Read ten listing descriptions in your market this morning and count how many use the words charming, cozy, or must see. Those three words appear in thousands of listings and tell a buyer nothing they can act on.
The MLS field and your website are two different jobs
Most agents write one description and paste it into both places. That wastes the only surface where there is room to be useful.
The MLS description field has a character limit, and the limit varies by board. It is read inside the system by buyers scrolling results and by other agents deciding whether to book a showing. Its job is to earn a click in a list of competitors, so it works best as three strong facts in two tight sentences.
The listing page on your own website has no limit at all. It is read by someone who already clicked, often arriving from Google or from a link you sent. It can carry the room-by-room layout, the mechanical updates with their dates, the strata details, the walking distances, and the honest drawbacks. It can also carry structured data, which is code that labels facts so a machine can read them properly.
Those are different readers with different questions, so writing once and pasting twice gives one of them a bad experience. The short version on your own site leaves the page too thin for Google to match against many searches. The long version pasted into the MLS gets truncated mid-sentence.
There is a second reason to write the long one. Sellers read your current listings before they decide whether to hire you. A page full of specific detail about someone else's home does more listing-presentation work than a slide deck, because it shows exactly what the seller would get.
What buyers actually scan for
A buyer looking at 40 listings on a phone is not reading. They are filtering, and they are doing it fast.
They scan for the numbers first: price, bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage, strata fee if there is one. Then location, in terms they recognise, which usually means a street, a neighbourhood name, or a landmark. Then the disqualifiers, because eliminating is faster than choosing. No parking, no outdoor space, a floor level they will not accept, a renovation they do not want to do.
Only after a listing survives that pass does anyone read a sentence for pleasure.
This matters because the first two lines of your description are doing the heaviest work, and they are where most agents put an adjective. In NAR's 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 70 percent of buyers used a mobile device or tablet during their search. On a phone, the first two lines may be all that shows before a "read more" link.
Put the strongest fact first. Not the most flattering one. The one a buyer would use to decide whether this listing stays on their list.
The tired adjectives and what they signal
Some words have been used so widely that buyers now read them as warnings.
Cozy has meant small for decades, and buyers apply that translation automatically. Charming carries no information at all: it might mean original 1920s trim, or it might mean nothing has been touched since 1974. Must see is an instruction rather than a description. Stunning, gorgeous, and immaculate are opinions the buyer has not agreed to yet. Priced to sell invites the question of why it needed to be. A handyman's dream is understood by everyone as a house with problems.
The common fault is that each word feels like description while carrying zero facts. Remove it and the sentence loses nothing, because there was nothing there.
Two others deserve a mention because they are actively risky rather than just empty. Words like exclusive, restricted, and limited have a documented history in discriminatory housing advertising, which the fair housing section below covers.
Here is the swap, in practice.
Instead of "charming character home": original oak floors and nine-foot ceilings on the main floor, with the kitchen updated in 2019.
Instead of "cozy one bedroom": 780 square feet, one bedroom plus a den that fits a desk and a filing cabinet.
Instead of "quiet street": a cul-de-sac of eleven houses with no through traffic.
Instead of "close to everything": a six minute walk to the SkyTrain station and two blocks to the elementary school.
Instead of "spacious open concept living": the living, dining and kitchen run 28 feet front to back with no dividing walls.
Every replacement is longer. Every one gives a buyer something to picture and to decide on.
Naming concrete specifics
The test for any sentence in a listing description: could a buyer act on this, or verify it?
Dates work. "Roof replaced 2022, furnace 2019, windows original to 1998" answers three questions a buyer would otherwise have to ask.
Measurements work. Room dimensions, ceiling height, lot size, the width of the garage. A buyer with a large sofa or a truck is looking for exactly this.
Orientation works. "The living room faces south and gets light until late afternoon" is a real selling point that no photograph conveys.
Named places work. Not "near shopping" but the name of the grocery store and how long the walk takes. Not "good schools" but the name of the catchment school, stated as a fact and with a note that buyers should confirm current boundaries with the district, because catchments change.
Numbers about the building work. Strata fee, what it includes, the age of the building, how many units, whether rentals and pets are allowed and under what limits.
This is also what makes a description useful to an AI assistant, which we will come back to.
How AI assistants read a listing page
An AI assistant answering a buyer's question reads the text on your page, the headings that organise it, and any structured data attached to it. It cannot see inside your photographs. It cannot open a PDF flyer that is linked but not indexed.
That produces a blunt rule. Anything you want an AI to repeat has to exist as text on the page.
Agents commonly break this rule by putting the important numbers in a graphic. A nicely designed image listing the square footage, the bed and bath count, and the year built looks good and is invisible to every machine that reads the page. The same facts in a plain paragraph are readable by everything.
The second rule follows from how assistants answer. Someone asks about three-bedroom homes near a specific school under a certain price. An assistant can only assemble that answer from pages that state the bedroom count, name the school, and give the price as text. A page of adjectives matches nothing.
Google's own guidance on helpful content makes a related point that applies here: write for the person, and make the page genuinely answer what they came for. A description written to satisfy a keyword and a description written to answer a buyer's questions end up looking the same, which is convenient.
One honest caveat about individual listing pages. They go stale the moment the property sells, and a site full of dead listing pages is a liability rather than an asset. Our post on sold listings pages covers what to do with them afterwards, and the durable search value usually lives in your neighbourhood pages rather than in any single listing.
Honesty about flaws builds trust
Every flaw is discovered at the showing. The only variable is whether the buyer learns it from you first or finds it themselves and wonders what else you left out.
Naming a limitation up front does three things. It filters out visits that were going to end in disappointment, which saves your time and the seller's. It makes every other claim in the description more believable, because a description that admits something has clearly not been written by someone hiding things. And it gives you the chance to supply context the buyer would not have found alone.
Compare two versions. "The main bathroom is original" leaves a buyer imagining the worst. "The main bathroom is original to 1978, and the plumbing behind it was replaced in 2021" tells them what they are actually taking on.
There is a limit worth being clear about. This is about the ordinary features a buyer can see. Material defects and required disclosures are governed by law and by your board's rules, and they belong in the disclosure process, not in a marketing sentence. Describing a home honestly is a writing decision. Disclosure is a legal obligation, and the second one has its own process.
The fair housing risk in description language
This section needs care, and the honest version is more useful than a confident one.
The federal Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in housing, including in advertising, on the basis of race, colour, religion, national origin, sex, disability, and familial status. HUD administers it. Many states, provinces, and municipalities add further protected characteristics, and Canadian agents are governed by provincial human rights legislation rather than by the US statute.
The pattern that creates exposure is describing who should live somewhere, or characterising a neighbourhood by the people in it, rather than describing the property. Phrases naming an ideal buyer type, or describing an area in terms of its residents, are the ones that draw complaints. Words with a documented history in discriminatory advertising, such as exclusive and restricted, are commonly flagged in fair housing training for the same reason.
We are not going to list which specific phrases are lawful in your jurisdiction, because that varies and because it changes. What is portable is the habit: describe the property, name places rather than people, and stick to facts a buyer could verify.
Your real estate board publishes advertising guidance, most boards run fair housing training, and your brokerage has a compliance contact. Those are the authorities for your market. Use them, and treat any listing description template you find online, including one produced by an AI tool, as a draft that has to pass your board's rules rather than as something already compliant.
Reusing the description across channels
Write the facts once, then shape them for each place rather than pasting.
The MLS field gets the three strongest facts in two sentences, front-loaded, with the strongest first.
Your website listing page gets the full version: layout, updates with dates, building details, what is nearby, honest limitations, and a clear next step for booking a showing.
A social post gets one specific detail and one photograph. The detail is what makes it stop a scroll, and "780 square feet with a den that actually fits a desk" outperforms "must see" every time.
Your email list gets the fact that matters to that group. If your list is mostly downsizers, lead with the single level and the elevator.
The print or window card gets the numbers, because that reader is standing outside and comparing.
One warning about the increasingly common shortcut of generating all five with an AI tool from one prompt. The output tends toward exactly the adjectives this post argues against, because that is what it has read the most of. It is a useful drafting tool if you feed it your facts and then cut everything it added. It is a liability if you publish what it returns, both for the empty language and for the compliance reasons above.
The takeaway
A listing description does its job when a buyer can picture the place and a machine can quote it, and both of those need facts rather than adjectives. Write the MLS field short and front-loaded, write the version on your own site long and specific, and name the flaws you would otherwise be asked about at the showing. Describe the property and the places around it, never the people who should live there, and check your board's advertising rules before anything goes out. The agent whose listings read like an inventory of real facts is also the agent whose next seller has already seen how their home would be marketed.
