The same house, described two ways.
An illustrative example. Same rooms, same square footage, two very different buyers.
The usual version
Beautiful 3BR/2BA Uptown home! Hardwood floors throughout, updated kitchen with granite, large backyard. Close to shopping and dining. Won’t last long, schedule your showing today!
The version I write
The front door opens onto twelve-foot ceilings and heart pine floors that have been walked on since 1905. The kitchen was redone with care, the back gallery holds the afternoon shade, and Magazine Street is a four-block walk for coffee in the morning.
Sometimes the research finds something.
Before I write about an older house, I go looking for its history: who built it, what it once was, and what changed along the way. Now and then the notarial archives or an old map turn up something that changes how the whole house should be presented. A former corner store. A builder whose name still means something. A family that stayed for a hundred years. When that happens, the listing becomes a story buyers remember and repeat. More on selling a historic home.
What gets written for every home I represent.
Not a template with the address swapped out.
The listing description
Room by room, in the order somebody actually walks through the house, with the things that distinguish it named rather than adjectived. What stays out: luxury, stunning, must see, and any sentence that would fit a house in Phoenix just as well.
The property history
Who built it and when, who lived in it, what got added and what got taken away. The Notarial Archives, the Sanborn maps, the HDLC files, and when a house earns it, an afternoon in the library. Sometimes that turns up nothing. Sometimes it turns up the thing the whole listing ends up being about.
The neighborhood note
What the block is actually like. Where the light goes in the afternoon, what you can walk to, what the parade route does to you in February, where the good coffee is and how far the nearest grocery really is. Written for somebody deciding whether they want to live there, not for somebody being sold to.
The press angle
Not every house has one. When one does, an architect worth naming, a renovation worth photographing, a history worth telling, it gets pitched to the regional and design press rather than hoped about. When it does not, I will tell you that instead of manufacturing an angle.
The captions
Every photograph gets a line. Not a label, a line. It is the cheapest thing on this list and almost nobody bothers, and it is the difference between a gallery a buyer scrolls past and one a buyer reads.