To sell the priciest homes in the country, some real-estate pros try their hand at prose. An analysis of listings language by website Realtor.com found that the higher the home price, the more flowery the verbiage in the property description. “Majestically poised along the shimmering Gulf of Mexico,” begins the 222-word real-estate listing 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.”
The listing scored at a 12th-grade reading level based on the Flesch-Kincaid scale, an algorithm first applied to school-grade levels in the 1970s. Mel Goldsmith, an agent with Michael Saunders & Co., had an in-house marketing team write the Sarasota listing. “They know how to use the buzzwords,” he said. For its analysis, Realtor.com took a random sample of roughly 1,000 listings across the U.S. in November. To see the differences on two ends of the real-estate market, about half of the homes in the analysis were listed for $10 million or more. The rest were for homes listed at $750,000 or less. Taking into account factors like the length of sentences and words, as well as the number of syllables, the $10 million-plus listings scored at a median 11th-grade reading level on a 12-grade scale. Homes listed for $750,000 or less scored at a median seventh-grade level. When it came to top-dollar homes, “it was adverbs and adjectives galore,” said Javier Vivas, an economic-research analyst with the site. (News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal, also owns Realtor.com, the listing website of the National Association of Realtors.) Luxury agents’ purple prose suggests they are trying to be more persuasive, he said, whereas agents of moderately priced homes tend to be more 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.” Write to Stefanos Chen at stefanos.chen@wsj.com This article originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.