How to Stop Your Real Estate Marketing From Sounding Generic and Copy-Pasted
There's a specific feeling buyers get when they read generic real estate marketing. It's not irritation. It's just... nothing. The text doesn't register. It slides right off.
"Stunning 4-bedroom home nestled in a sought-after neighborhood. Move-in ready with updated kitchen and spacious master suite. Don't miss this opportunity!"
You could swap that description into 40 different MLS listings and it would fit every single one. That's the problem.
Here's what generic copy costs you — and how to fix it specifically.
What Generic Copy Actually Costs You
The visible cost is obvious: less engagement on social posts, fewer showings per listing, emails that don't get opened.
The invisible cost is bigger: you become interchangeable with every other agent in your market.
Real estate is a relationship business, but buyers and sellers often choose their agent before they've met you — based on your marketing. If your marketing sounds like everyone else's, you have no natural advantage when someone is deciding between you and the next agent who popped up in their Instagram feed.
The agents with thriving referral businesses? They all have something in common: people feel like they know them from their content. That feeling comes from consistent, specific, personal voice — not from good headshots and nice font choices.
The 5 Specific Signs Your Copy Is Generic
1. You could swap it into a different listing without changing it If you can copy-paste your MLS description into a different property and it would still technically work, it's not doing its job.
2. It starts with "Welcome to" or "Don't miss this" These openers are listing description white noise at this point.
3. You use the word "stunning" more than once a month Same with "nestled," "boasting," "cozy," "spacious," and "move-in ready." These words have been used so many times they've lost all meaning.
4. Your captions look the same on every platform Instagram caption copied to Facebook copied to LinkedIn = copy that's native to none of them.
5. Someone could read your last 5 posts without knowing anything about your personality Generic copy has no voice. Someone who follows you for three months should feel like they know you.
The Fastest Way to De-Generic-ify Your Copy
Take your last listing description and run it through this exercise.
For every sentence, ask: "What specifically makes this true of THIS house?"
"Updated kitchen" → What exactly is updated? "Carrara marble countertops, custom soft-close cabinetry, and a farmhouse sink that was the owner's splurge" is the same update but a completely different sentence.
"Spacious master suite" → How spacious? What's in it that earns the word? "Large enough for a sitting area and a king bed without crowding, with a walk-in closet that finally makes morning routines non-chaotic" is specific.
"Great location" → What about the location matters to your buyer? "Three blocks from the elementary school and walking distance to the coffee shop that's become the neighborhood's de facto living room" is something a buyer can picture.
Specificity is the antidote to generic. Every time you're about to write a generic phrase, slow down and write the specific version.
Your Platform Copy Should Not Match
This is where a huge amount of agents go wrong. Your MLS description, Instagram caption, Facebook post, and email should all be written for their specific platform.
Instagram wants short, visual, casual. Facebook wants community-oriented and shareable. Email wants personal and specific. MLS wants specific and professional.
Copy-pasting between platforms produces content that feels slightly off everywhere. Buyers can feel it even if they can't name it.
The Brand Voice Investment
The longer-term fix is building a real brand voice system — a set of rules and examples that governs how you sound across every piece of content.
This takes a few hours to set up properly. After that, it makes every piece of content faster to write and easier to keep consistent.
The quick version: write three paragraphs about a listing as if you were texting a friend who's actively looking. Read them out loud. That's your voice. Now make your marketing sound like those three paragraphs.
Does AI Make the Generic Problem Worse?
Only if you use it wrong.
Vanilla ChatGPT, given minimal context, produces listing copy that's technically acceptable and completely generic — because it defaults to the average of all listing descriptions it was trained on.
AI tools built specifically for real estate, used with proper brand voice setup, do the opposite: they scale your voice across 13+ content pieces per listing without requiring you to write each one individually. The output is consistently your specific style, not a generalized real estate agent style.
The difference is entirely in the inputs. Generic in → generic out. Specific brand voice + specific property details → specific, distinctive copy.
PropWrite's Brand Voice feature lets you train the AI on your communication style so every output sounds like you. Try it free.