Hi there, my name is Peter Boscas and I’m broker and owner of Red Cedar Real Estate here in Maryland and today we’re going to be talking about those horrible home listing descriptions that you see online and some of the equally horrible pictures that you see of properties. As I’ve said before, I’ve actually been on real estate for about 10 years now and sometimes when you’ve been in a certain industry for a long time, you take some things for granted that you don’t realize that the public doesn’t understand.

Recently I was working with a client and she, in a nice way, asked me if I needed any help writing my descriptions for my website for the home listings and I didn’t understand what she meant at first and that she pointed out a couple – that the grammar was horrible, the descriptions were horrible, it made no sense and it was at that point I realized that maybe the general public does not understand that when you’re visiting my website or any other real estate agent’s website, that they’re not actually the people who are writing those descriptions or taking those pictures. So I wanted to point out today that they way the process works is every home seller will hire their own agent to represent them during the home selling process and those agents are responsible for writing the descriptions and taking the pictures of the properties.

When you go online and you search for properties, you’re not actually seeing properties listed with a particular agent or company. You’re actually seeing, what they call, an aggregate on the multiple listing service and that’s actually, it’s an information source for all the websites, all the real estate agents in Maryland will put all the information for the properties on that website and then all the other websites will take the information from there.

So if you have a listing agent that writes a really bad description, you might see it on every other real estate agent’s website. So I wanted to point that out and hopefully, that gives you a better understanding of why some listings – the pictures look great, the descriptions are great, and very informative and others – the descriptions are terrible, the pictures are terrible or sometimes you only see one picture or some kind of out-of-focus picture or something like that and that really all comes down to who the listing agent was that the seller chose to work with. That should also give you a good indication if you ever need to sell a piece of property of who your agent is and what kind of a job that they’ll be doing for you. You should always ask to see their previous listings and make sure that they’re doing everything they should as far as taking good pictures and giving accurate and informative descriptions.