Can someone tell me the thought process behind some real estate house descriptions that have replaced the words (nouns) kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom to (verbs) cook, sleep, wash. As in, “this house features 3 sleeps and a spacious cook.”
Who came up with it, how did they decide on the verbs (I do more than just wash in my bathroom) and why do they think this is an effective way of marketing?
It got your attention, didn’t it? I would say as a marketing tool it worked.
I haven’t seen that around here (but then I haven’t really been looking at real estate lately either). Is this a regional thing?
I’ve only ever seen anything like this in the form “sleeps 3” - and usually in the context of a holiday chalet or something.
It did, but only because of the pretentious use of the words-who do they think would be interested in being the person who lives in their development and refers to their living room as a “work, play”. Just really annoys me for some reason. Maybe I need to think about why it annoys me so much rather than the reasoning behind it!! This is in the metropolitan Denver area by the way.
Styles in advertising come and go. Fads catch on, then become trite and are dropped. I have never seen that wording, and I predict it will vanish from the real estate landscape with time.
Around here, the word “prestigious” fit into that category, and I might have been partly responsible for it. I described high-end properties as on “prestigious Bay Shore Drive” or “prestigious Memorial Lane,” and a few other Realtors copied the wording. Pretty soon the broken-down fixer-upper, garbage-dump hovel was “prestigious” as well. I wouldn’t dare use it now, or at least until it comes around again.
Not sure about “3 sleeps” but perhaps “spacious cook” refers to the size of the chef who is included with the house?
Now that’s a prestigious kitchen.
Do you live in Los Angeles? Sounds like something a fired writer from Daily Variety would come up with.
I have never encountered that style personally but maybe Borat has some properties for sale in your area. It doesn’t strike me as good advertising form either and I wouldn’t consider it a positive at all. At best, it comes across as some combination of pidgin English, precious or ghetto. None of those are good things in real estate transactions.
“All mod cons.”
I’d be tempted to go look at it, just so I could ask the realtor “How many moneys for building?”
Maybe it’s next in the continuum. Realtors do absolutely not sell houses anymore. No, they sell homes. I know it’s been like this for a few decades, but seriously, I know it’s a damned house.
That ad would catch my attention, but in a negative way. I would avoid that place, as the wording makes it seem extremely unprofessional.
The person who wrote that ad is probably a recent parolee whose last residence was “three hots and a cot”.
Remember when people used to sell used cars? Then they started selling pre-owned cars.
Then there was a guy in Rochester who used to advertise his lot full of “pre-enjoyed” cars on cable at night. That was about 12 years ago. I wonder if he’s since moved on to “cars previously known as new.”
Ah yes, the pre-owned car marketing ploy. Apparently we are all complete idiots and think that used cars are somehow worse than pre-owned cars.
Getting back to real estate for a second, I just had a conversation with my neighbours who are moving. Apparently houses need to be professionally “staged” now. Buyers can’t come into your house and imagine what it might look like as their house, you know, with their furniture and pictures and stuff.
So you need to remove all personal pictures and the like. My neighbour informed me that their “stager” even rearranged their bookshelf, removing some books and arranging the rest in order of largest to smallest: seriously?
“Well, I would have put in an offer but the bookshelf was disorganized, and I didn’t like the pictures of grandma and grandpa on the mantle.”
Does anyone in the world think like this when buying a house?
Yes they do. Apparently some people are so brain-dead that they can’t imagine a room without the previous owner’s belonging even though those will be long gone if they buy the house. The worst people of all are the ones that complain about the paint colors or other superficial details. You are buying a house, not a hotel room. You can change anything you want in a weekend for less than $100 and some labor.
It is astounding that some people don’t understand the difference between buying a property or renting an apartment but lots of people don’t. However, you can use that to your extreme advantage. Just pick one that has unattractive superficial details and fix it up for little cost.
I restored a circa 1760 colonial with 2 1/2 acres over 7 years. It was almost uninhabitable when we bought it but it was diamond in the rough. It got covered in magazines when we were done. That is major league restoration. Most of the others are easy and completely superficial yet some people balk at even having to repaint a bedroom.
Don’t do that. Show value on a house means nothing. Potential is everything.
I once saw an ad for a camper for sale, that said “sleeps four”. I was wondering how many it eats, in its dining space.
Wow, that’s obnoxious. I’ve never seen rooms described that way, and I’d be likely to think the realtor either has English as his or her fifth language, or is an aspiring terrible writer.
Back in the housing boom, we had TV programmes devoted to this stuff. One that I caught went to a pretty ordinary semi-detached 3 bed house in a suburb which had been stuck on the market for months.
The interior decoration was terrible - purple paper on the hall walls, stars on the ceiling. black tiles in the bathroom, 1970s kitchen. The ‘expert’ set about the redecoration which cost about £1000. This apparently added about £5000 to the value of the house, and it sold within weeks.