I’ve been thinking about buying a house for a while and this week I finally got round to looking at a few places. The estate agent’s descriptions and photos of the properties are designed make them sound and look attractive to potential buyers and need some interpreting as they don’t always quite match the reality.
For example, ‘surprisingly spacious’ seems to mean that a house is marginally larger on the inside than it appears from the outside; ‘mature’ might mean in a poor state of repair, as might ‘with great potential’; ‘small’ might mean absolutely tiny; and ‘popular location’ might mean that the area tends to get noisy at night; and/or there’s a lot of traffic.
Have you any other examples or interpretations?
Country location – no way you are going to be able to drive to work – too far!
Desirable Neighbourhood – inflated house price because area is snobbish
Easy access to Motorway – NOISY!!
“Needs a little TLC”
“A diamond in the rough”
“Mostly cosmetic issues”
“Handyman Special”
= consider dynamite
“Bijou” – absolutely tiny!
“Has character” – a lot of little things to be repaired or otherwise functional but nonstandard (e.g. hot and cold water knobs reversed); unconventional interior design, i.e., you might want to replace some if not all the furniture, decorations, carpets, and wall colors.
“Cozy” = tiny.
There is a chapter in the book Freakonomics that touches on this subject! 🙂