Condos, Colonials and Cabins: Popular Listing Descriptors for Urban, Suburban and Rural Areas
- Location-based language, including terms like “block,” “line” (as in “bus line” or “subway line”), “downtown” and “heart” (as in “the heart of Brooklyn”), is more common in listings of homes for sale in urban areas.
- Listing descriptions of suburban homes for sale focus more on the attributes and features of the homes themselves, advertising features like two-story foyers, lanais, plantain shutters, pools, patios, tennis courts and game rooms.
- Rural listing descriptions are more likely to boast of nearby natural amenities including pastures, rivers, lakes, ponds, creeks and good fishing spots.
The U.S. landscape changes dramatically as we move from our bustling urban centers to the sprawling suburbs and on to the vast open spaces of rural America. And as the landscape changes, so too does the way we describe homes listed for sale in these different regions.
For-sale listings in urban areas are more likely to mention location and neighborhood amenities; suburban listings note specific features of the home itself; and rural listings feature richer descriptions of natural features, according to an analysis of more than five million Zillow listing descriptions.
We determined which characteristics and descriptors are most popular in urban, suburban and rural regions nationwide and in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., and summarized our findings in the interactive tool below.
In the tool, you’ll see three columns: URBAN, SUBURBAN and RURAL. Each column contains a list of phrases that appear more frequently in that type of area than in the other two, while the number next to the phrase tells you how much more frequently. 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 their frequency so that similar phrases (like “tiled floor,” “tiled flooring” and “tile floors”) would be tallied together as one phrase (“tile floor”).
A U.S. View: Parking, Patios and Pastures
Listings in urban areas nationwide employ the most specific location-based language, using terms including “block,” “line” (as in “bus line” or “subway line”), “downtown” and “heart” (as in “the heart of Brooklyn”). Since urban space comes at a premium, it’s also popular to call out terraces, parking spaces and in-unit washers/dryers. Higher density also means neighbors have to deal a bit more with your furry friends – which helps explain why pets are referenced 1.7 times more frequently in urban areas than in other areas. These references could be welcoming (“Pets welcome!”) or prohibitive (“No dangerous breeds!”).
Suburban listings focus more on the attributes and features of the homes themselves, advertising features like two-story foyers, lanais, plantain shutters, pools, patios, tennis courts and game rooms. They also call out when the home sits in a cul-de-sac, an enduring symbol of suburbia mentioned 1.7 times more frequently in the suburbs than in other areas. Suburban listings are also more likely to use the phrase “award-winning,” which almost always describes a school district – a strong selling point for current or future parents.
Rural listings boast of natural amenities including pastures, rivers, lakes, ponds, creeks and good fishing spots. Because land is more abundant in rural America, we also see more frequent references to frontage and the number of lot acres. The kinds of buildings we typically associate with rural areas, including cabins and barns, also make the list. Rural listings are more likely to mention farms in the context of land used for agriculture, unlike in urban areas where the term is likely used more to describe things like farmers’ markets and farm-style sinks.
Listings as Diverse as the 50 States
Digging into the top phrases for individual states, there are a number trends that don’t appear at the national level. For example, top terms in urban, suburban and rural areas in each state are often city names. These city names are overwhelmed by more common terms that appear in many states when looking at the nation as a whole.
When comparing across states (figure 1), we find that some terms consistently appear in the list of top rural phrases, including “barn” (a top rural phrase in 35 states), “land” (35 states), “road” (35), “horse” (34) and “mile” (30). These terms are distinctly rural and don’t appear at the top of urban or suburban phrase lists in any state. The consistency of rural phrases could be an indication that homes and amenities even in rural areas far from one another are more similar than they are in urban or suburban areas. This makes sense: Cities vary dramatically from one to the other, based on different histories and cultures, while in more rural areas life and homes are more likely to be shaped by the land itself – and landscapes don’t differ as much as cityscapes.
Phrases common to urban areas across states include “unit” (a top urban phrase in 26 states), “block” (22 states), “condo” (22), “downtown” (19) and “investor” (17). Phrases including “charm” (11 states) and “cute” (3) are also popular, especially because these sorts of words are often euphemisms for “small.” Homes in some cities may also be old, and may have some charm related to their “historical” and “original” features – phrases that appear as top urban terms in 19 and 18 states, respectively.
“Condo,” a term typically associated with dense urban areas, is actually bit schizophrenic. There are five states – Michigan, South Carolina, Indiana, Delaware and Arkansas – where “condo” appears as a top suburban term. Other terms commonly found in both urban and suburban listings include “fenced yard” (top urban phrase in 5 states, suburban in 7), “balcony” (11, 3), “townhome” (4, 6), “hardwood floor” (6, 3), “stainless steel” (2, 5), and “granite counters” (2, 6).
Similarly, the term “city” appears as a top urban term in eleven states, but as a top rural term in seven states. In rural areas, the phrase may be used to point out the short travel time to the city, access to the city water supply and/or views of city lights at night. And speaking of “views,” this term is more popular in urban areas in Washington, D.C., Illinois and Wyoming, but takes on a rural role in Colorado, Michigan, Nebraska and Connecticut.
The most consistently suburban phrases from state-to-state are “cul-de-sac” (16 states), “family room” (11), “lower level” (10), and “model” (10). “School” also makes an appearance (8 states), reinforcing the idea that schools and school quality are first and foremost suburban concerns. The phrase “convenient location” appears as a top suburban term in five states.
Phrases that appear as top urban, suburban and rural phrases in different states often reference natural amenities including beaches, rivers, hills, trails and waterfronts. Unlike pastures, which require a certain level of open space largely found only in rural areas, these features can appear in all kinds of regions.
Methodology
We classified homes into density buckets using data from a 2014 Zillow Group consumer survey asking residents to classify their ZIP code as urban, suburban or rural. We then built a model using population density and transit-related variables as inputs to predict the predominant of all other ZIP codes. For a more thorough explanation, see our brief on home values and rents in urban, suburban and rural areas.
To determine word-frequency data, we pulled the listing descriptions of all properties listed for sale on Zillow in 2015. After cleaning the listings,[1] we calculated the frequency of all 1- and 2-word phrases for each combination of state (plus the U.S. as a whole) and density type.
For each phrase and for each combination of state and density we computed:
- The frequency of the phrase (e.g., all instances of “cabin” in rural areas in the state of Washington) divided by the total number of words in the listings.
- The frequency of the phrase for the other two density types (e.g., all instances of “cabin” in urban and suburban areas in the state of Washington) divided by the total number of words for the other two density types.
Figure 2 shows the calculations for the phrase “cabin” in the state of Washington. Rural has the highest relative frequency of the three density types at 6.5 (see the cell highlighted yellow), so we classify this as a rural keyword.
For each state and density combination, we selected the top 25 phrases where (1) minus (2) was largest, since this seemed to return results that were most interesting.[3]
We also made sure that the relative popularity of the phrase for a density type – (1) divided by (2) – was at least twice the phrase’s relative popularity for both of the other two types. 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.[4]
[1] To clean the listings, we converted everything to lowercase and removed numbers, punctuation and common English words (e.g., “the” or “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] If you’ve made it this far and are still following the math, you’ll notice that these don’t add up exactly. This is simply because I rounded all numbers at the end in the table just to make the large numbers easier to follow.
[3] 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 regions with different classifications. 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.
[4] 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.