Think you know in which state you’re most likely to find references to boat landings in home listing descriptions, relative to the rest of the nation? What about snow mobiles, impact windows or dive-in pools?
Think you know in which state you’re most likely to find references to boat landings in home listing descriptions, relative to the rest of the nation? What about snow mobiles, impact windows or dive-in pools?
If you think you’ve got every state’s home characteristic preferences memorized, we challenge you to take our quiz here.
For the rest of you, read on to find out, and use our interactive tool to find more of the most popular listing phrases, characteristics and descriptors in each state according to our analysis of all Zillow listings descriptions in 2015. The results were both confirming and surprising. See below for yourself!
After selecting a state in the tile map, the word cloud will populate with that state’s popular phrases. The same phrases will appear in the table along with the frequency statistics that determine the size and color of the phrases in the word cloud. You may notice that the ends of some of the words have been cut off or altered. This is because we shortened words to their roots before calculating frequencies so that similar phrases (like “tiled floor,” “tiled flooring” and “tile floors”) would be tallied together as one phrase (“tile floor”).
See the Methodology section for more information on how we cleaned the data and selected the phrases for each state.
In Alaska, southern sunlight is scarce and valuable in the long winter months, so it’s no surprise that listings there are 13 times as likely to mention southern exposure when compared to the rest of the U.S. And Arizona listings are more than 400 times as likely to mention the phrase north/south exposure – but this is because they’re looking to avoid direct sunlight coming from the east (at sunrise) and west (at sunset), in order to enjoy cooler days.
In areas prone to natural disasters, homeowners and agents are quick to point out when their home is up to snuff. For example, in Florida, listings were more than 100 times as likely to mention hurricane shutters and 700 times as likely to mention impact windows. In Oklahoma – the heart of Tornado Alley – listings are more than 100 times as likely to mention storm shelters. Louisiana listings are 35 times as likely to indicate whether the home is in a high-risk flood zone. California listings are more likely to mention earthquake insurance (more than 100 times as likely) and drought-resistant landscaping (45 times as likely).
In Washington, D.C., there’s a unique (some would say quirky) culture surrounding grocery stores, which might explain why listings in the nation’s capital are more likely to mention a nearby Whole Foods (25 times as likely), Safeway (71 times) or Harris Teeter (92 times). Whole Foods is a point of reference for the gentrifying and desirable neighborhood just west of Logan Circle, while the same goes for the Harris Teeter around Kalorama Park. But Safeways get the most love: Almost every Safeway in D.C. has a nickname, including the “Social” Safeway in Georgetown, the “Sexy” Safeway in Mount Vernon Triangle, and the “Swanky” Safeway on the city’s southwest waterfront (we’ll leave it to the reader to investigate the origins of these names).
Pool preferences also vary considerably by state. Floridians prefer screened-in pools (370 times as likely), perhaps to keep out the area’s notoriously voracious gators and mosquitos. They also like their heated pools (11 times as likely), despite the already warm climate. Arizonans differentiate between shallower play pools (53 times) and deeper dive-in pools (45 times), and they have a strong preference for the desert-appropriate Pebble Tec finish (39 times).
Sometimes what’s most important is not only where you live, but how you get there. In California, listings are 11 times more likely to mention access to a freeway, and New Jersey listings are more than 1000 times more likely to mention NYC transportation. In Iowa, where a large portion of the roads are gravel, listings advertise when the home is located on a hard surface road (250 times as likely). Boat owners in North Carolina put a premium on a public boat landing (44 times as likely) or boat storage (8 times). And while snow mobile (55 times as likely) is probably not the primary form of transportation in New Hampshire, listings are sure to point out when there are nearby trails.
This just scratches the surface. Feel free to play with the tool and find your own interesting tidbits.
For our data set, we used all Zillow listing descriptions from 2015. After cleaning the listings,[1] we calculated the frequency of all 1- and 2-word phrases for each state and for the U.S. as a whole.
Then for each phrase and for each state we computed:
Then, in each state, we selected the top 35 phrases where (1) minus (2) was largest, since this seemed to return results that were most interesting.[2]
We did our best to manually exclude legal and transactional terms (e.g., “copyright,” “qualif” and “approv”) and the names of cities, counties, neighborhoods, and terrain types (e.g., “river” and “mountain”). We also made sure that the relative popularity of the phrase in a state – (1) divided by (2) – was at least twice the phrase’s relative popularity in any other state. If a 1-word phrase within a state (e.g., “pane”) appeared in at least one other 2-word phrase (e.g., “dual pane” and “pane window”), then we removed the 1-word phrase and kept the 2-word phrase with the highest frequency.[3]
[1] To clean the listings, we converted everything to lowercase and removed numbers, punctuation and common English words (e.g., “the,” “in”). We also “stemmed” the endings of all words, removing common endings like “-s,” “-ing,” “-ed” and “-ly” so that different forms of the same word could be tallied together.
[2] We believed the most interesting phrases were those that were frequent (in either the state or in the U.S.) and had a high relative frequency when compared to the rest of the U.S. Using only frequency as our metric of interestingness would have given common real estate terms like “bathroom” and “home,” while just using relative frequency would have given hyperlocal, low-frequency terms. Perhaps surprisingly, simply calculating (1) minus (2) was more effective at giving us interesting phrases than were any of the hand-tuned indices we tried.
[3] In these situations, we prefer 2-word phrases over 1-word phrases because they often offer crucial context. For example, “dual pane” offers much more information than “dual” or “pane” alone, in that we know the phrase is referring to windows.
