Great Performance !

“Fantastic,” meanwhile, is a dangerously ambiguous adjective, as is “charming.” Both these words seem to be real-estate agent code for a house that doesn’t have many specific attributes worth describing. “Spacious” homes, meanwhile, are often decrepit or impractical. “Great neighborhood” signals a buyer that, well, this house isn’t very nice but others nearby may be. And an exclamation point in a real-estate ad is bad news for sure, a bid to paper over real shortcomings with false enthusiasm.

If you study the words in the ad for a real-estate agent’s own home, meanwhile, you see that she indeed emphasizes descriptive terms (especially “new,” “granite,” “maple,” and “move-in condition”) and avoids empty adjectives (including “wonderful,” “immaculate,” and the telltale “!”). Then she patiently waits for the best buyer to come along. She might tell this buyer about a house nearby that just sold for $25,000 above the asking price, or another house that is currently the subject of a bidding war. She is careful to exercise every advantage of the information asymmetry she enjoys.

But like the funeral director and the car salesman and the life-insurance company, the real-estate agent has also seen her advantage eroded by the Internet. After all, anyone selling a home can now get online and gather her own information about sales trends and housing inventory and mortgage rates. The information has been set loose. And recent sales data show the results. Real-estate agents still get a higher price for their own homes than comparable homes owned by their clients, but since the proliferation of real-estate websites, the gap between the two prices has shrunk by a third.

It would be naïve to suppose that people abuse information only when they are acting as experts or agents of commerce. Agents and experts are people too—which suggests that we are likely to abuse information
in our personal lives as well, whether by withholding true information or editing the information we choose to put forth. A real-estate agent may wink and nod when she lists a “well-maintained” house, but we each have our equivalent hedges.

Taken From : FREAKONOMICS - A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything