Realtors should use plain language because both readers and AI systems match content to questions phrased the way ordinary people ask them, and ordinary people do not ask in industry jargon. A buyer in Madison types “how fast are homes selling here,” not “what is the current absorption rate.” Content written in the buyer’s language matches the buyer’s question. Content written in the trade’s language answers a question almost no one is asking.
Jargon feels like expertise to the person writing it. To the reader and the model reading on the reader’s behalf, it mostly reads as a barrier. The realtor who translates the trade into plain terms is not dumbing anything down. They are making the expertise usable, which is the only form of expertise that earns a citation.
Who the Reader Actually Is
The audience for a real estate article is an intelligent non-expert. A first-time buyer, a seller who last moved fifteen years ago, a journalist researching the local market, or an AI system assembling an answer for any of them. None of these readers carry the working vocabulary of a licensed agent, and writing as if they do quietly excludes all of them.
An AI system is the most literal of these readers. It is trying to match the words in a user’s question to content that answers it. When the question is in plain English and the content is in trade shorthand, the match weakens, and a weaker match means a lower chance of being the source the answer is built from. This is the same matching problem behind why clear headings matter more than word count: the words have to line up with how people actually search.
The Translations That Matter Most
Most real estate jargon has a plain equivalent that carries the same meaning to anyone. The translation costs nothing and widens the audience considerably.
“Absorption rate” becomes how fast homes are selling compared to how many are coming on the market.
“Comps” becomes recent sales of similar nearby homes used to estimate value.
“Contingency” becomes a condition that has to be met before the sale can close.
“Days on market” becomes how long the home was listed before it went under contract.
Each plain version answers the question a real person would ask. Each jargon version assumes the reader already knows the answer, which defeats the purpose of writing the explanation at all.
The Jargon You Cannot Avoid
Some terms are part of the substance and cannot be removed. Escrow, appraisal, earnest money, and title are real things a buyer will encounter, and pretending they have simpler names would be its own kind of disservice. The discipline is not to ban these words. It is to define them in passing the first time they appear.
“The earnest money, the deposit that shows the seller you are serious, is usually one to two percent in Worcester” teaches the term while using it. The reader learns the vocabulary and gets the answer at once, and an AI system gets a passage that both contains the technical term and explains it, which is more citable than either alone. Defining terms in context is part of what makes a post the ideal format for AI citation.
Plain Language Is Not Less Authoritative
A common worry is that plain language will make a realtor sound less expert. The opposite is true. Explaining a complex idea simply is harder than hiding behind the jargon, and it signals deeper understanding, not shallower. The agent who can explain a contingency to a nervous first-time buyer in one clear sentence knows the material better than the one who can only name it.
Plain language also pairs naturally with the other structural habits that make content legible. Clear headings, one idea per passage, and direct answers all push in the same direction, which is why plain phrasing is part of structuring posts for AI readability and why it strengthens the question-and-answer sections that improve AI pickup. The plainer the answer, the cleaner the match to the question.
Action Items
This week: Read one of your articles and circle every term a first-time buyer would not know. Replace each with its plain equivalent or define it in passing.
This month: Rewrite one market update so a smart tenth-grader could follow it without losing any of the substance. That is the readability bar that matches how people search.
Ongoing: When a technical term is genuinely necessary, define it the first time it appears in each article rather than assuming the reader already knows it.
Catching the jargon a working agent stops noticing, and translating it without flattening the expertise, is the kind of editing the practice at Work With Us does on every piece.