I know that when a leasing company describes an apartment in Austin as a “flat”, they’re trying to conjure up an image of European sophistication, but boy howdy, does that word have a different connotation when you’ve spent a year holed up in tiny European boxes. A flat is an itty-bitty space you overpay for. That’s what the word means. Look it up.

So ads like this immediately remind me that 90% of real estate advertising is spin or lies. Any time you try to conjure up certain images for a renter or buyer, you’re doing it because the reality of the situation is probably crappy (it’s not helped by the fact that it refers to an airport that opened almost a decade ago as “new”, or that it tries to sell itself on location by reminding readers that it’s by the airport, which usually means that you’re out in the middle of nowhere).

Meanwhile, something like $575 / 2br - Cheap House in East Austin (12th St near Chestnut) is right to the point and makes me click on the ad immediately. I know exactly where it is, I know that the owner is aware that the price is cheap, and there’s little guesswork involved. It’ll be taken or left behind on its own merits. I won’t get there and have my bubble burst because I expected a cottage and found myself in a sprawling apartment complex. Now, granted, the 12th & Chicon area of Austin, which is just west of this house, is pretty much the only neighborhood in Austin I’d call bad, but hell- I haven’t been there in a year, and who knows what it’s like with the gentrification waves washing over the east side? But even so, they didn’t try to dress it up as “downtown” or “near east” or anything. It’s an address and a description.

And this is important because Craigslist, especially in Austin, is full of apartment locator and leasing company spam. If you clicked on every headline that sounded promising, you’d be online for hours and hours, looking at the same properties everyone has access to, and never finding what you want. That is no fun.

The thing is, your audience is smart enough to know that most of what they’re going to see is meant to deceive them. Ambiguity doesn’t entice us, it just reminds us that you’re probably lying.

“South Central” is a little bit useful as a descriptor, but people have different definitions of terms like that, and I’ve seen “central” used to describe any property in Austin that isn’t directly east or west, even if it’s nine miles from downtown. I’ll always click on an ad that lists an address, even if I don’t know the street names, because I can figure out where it really is that way, instead of having to guess that maybe the person who posted it was actually being honest.

Of course, when you list a property with the address, you should probably be sure that you’re not totally wrong about what that address is. Claiming that you have a duplex on 18th and Lavaca in Austin means that the other half is either a condo tower or a Mexican restaurant. Which probably means that the ad is bait-and-switch… “Oh, it was great, but it just rented. Let me show you what else we’ve got…”

Mostly you just have to be aware that your audience is reading dozens, if not hundreds, of ads while they’re looking for what they want, and so being ambiguous and non-specific makes it impossible to distinguish what you’ve got from what anyone else has. And even if it does entice people to give you a call, there’s no point to getting a bunch of responses from people who aren’t going to be interested once they actually see it. The more you give a person from the ad, the more likely they are to go in pretty sure that they already want your place.