Real Estate in Plain English

by Jay Thompson on November 28, 2008

I was talking to a friend earlier this week who isn’t in real estate (Yes, I have friends outside real estate!) and she brought up an interesting subject…

Real estate speak.

Yes, we real estate professionals tend to have a language all our own. It’s easy at times to forget that some of the terms we use sound like Greek to the majority of folks out there. Happens in any profession. Heck when I was in semiconductor manufacturing, we wrote a glossary to keep track of all the TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) and geek-speak terminology.

Sometimes I think real estate need such a glossary.

Oh, you can find bits and pieces of a real estate glossary out there. RealEstateABC has one. ProU.net’s is even better. The problem with these glossaries is they aren’t comprehensive, and who wants to bounce over to a glossary and look something up as they are reading one of the scintillating, amazingly educational articles here on Phoenix Real Estate Guy?

So beginning today, I’m going to make an effort to include a short footnote ((This is a footnote. It will help explain potentially unfamiliar terms)) for terms that may need additional explanation. See the little superscript number in that last sentence? Click that, and you’ll be taken to the bottom of the post you’re reading where you can get additional info. Once there, clicking on the arrow symbol at the end of the footnote will take you back to where you were in the post (at least in theory). Depending on your browser, you may be able to hover your cursor over the footnote number to read it.

Here’s how I envision it working:

Today’s post is about short sales ((“Short sale” is a term used to describe a home that is being sold for less than the amount that is owed on it.)). Short sales suck because…. blah blah blah….

I think I can even put a link in a footnote. We’re about to find out ((This footnote should have a link in it to the best Phoenix home search)).

Hopefully foot-noting posts will help folks understand some of the real estate speak that many real estate blogs (this one included) tend to use. I’m not trying to insult anyone’s intelligence by defining terms — let’s face it, many readers here are far brighter than I am. Knowing some of these terms doesn’t make me any smarter than you, it just means I live with these words on a daily basis and have learned them from shear repetition if nothing else.

Of note:

I promise not to clutter posts with dozens of footnotes. These aren’t research papers after all. In fact, the majority of posts won’t have any footnotes.

For you academia / professor / English major types out there, footnotes will not be formatted in any formal MLA or APA style. I had enough of that in college. “Footnotes” may not be the proper academic way to handle what I’m doing here, but it seems the most practical way. Deal with it.

I am not going to go back and annotate the 1500ish previous posts here. To do that would require ridiculous amounts of time and alcohol/caffeine. We’ll do the footnote thing moving forward.

And as always, if something I write doesn’t make sense or you need further clarification, just ask!

Thanks ousooner44 for the inspiration!

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