Desperately seeking domestic bliss

The vivid imagination with which ordinary people are willing to market themselves has long been displayed to full effect in classified personal ads, those “lonely hearts” listings in local newspapers or what the FT’s UK magazine calls an “introductory service” for “affairs of the heart”.

Styles vary from the timidly hopeful – “honest, reliable woman seeks caring male” – to the inexplicably confident – “young Liz Taylor look-alike, 40s, glamourous and bubbly would like professional man” – to the unabashedly delusional – “ugly, a bit bald, 50 and a beard ... call me now”. Whether it’s a fondness for sunset strolls or a hankering for no-strings-attached sex, those seeking a romantic partner seem to have no trouble revealing their innermost thoughts and desires in tiny little boxes of text for all the world to see.

What I find puzzling is not why so many people do this but rather why so few are willing to market their homes – buildings that evoke the same passion, hope and expectation (not to mention need, disdain and self-loathing) we associate with finding a mate – in the same way.

That relationships and residential property occupy adjacent provinces is well established. New buyers often describe their feelings about finding the right house as “love at first sight”. We flush with pride at new paint jobs and polished floors. We grow accustomed to – even fond of – idiosyncrasies. And, when we move on, it often feels like a break-up with someone we still love; we hope the next partner, or owner, will cherish the house, and care for it, as much as we did.

In her recent book, Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses, Harvard University professor Marjorie Garber explores the role of the house as “primary object of affection and desire”, showing how our colonials and condominiums, our maisonettes and mansions can elicit the same complexities of emotion that our companions tend to rouse. Essays explore the house as “mother”, “beloved”, “body” and “trophy”, citing sources from William Shakespeare to Sigmund Freud to modern-day films. “Home is more than a place,” Garber writes. “It is the ground of possibility, a place of beginning and ending (or, as the poets have it, of womb and tomb). But more and more it is also a conscious fiction.”

So why shouldn’t we use the lively and passionate language of lonely hearts ads to buy and sell property too? Isn’t it time we moved beyond turgid descriptions like “1600 sq ft, fully renov, sep kit, 1BR w vu” or “Quiet + sunny, 2 br, luxury condo, west exposure, pet friendly, oak flrs”? Don’t the places we live deserve something more evocative and soul-searching, even delusional and fantastic?

There is some logic to the fact that housing classifieds tend to be less expressive than personals. In the language of exchange, a legitimate pragmatism comes into play. When people realise they have something someone else might want, possibly even pay for, the tendency is to keep it short. Plus, ads tend to be priced per line. So, from the broadsides posted on London streets in the 15th century to the early ads in American newspapers in the 17th century, property classifieds have always been distinguished by their directness,

Also, it is bricks and boards we are selling, not flesh and blood, and the practicality inherent in the very idea of shelter and the need to have a roof over one’s head may necessitate dry and succinct prose. Economist Stephen Levitt has even shown that factual descriptions of a homes’ asssets, such as “new”, granite”, “maple” and “state-of-the-art”, are correlated to higher sales prices, while “empty” adjectives, such as “fantastic”, “spacious” and “charming”, even the use of exclamation points, are correlated to lower ones.

There is also the fact that legislation in most marginally civilised places discourages the inclusion of details that may seem discriminatory. In the US, the Fair Housing Act bans any ads insinuating that buyers will be preferred or denied on the basis of race, colour, religion, handicap, familial status or national origin. So “three spacious bedrooms, two blocks from the synagogue, perfect for a wealthy Jewish couple with kids” simply won’t fly.

Still, one’s personal biases are hardly limited to the aforementioned categories. This is, after all, human desire we are talking about, an area in which we generally tend not to be restrained and inhibited. And, though the circumstances under which pragmatism morphs into fantasy has always been one of life’s mysteries, it is clear that in the property market, such fantasy has yet to find its full expression.

That’s not to say that the occasional effort isn’t made to evince the lurid prose this category calls out for. In their book, 2001 Winning Ads for Real Estate, authors Steve Kennedy and Deborah Johnson advocate limiting the traditional (and tedious) catalogue of amenities. Curb the temptation to itemise the top-shelf appliances, costly hardware and lavish materials and focus instead on history, atmosphere, the tone of the property and its neighbourhood. “Every house is meant to be a home; see it that way. Make it sound like a place where someone would want to live – not because of all the great features it has but because of the way someone would feel if they lived there.”

A marketing campaign called “Live Who You Are” launched by New York real estate agency The Corcoran Group seizes upon this idea, featuring black-and-white photographs of people that symbolise certain types of residences – an older woman in an Upper East Side apartment labelled “Rare Victorian gem” and a baby in a condominium for “New development”. But these are glossy magazine ads; the emphasis is on the pictures, not the words; and they still lack a personal touch.

Carol Goodman is a short-story writer with a rustic cabin in Vermont that she sometimes rents to skiers. The copy she has crafted for the local real estate insert makes mention of “hand-hewn beams that caress you on a cold winter night, a wood stove to bring back memories of days gone by, radiant heat for erotic moments – no hours, no days – on the floor and a river running down behind the house that resonates with the sound of a primal life force”. Surely that’s a start, much closer to “fond of walks in the rain and as comfortable with Prince as with Puccini” than “3-bed, 2-bath ski house, close to shuttle bus stop”.

Consider also the ads written by Julian Bending for the Glastonbury-based Ralph Bending Estate Agent: “Nourishing as a hot tart on a cold night this Georgian cottage sits there above the Somerset levels and gently steams” or “Delicious as a small bun sprinkled with sugar on top, this place glistens with delight. It’s smooth and silky with a contemporary twist but still holds fast to an ancient value.”

Why not go farther and recognise that the places we live engender in us not necessarily a litany of tender thoughts but more complex feelings, ranging from mild ambivalence to outright despair? Even the most charming ocean-front cottage is capable of guile and deception; recall the poet Anne Sexton’s ode to a beach house that alluded to its prison of pine and bedspring. In fact, in 1950s and 1960s London, estate agent Roy Brooks was famous for publishing unflattering truths about properties he was trying to sell and, today, Bending is following in his footsteps, acknowledging that “ramshackle and bewildered best describes the decor” in one house, while another “taps out an SOS as it waits for someone with a gun to come along and put it out of its misery”. But such eloquent honesty is rare.

Not long ago, I was looking for a tenant for a small house in the Hudson River town of Beacon, New York. It’s an awful, tiny, grey, dismal house with a damp basement and dark kitchen with nary a Sub-Zero refrigerator in sight. Still, the back bedroom has a lovely view of Mt Beacon, a cherished inspiration to Andrew Jackson Downing, the pre-eminent 19th-century American landscape designer who lived in the area. Had my agent been willing to catalogue these assets in the promotional copy for the house, there is no doubt in my mind it would have been snapped up by the depressed writer for whom it is so obviously the perfect habitat.

Real estate classifieds can also capitalise on the human penchant for making decisions based on warped or misguided reasons: choosing a watch, a wife, a waterfront condo for the envy it is presumed to provoke in others. I’m not talking about the typical positive adjectives – “charming”, “spacious”, “well-maintained” – which, according to Levitt, are typically used to hide shortcomings – “small”, “big but impractical”, “old but not quite falling down” – anyway. No, there is potential for much more.

Take the poet Mary Ruefle’s ad for a suburban McMansion: “Extraordinarily large suburban home with high ceilings and extravagant use of plate glass; cleaning is not a problem as it is virtually impossible. You will gladly get lost wandering from section to section, trying to imagine a use for every space. By all means, try! This is the dreamboat retirees have been waiting for; upscale while you can, secure in the knowledge that while you are standing in the middle of any of its cavernous rooms, a stranger in a passing car is saying out loud: ‘I wish I lived in a house like that!’”

Why not be more inventive still and take cues from the lonely heart in the London Review of Books who started her ad “I’ve divorced better men than you”. In other words, take pride in the colourful history of the place you’re trying to unload. Yes, most people selling a Tuscan ruin built on the site of a Roman castle or a Liverpool terrace house once occupied by a teenage Paul McCartney would mention that. But what about the more mundane details? Why wouldn’t househunters be intrigued by the idea of a charming Amagansett beach house with a pool cabana that has been the site of half a dozen trysts? Or the Cornwall cottage with a newly painted kitchen wall covering red wine splashed across it during a 25th anniversary celebration? Or the Dorset farmhouse with 18th-century strap hinges on the front door that have become worn and weathered not so much from the passage of the centuries so much as incalculable tormented leave-takings and joyous homecomings?

Our fantasy lives are the richest when we are without. Those searching for a partner know this and our imaginations manage to be equally fevered when we are looking for a home. The fact is: places are as complicated as people. It’s no wonder that Kennedy and Johnson advise in their book that “the longer you make your ads, the better they’ll sell”.

Still, as a writer, I know that concise language is usually the most evocative. In fact, when it comes to marketing residential real estate, what I consider to be the model for classified ads is a two-line, 12-word jingle describing the kind of place where anything can and will happen – that is, any house at all. Jotted down by William Blake in his notebook in 1803 and managing to reference the full range of human experience available in one’s own home, it is honest, suggestive and accurate.

“Terror in the house does roar/ But Pity stands before the door.”