My wife won’t let me have my mistress in the master bedroom.
This.
And I agree that the whole idea is ridiculous.
The one attached to the bedroom already has a name - “en suite.”
What about en-suites attached to the guest bedrooms?
There was a BIG fuss over this, and other, terms in Real Estate advertising in the early-to-mid 1990s. We discussed this, tangentially, in the thread about “Normal Shampoo” last month.
I wasn’t able to find news articles specifically about that (although there were plenty at the time), because all attempts to search came up with pages upon pages of cites about “steering”, which was and is a real problem.
The real problem is that real estate agents and sellers are forbidden to “steer” prospective buyers either toward or away from properties where doing so would be illegally discriminatory. This certainly would have included explicit language in advertisements like “Whites only” or “Jews need not apply”.
Where things got crazy was when the rules about language in advertising became a slippery slope, where even the most abstract or trivial wording was imagined (by those looking to be easily offended) as “steering”.
Words and phrases like “family room” became a faux pas because that might encourage married family people to apply more than single people, and we can’t discriminate on family status. “Walking distance to schools” likewise steered people with children toward the property more than older “empty nesters”. “Walking distance to [anywhere]” was considered to be favorable to able-bodied people at the expense of the disabled. “Close to [churches, synagogues, mosques, etc.]” was right out.
Laws were passed in some states allowing any citizen to have standing to file suits against such advertisers. It became a cottage industry. Ambulance-chasing lawyers scanned the real estate want-ads for “steering” terms, steadily becoming more and more imaginative as to what terms could be “steering”.
Real estate firms and agents compiled ever-growing lists of common words and phrases, categorizing them as “acceptable”, “unacceptable”, or “use with caution”. The phrase “Master bedroom” appeared on some of those lists.
Here is an example of such a list that I was able to find.
Note that “Master bedroom” doesn’t appear on this list, although it did appear on other similar lists. Most of the unacceptable (bold-face) words on the list are obvious. But there are also forbidden phrases like “traditional neighborhood”. “Christian”, “Jewish”, “Muslim” are listed as “caution”, but "Churches (near), “Synagogues”, “Mosque” are shown as forbidden. Go figure.
Sometime around 1995 or 1996, the whole craze more-or-less blew over, but in these newly woke days where every word or phrase walks on eggshells, you can’t be too careful.
Can I put a Master Lock on the door to the master bedroom? And what about all you people that got Masters degrees, that sounds pretty bad. And don’t even get me started on that Masters and Johnson couple.
Update to my above essay: I don’t have the date of the word-list that I posted, but I vaguely recall that it was something more recent than the mid-1990s craze. Note that “family room” is shown as “acceptable” while “Master bedroom” isn’t even on this list.
At the time, both of those phrases were criticized, and were listed as “forbidden” on some of the lists then.
ISTM there are quite a number of words on this list shown as “acceptable” or “use with caution” that were previously shown as “use with caution” or “unacceptable”. So a lot of the silliest examples have been re-considered.
This could definitely cause confusion.
“Contemporary home with upstairs mistress bedroom…”
That’s a verb, not a noun. “Master of the house” is still a gendered term.
Master bedroom does sound outdated to me.
I’ve probably been hearing “primary bedroom” for several years now. I just thought of it as a normal evolution in language. It’s sounding more and more normal to my ears now. Master bedroom is sounding old fashioned and clunky and makes me think of tacky 1950s decor.
I just spent two years in the housing market. (What a pain in the ass.) Master was still the overwhelmingly predominant term. That is in New Jersey.
Where have you been hearing Primary?
Southern California.
Nebraska.
They both sound dirty to me now.
They’re getting the vapors over “master”? How do they react if there’s a dungeon in the basement?
(Ours is in the attic.)
They’re in Canada. That’s “vapours.” 
I wonder how the RE industry does deal with advertising “unusual hobby” rooms in houses?
For devotees of whatever unusual hobby, finding a house that’s already converted for {whatever} is darn handy. I’d imagine a good dungeon is kinda expensive to have built; probably cheaper, if not easier, to find a house that already has one.
“Master of the house” itself is a somewhat loaded term, with historical connotations of classism and sexism.
It wasn’t only enslaved workers who referred to male householders as “the master”, nor was it enslaved people who gave us the traditional idiom “lord and master” to mean “husband”, for example.
I think there are probably few if any people who would get seriously outraged about the term “master bedroom”, but ISTM that “primary bedroom” is marginally preferable because it avoids the baggage of “master”.
However, I don’t think this is going to be a big deal to anybody but the “anti-woke” conservative crowd trying to make a big deal out of what a big deal they claim it is to the “woke” folk.
We bought a house a few years back and always heard master bedrooms. But then I’m here in Arkansas and we’re not really on the cutting edge of language shifts.
There is a clear precedent that using “master” as an adjective can be offensive to some people, and there already exists an easy term that could take it’s place. Thus I see no reason not to use the new word. It’s the same policy I use in real life.
The idea of caring about what the anti-PC crowd thinks seems increasingly silly. What are they going to do about it? The TRREB is a private organization, so it’s not like they can force their hand. And if they choose to be “Politically Correct to the Point of Insanity,” that must be working out for them.
It’s really hard to get me to have a problem with being PC. And, if you do, it’s just at the level of “I’m not going to do that,” not getting mad at those who choose to do so. There are just too many people who don’t care about others for me to hate those who try but make mistakes.
Though, to be clear, in this case, I do not think it is a mistake. There is precedent of the word “master” as an adjective being retired, and it’s not really any harm in doing so here.
I hope these people don’t take up auto repair, is all I can say. If they don’t like “master bedroom” they’re really not going to like the names for some of the stuff inside a car.
I’m surprised the controversy (at least within the industry) goes back that far. I know that I, and I suspect a lot of other people, only heard about it in the past few years.
I’d be very surprised if a single person was at all put off by “family room” or how close something is to the schools. Similarly for some of the other things you mentioned. OTOH, when 10’s of thousands of dollars (commission) are on the line, it’s not the worst idea to avoid anything that might upset, even unconsciously, any prospective buyer, especially when it’s not a huge deal to avoid. Plus, people are allowed to be offended by something even if you (not you specifically) don’t think it’s something to be offended about.
Regarding the master bedroom thing. My first thought was that it seemed like an over reaction, but I understood the reasoning behind it. I hadn’t really given it a whole lot of thought until the discussion came up one day and my sister-in-law mentioned that her and my brother were looking at houses and as she kept hearing ‘master bedroom’ over and over and started to get a bit upset about it. If it makes a difference, she is a minority (Asian). Between her minority status and myself respecting her opinion on a lot of this type of stuff that was enough for me to decide that maybe I shouldn’t use that term. I will note that I didn’t ask and don’t know if she, personally, was offended by the term or upset that someone was using, what she considered to be, an offensive term. But again, I respect her opinion on many social issues.