Kay Baker Wilmington, NC real estate
http://www.cbbaker.com

Roost is on path of brilliance, especially with need for refining search results, to reduce a large result set using natural language.

Per your comments Darek and that of Wade, sounds like MLS descriptions should be heavily based on phrases…refraining from sentences, get to the heart of it. As MLSs embrace syndication partners, one can only hope limitations on the amount of text for interior / exterior descriptions would be relaxed

I wonder if agent websites or other services with syndication partners have such tight restraints on the amount of narrative for interior / exterior descriptions.

At Roost, Vast, Oodle, etc…I’d be curious as to what “phrases” are commonly used in search.

Is it “Breakfast Area” or “Breakfast Nook”? If I’m limited to a certain number of characters in the MLS…I may want to follow the “consumer standard” for search terms. I’d be curious to know the “popular” way to phrases used…especially if narrative for interior / exterior may be limited in number of characters.

You are definitely the smartest guy in this class. When I saw that mathematical diagram it took me back to college math systems and “fractal rabbits.”

It is an interesting concept that listings maybe soon thought of more as a website page and have meta considerations like meta-header, meta tags and meta descriptions and keyword densities. It is really going to come down to which site prevails in setting the standard for listings display.

Your last comment is interesting because agents have been using their own “description language” for years. This was not necessarily self-imposed but out of necessity by the lack of space provided in most MLS systems.

The problem is that most consumers don’t speak this language but want to know about these specific features when refining their search.

As you stated in your post, we at Roost.com are taking this consumer need into consideration to hopefully provide one of the better experiences available.

Thanks for grabbing on to what we are doing at Roost.com and hopefully we, as well as others, can continue to speak the right language.

Derek Overbey
Senior Director of Partnership Strategy
Roost.com

I’ve always tried to make my property descriptions very descriptive to entice the buyer to want to see the house. Obviously there will be some keywords in the description, but I’ve typically relied upon the information input with the listing to provide the basic information regarding the property.

Most multiple listing services (MLS) have a maximum amount of characters that you can add to the property description, so there will be a trade off of cramming the descriptions with keywords and making the descriptions paint a picture of the house.

I guess there will be a trade off in filling the description with key words vs trying to paint a picture of the house.

Online Classifieds will get “smarter” in combing and utilizing the information rich descriptions associated w/ listings.

Challenges for online real estate classifieds to make most use of narratives for descriptions…a good “thesaurus” on their back-end.

EXAMPLE
– Microsoft Office 2007
– MS Office 2007
– MS Office 2K7

All the phrases above are referencing the same “thing”…not to get long-winded, but online classifieds looking to engage keywords / phrases as part of the search experience, will have to work within confines of agents/brokers “saying the same thing”, but in slightly different ways. Given the phrases above…search by consumers should treat as the same.