In luxury real estate, love is cheap and sex sells. An analysis of roughly 1.6 million home listings found that lower-priced homes were most likely to have the word “love” in property descriptions, while homes priced in the millions of dollars were most likely to have “sexy” and “seductive” in the descriptions. “Love is basic,” said Javier Vivas, an economic researcher for Realtor.com, which analyzed the data. “It’s a pre-canned pitch to generically describe something beautiful.”
Realtor.com looked at homes for sale as of Feb. 1 to look for terms of endearment used by real-estate agents when listing the properties. Then it calculated the median asking price of homes described with mushy words. Listings with the word “romance” had a median asking price of $820,000. “Seductive” homes listed for a median $640,000, and “sexy” properties had a $620,000 median price. “When you talk about extreme wealth, you’ll see terms like ‘sexy’ bandied about,” regardless of the product, said Adam Alter, an associate professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business. Luxury products strive for uniqueness, he says, and it makes sense that sales people use impassioned language to set their brand apart. Love and its variations appeared in 1 out of 10 of all listings, but the words were most common at the low-end of pricing. Homes with “lovely” and “love” listed for $264,000 and $250,000, respectively. At the bottom were homes with “loving” descriptions, with a $195,000 median asking price. The median price of all U.S. listings was $229,000, according to Realtor.com. (News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal, also owns Realtor.com, the listing website of the National Association of Realtors.) In North Bethany, Del., a waterfront home listed for $2.5 million describes “a modern romance” with “luscious views and seductive spaces.” “The type of verbiage definitely changes a little bit once you get to that price point,” said marketing manager Chelsea Brown, with the Debbie Reed team at Re/Max Realty, which listed the home. Conversely, she said she would put words like “love” in the same category as “charming” and “quaint”—terms reserved for more modest homes. There also may be regional differences in how agents pitch homes. Listings in the West were most likely to use terms like “romantic” and “seductive;” the Midwest was the least likely to use any terms of affection, including “love.” This is likely a function of coastal markets having the most expensive homes, said Mr. Vivas, but could also reflect vernacular differences. “We focus on the emotions of the house,” said Rebecca Riskin of Riskin Partners, who is co-listing an $18.8 million Italian villa in Montecito, Calif. The word “romantic” appears three times in the 1,330-word brochure for the roughly 10,000-square-foot estate. Ms. Riskin says she tries to evoke a feeling and a sense of place. And at least one reader was affected: “It made the owner cry when she read it,” she said. Write to Stefanos Chen at stefanos.chen@wsj.com This article originally appeared on The Wall Street Journal.