How to write a property listing: the complete guide

An effective property listing is four blocks: a headline that gives a reason to click, a description of 150 to 300 words that answers questions in the order a reader asks them, a scannable list of key features, and a short version for social. Mandatory disclosures — BER and PSRA licence number in Ireland, DPE, Carrez floor area and Géorisques in France — are checked separately, before publishing. This guide covers each block, how to write it, and the checklist to run before anything goes live.

Five things to take away

• A property listing is four distinct blocks, written in this order: headline, description, key features, social version.
• The headline should not summarise the property — the results page already shows price, size and area.
• A description runs general to specific, and handles the weak point honestly.
• Disclosure requirements differ between Ireland and France and change regularly.
• The biggest time saving is not in the writing. It is in capturing information at the viewing.

What is a property listing?

A property listing is a short commercial document describing a property for sale or to let, published on a portal, an agency site or a window card, and subject to mandatory legal disclosures. It does two things at once: it prompts an enquiry, and it informs precisely enough to prevent wasted viewings.

Those two jobs pull in opposite directions. An over-enthusiastic listing generates viewings that go nowhere. A purely factual one generates nothing at all. The craft is holding both.

The structure of a listing that works

A publishable listing has four blocks, each with a distinct job and a target length.

Write them in that order. The headline steers the description; the description feeds the key features; the key features hand you the social version almost for free.

Writing the headline

The headline has one job: to name the reason this particular property is worth a click. The results page already shows price, bedrooms and area — repeating them spends your only line of free text on information the reader can already see.

The test is one sentence: if the headline would still be true for the house next door, it isn't doing any work.

• ❌ "Two-bedroom apartment, 74 m², Rathmines"
• ✅ "Two-bed with a private south-facing garden, not overlooked"

The topic is developed in what a listing headline is actually for.

Writing the description

A description moves through five stages, in this order. Each answers a question the reader has anyway.

1. What it is. Property type, floor, size, bedrooms. One sentence, no adjectives.
2. What sets it apart. The thing that justified the headline, expanded and located.
3. Condition and works. What was done, and when. Dates carry more weight than adjectives.
4. The surroundings. Transport, shops, schools — in walking minutes, not impressions.
5. The weak point, handled. One sentence naming the constraint and framing it.

That fifth stage is the one people skip, and it is the highest-yielding. A narrow second bedroom described as "well suited to a home office" saves three viewings from families who wanted two real bedrooms. Hiding a flaw does not remove it — it just moves the discovery to the doorstep, at the worst possible moment.

Two rules of form: short sentences, and no superlative you could not prove on site.

Writing the key features

Key features exist for the reader who will not read the description. They have to stand without it.

• One fact per line, most concrete first.
• Numbers wherever possible: floor area, floor, year of works, walking minutes.
• No verbatim repetition of the description — key features complete it, they do not summarise it.
• The energy rating (BER or DPE) always appears here.

Writing the social version

The social version is not a shortened listing, it is a re-angled one. It is read in a feed, between two personal posts, by someone who was not looking for anything.

Three differences from the portal listing: an opening that leads with the benefit rather than the property type, a more direct tone, and an explicit call to action. Include the price — a post without one generates messages asking for it.

If it takes more than five minutes, it is being rewritten from scratch instead of derived from the listing.

Mandatory disclosures

These are not written, they are verified. They add an unavoidable checking step, and missing them exposes the agency.

[TO VERIFY: these lists change regularly in both countries. Confirm what is in force with the official sources before publishing.]

Sources: the SEAI's BER guidance for Ireland, and the French DPE rules for France.

Adapting the listing to the portal

The substance does not change between portals; the shape does. What differs is the order of information, the permitted lengths and the structured fields.

In short: an Irish reader looks for the BER and the bedroom count first, a French reader looks for the floor area and the room count first. The same listing therefore has to open differently depending on the market.

The detail is in Daft and SeLoger want different things.

How long to allow

Budget 30 to 60 minutes for all four blocks on a single portal, and up to 75 minutes if information has to be tracked down. The description and the information hunt account for close to half of that.

The full breakdown, and a method for measuring your agency's real number, are in how long it takes to write a property listing.

The seven most common mistakes

1. A headline that summarises instead of distinguishing. It repeats what the results page already shows.
2. Opening with a greeting. "Come and discover this charming…" says nothing and burns the first line — the one truncated in previews.
3. Adjectives instead of data. "Bright" is worth less than "dual aspect, east and west".
4. Hiding the weak point. It surfaces during the viewing, and costs trust on top of the wasted trip.
5. Key features that repeat the description. They lose their only purpose: being read alone.
6. A pasted social version. It does not read in a feed and engages no one.
7. Writing in the evening. Cost per listing rises with fatigue, and the review gets worse.

Pre-publish checklist

• The headline would be false for the property next door.
• The first sentence of the description says what the property is, without adjectives.
• Every claim is verifiable on site.
• The weak point is named and framed.
• Key features read on their own.
• Floor area, floor, year of works and distances are all numbers.
• The disclosures for the relevant market are present and current.
• The social version has the price and a call to action.
• A human read the listing after it was drafted or generated.

Going further

This guide is the entry point to the cluster. The articles that complete it:

• What a listing headline is actually for
• How long it takes to write a property listing
• Daft and SeLoger want different things
• How to dictate a listing in ninety seconds

If you want to see what these four blocks look like starting from a plain voice note, see what Dictae produces or book a 10-minute call.