April fool’s day
Today, let’s make fun of listing sheets. Easy, right? I hope this is fun for you.
First, I want to share my two personal (seen with my own eyes) favorites:
It is custom to tell an agent that there will be a pet in the house. Example: “Small dog named Fred will be in crate in the office.” “Two cats, don’t let them out.” Sometime in the 90s, I saw a listing sheet that read,
“Friendly dog, named Killer, will be in the house.”
I met Killer. You guessed it; he was a lap dog! But that wasn’t the picture I had in my head at three in the morning the night before the showing. (Confession, I am afraid of strange dogs.)
The other was a Freudian typo.
“An imaginative buyer can burn this one into a beauty.”
The most common type of remarks that draw derision from my clients are the ones that are obvious exaggeration. My colleagues, Kathe Geist and Hilda Silverman and I prepared this list for our clients about ten years ago:
Won't last = over priced, pretty, been on sale before at a higher priceReady for your growing family = huge, sprawling, ugly
Expansion potential (also “cozy,” “efficient,” and “for first-time buyer”) = small
Near center of town = in center of town
Near Harvard Square = somewhere in the city of Cambridge, Somerville or Medford
View of Harvard Square = on a hill in Cambridge, Somerville or Medford
Charm, charm, charm = abandon all hope, ye who enter here
Lots of space, near everything = abandon all hope, ye who enter here
Developer’s dream = abandon all hope, ye who enter here
I bet you can add to it. Please keep it clean!
