According to Stephen Fry on Last Friday’s QI entitled “Fakes and Frauds”, the average estate agent has the same vocabulary as a budgerigar called Puck (which holds the record at 1728 words). I was appalled at this statement and spent the weekend attempting to prove him wrong. I have been successful and have proved Stephen was mistaken! Unfortunately the average vocabulary of an Estate Agent is only 667!
This ridiculous statement has sound statistical backing – I looked at the main property description for all properties our agents currently have on the market and calculated the number of unique words used. Only 19 agents exceeded the 1728 words of Puck with the most verbose agent being LetSureUK in Billericay! Unsurprisingly the most used word (other than “the” and “a”) is “property”. Interestingly LetSure prefer the use of the term “home”. A much more important useless piece of information is that as a group Dezrez estate agents have used over 35360 unique words. This thrashes Shakespeare who used a measly 28,829 throughout his plays (thanks http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/stats/).
So which do you prefer: Less verbose than a budgie or more eloquent than Shakespeare?
Ah, to sell or not to sell that is the question?
Most buyers prefer less waffle and more fact… pretentious descriptions of property for sale won’t do anyone any favours!