Write listing descriptions for the person, then check that a machine can read them

STUNNING! This IMMACULATE gem won't last! Truly a MUST SEE. Bring your pickiest buyers. Motivated seller. Priced to sell.

That paragraph contains zero information. Not a little information. Zero. A buyer learns nothing, and a system trying to summarize the property for someone who asked about three-bedroom homes with a home office and no HOA has nothing to extract.

The job has quietly changed

Your description used to be read by two audiences: a buyer scrolling a portal, and an agent skimming for their client. Both were human, both filled in gaps, and both forgave hype because everyone was doing it.

There is now a third reader that does not forgive anything and does not infer. It looks for facts, matches them against what a person asked for, and produces a sentence about your listing. If your description has no facts, your listing does not appear in that sentence.

Every adjective you use in place of a fact is a query you have opted out of.

A structure that serves both readers

1. 1One sentence naming what it is and where: property type, bedrooms, baths, square footage, neighborhood. Plain and complete.
2. 2The layout in the order someone would walk it. Rooms, how they connect, what is on which floor, where the light comes from.
3. 3The specifics that answer real questions: parking, outdoor space, HOA and what it covers, heating and cooling, the age of the roof and systems, storage, laundry location.
4. 4What is genuinely distinctive about it. One honest paragraph. If the kitchen was renovated, say what was done and when.
5. 5The context: what is walkable, transit, what the block is like. Facts, not marketing.
6. 6What it is not. "No dedicated parking" and "the third bedroom is small" cost you nothing with the right buyer and save everyone a wasted showing.

Written that way, the description is longer, reads like a person wrote it, and happens to be dense with the exact attributes an assistant needs in order to include the property in a match. Nobody had to choose between the audiences.

On using AI to write these

Use it. Just use it in the right seat. The failure mode I see constantly is an agent typing three details into a tool and asking for a description, which produces fluent text about a property the model invented details for. That is how listings end up claiming a primary suite that does not exist.

Reverse the order. Dictate everything you noticed on the walkthrough, messy and out of order, into your phone. Two minutes of talking. Then have the model organize what you said into the structure above with an explicit instruction to add nothing you did not say. You supply the facts, the tool supplies the arrangement. That is the division of labor that holds up.

The photos still carry the emotion

Some agents defend the adjectives by saying the description has to sell. It does not, and it never really did. Photos sell. Video sells. The description's job is to answer the questions the photos raise and to make the listing findable, which is a different job entirely and one it can only do with facts in it.

Rewrite your three active listings this week using the structure above. It takes twenty minutes each. Then read the old one and the new one back to back and decide which one you would want representing your seller.

The Takeaway

Dictate the facts yourself, let a tool arrange them, and never let it invent. A description built from specifics serves the buyer, the agent and the machine at once; adjectives serve none of them.