing and early. Price is one lever and the dates are frequently the better one, since a seller with a possession date they cannot move will trade money for certainty. The five terms an offer is built from covers what else is available to move.

Sun-drenched describes one hour of the day

Somebody stood in that room at the hour it looked best and photographed it. The room does get that light. It gets it at that hour, from that angle, at that time of year, and Calgary's winter sun sits low enough that a south window in July and the same window in January are two different rooms.

The fix costs nothing and takes fifteen minutes. Go back at a different hour. The evening version of the same visit covers what else changes after dark.

As-is means the seller will not repair it

Exactly what it sounds like. The seller is selling the property in its current condition and has no intention of fixing anything a buyer finds. It appears on estate sales, on foreclosure and judicial sales, and on properties where the owner has already left the province.

It does not remove your right to inspect, and it does not remove a seller's duty to disclose a material latent defect they know about. What it removes is the negotiation after the inspection. Budget for the "is".

The word also tends to travel with a shorter condition period and a seller who wants certainty over price. That is useful information about the other side of the table, and it belongs in how the offer gets written rather than in whether to write one.

Investor special means bring a contractor

The house needs work at a scale the photographs are not hiding. Sometimes the number works and somebody makes a good living doing exactly this. Sometimes the number worked for the person who wrote the listing and will not work for you.

The way to tell the difference is a contractor walking through with you before the condition period ends, and a written figure rather than a conversational one. That is what the viewing is for. What to notice on a first viewing is the fifteen-minute version.

The rest of it translates in person

Listing language is a compression format. It exists because a listing has a character limit and a house has a thousand facts, and a word doing the work of a sentence will always lose something in the middle. All of it is edited.

The rest of the vocabulary works the same way once you know what to do with it. Updated wants a date attached. Handyman special is investor special without the investor. Priced to sell describes a hope rather than a condition. Every one of them is a compression of a fact somebody could tell you in a sentence, and asking for the sentence removes the guessing the word requires.

We write listings and we read them. The reading is the part we do for buyers, and it happens standing in the room the word was describing.