NYT Article
January 29, 2006
The Power of Words
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
HOW best to describe the condition of the New York City real estate market? Is it "cooling" or "melting down?" Will there be a "pause?" A "soft landing?" A "slow leak?" Are you a "bubble" believer or of the "frothy" faith?
These and other buzzwords have been appearing in articles and rolling off the tongues of broadcasters. They are whirring around New York cocktail parties and being whispered in Wall Street elevators. It is the language of real estate. And real estate, as Pamela Liebman, chief executive and president of the Corcoran Group, put it, is "part of the language of New York."
It is a language at once glamorous and mundane, one that encompasses not only market catchphrases but scores of seductive adjectives that brokers use to describe properties. Yet as intangible as words are, they influence the decisions buyers, sellers and lenders make - and those decisions can affect the market. As Jean-Paul Sartre said, "Words are loaded pistols." A look at the most popular ones being bandied about nowadays may not reveal the future, but they reveal the pulse of the public. Its beat is a mix of fear, confusion and wishful thinking.
The yearning for a smooth transition from the surging market is seen in the increasingly frequent use in the last six months of the phrase "soft landing."
"Soft landing is everyone's big hope," said Paul JJ Payack, president of the Global Language Monitor (languagemonitor.com), which analyzes language trends and their impact on politics, culture and business.
Mr. Payack, who graduated from Harvard with a bachelor's degree in comparative literature, calculated the popularity of some 36 buzzwords chosen by a reporter. He used his Predictive Quantities Indicator, or P.Q.I., an algorithm that tracks words and phrases in the media and on the Internet in relation to frequency, contextual usage and appearance in global media. It is a weighted index that takes into account year-to-year increases and acceleration in the last several months.
Among the market buzzwords he ranked, "soft landing" and "pause" had the highest P.Q.I.'s. They were ranked first and second respectively, while the more ominous sounding "housing bubble" ranked seventh. " 'Pause' is another one of these hopeful things," Mr. Payack said.
(Mr. Payack can also verify that "O.K." is the most frequently spoken word, that "outside the mainstream" was the top phrase of 2005 and that as of Jan. 26 at 10:59 a.m. Eastern time, the number of words in the English language was 986,120.)
While Mr. Payack analyzed buzzwords used across the nation, the words are especially prevalent in New York, where residents routinely say that real estate is a topic second only to sex. And where there is extreme interest, there tends to be extreme language.
Historically, the New York City real estate market has been characterized by boom-or-bust buzzwords. "If there isn't an exclamation point on a description then it's somehow incomplete," said Jonathan J. Miller, the president of Miller Samuel, an appraisal firm.
That is in part because extremes make for juicer news stories, added Robin Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, in an e-mail message. "A topic that in some sense is always around has to be goosed up a bit to make it exciting," she wrote, "and hyperbole is one means toward that end."
While sexy and quotable, catchphrases can be misleading. "A new language has entered the fray that is not entirely accurate," Mr. Miller said. For example, he said, most people think a "cooling" market means that prices are falling, when it is only the rate of appreciation that is declining. Another misconception concerns the word "dumped," as in "he was forced to dump his apartment."
"The perception is the market is falling," Mr. Miller said, when "in reality the apartment was worth more than it was a year ago. It was simply the list price outpaced the market." As for "soft landing," Mr. Miller said it connotes downward motion ("because all I can think of is a plane landing") when really "what they mean is that we've gone up and reached a plateau as opposed to coming down the mountain," he said.
It is because of such confusion and lack of nuance that Henry O. Pollakowski, the editor of the Journal of Housing Economics and the director of the Housing Affordability Initiative at the M.I.T. Center for Real Estate in Cambridge, Mass., does not use buzzwords. "It gets out in very black and white measures," he said. " 'Things are more affordable.' 'Things are less affordable.' And I'm like, 'Where and what are you talking about - and for whom?' "
Housing markets are local and how people talk about real estate depends on how they relate to it, he said, "whether you're already an owner or whether you are trying to buy something or trying to buy something bigger or trying to rent. It's different for everybody."
A Google ranking of people's top five "worries" in October included "housing bubble," along with "bird flu," "earthquake" and hurricanes Wilma and Katrina.
"No one really has a great sense of what's going on and that has added another layer of anxiety," Mr. Miller said. But he added that "in all fairness I think it's much harder to articulate what's happening with the market right now."
"There's no great catchphrase," he said.
But if there were, what might it be? Mr. Miller suggested "normalized." Jeffrey Levine, the president of Douglaston Development in Queens, said it is misleading to refer to the current market as cooling or slowing because, until recently, the market was "on steroids."
"We are back to a healthy, reality-based market," he said. Ms. Liebman of Corcoran also calls the market "healthy" yet "more challenging" for brokers and sellers. She uses the word "shift" to describe the rebalance of power from sellers to buyers and "disconnect" to explain how sellers are still pricing as if it were the spring of 2005.
"Disconnect," Ms. Liebman said, is "a nice way to say some sellers are crazy because buyers are not paying."
In a press release this month, the National Association of Realtors wrote that "the key word for the housing market in 2006 is balance."
Brokers are loath to use hyperbolic language to describe the market partly because they think the market is cyclical and partly because it is in their best interest to bulldoze fear. Steve Solomon, an executive vice president of the public relations firm Rubenstein Associates and head of its real estate group, said that "professionals use words to soothe and to give hope and positive feelings about properties so there isn't as much anxiety."
So they engage in verbal firefighting. "If prices are going down, we don't like to say that," Mr. Solomon said. "It's 'prices are leveling off,' 'there's a pause in the market.' "
These days, brokers frequently find themselves massaging market buzzwords, or the "macro" language of real estate, to make it more palatable. At the same time they are also busily tweaking the "micro" language of real estate - the language used to describe properties - to make it more alluring and meaningful. Some words are being phased out. Others are being used in fresh ways. As a result, a new micro lexicon is emerging, one that borrows from the art and fashion worlds and in which nearly every word implies affluence, exclusivity and limitlessness.
The reigning buzzword of the micro language today is "lifestyle." Ms. Liebman of Corcoran called it the biggest change in language in the last few years. "We're not selling apartments," she said, "we're selling a lifestyle." The word has tripled in usage since December 2004, Mr. Payack wrote in an e-mail message.
And where "lifestyle" is uttered, "amenities," "name architect" and "spa-bath" tend to follow. The word "designer," as in "designer kitchen," is no longer a sufficient indicator of status. "Everything's a designer kitchen now," Ms. Liebman said. "You'd better say what designer."
The same is true of gyms. "It's not just a gym," she said. "It's a La Palestra gym."
Louise Sunshine, chairwoman emeritus of the Sunshine Group, takes the notion one step further. "Fashion and art have definitely influenced my vocabulary in describing real estate today," she said, adding that it is a phenomenon that began three years ago. She calls the apartments by the architect Peter Marino at 170 East End Avenue "Couture Homes," while the apartments at Cipriani Club Residences are "prêt-à-porter" because they come "ready to wear" with linens, toasters, even toothbrushes.
Laurie Zucker, a developer at the Manhattan Skyline Management Corporation, said the desire for tony apartments and amenities has been on the rise since Sept. 11, 2001. An essential component of such opulence is expansiveness. The phrase "great room" (used to describe a living room that is open to the kitchen as it would be in a suburban home) has been growing in popularity, Ms. Zucker said.
Janice Silver, executive vice president of sales and marketing at Bellmarc Realty, said "oversized" is showing up everywhere, from "oversized bathtub" to "oversized closet."
The word is on "everyone's lips," Mr. Payack said in his e-mail, and has more than 1.5 million real estate references to it in the media and on the Internet.
Mr. Solomon of Rubenstein is fond of "renaissance" ("I try to stick that in whenever possible," he said) and "resurgence" ("People like to live in places that are on the upswing"). Another trend is using words that convey authenticity to express the mere feeling of authenticity. Take the word "landmark." Mr. Solomon said it is now used both literally (as an official city designation) and figuratively (as in something that feels like a landmark even though it is not). Mr. Payack confirmed the trend, writing in an e-mail message that the use of the word is "rising sharply." The same thing is occurring with the word "historic," Mr. Solomon added.
Then there are words that were in vogue a few years ago, like "cozy," but which have since been put out to pasture. "Everyone knew it meant small," Ms. Liebman said. "They figured it out." She now predicts the death of the word "luxury," because it is overused.
So is "spacious," according to Mr. Solomon. "Now we've elevated it to 'grand,' " he said, adding that 'spacious' was not special enough. "Everyone had spacious apartments," he said. "Grand has that ambience to it. It implies high ceilings and airy views." It has even become part of building names, Mr. Solomon said, like 225 Fifth Avenue, which was dubbed "the Grand Madison," when it went on the market last year. Mr. Payack said "grand" has doubled in use around the country, while "spacious" is down 30 percent since December 2004.
A decade ago newspapers and magazines were publishing articles about the rampant hyperbole in real estate listings, the vague adjectives ("fabulous"), clichés ("sun-drenched") and euphemisms ("fixer upper"). The exaggeration was so widespread, complaining about real estate clichés became, well, cliché.
But puffery was reined in to some extent as brokers tried to win the trust and business of prospective clients in a highly competitive market. These days savvy buyers will not go to see a property unless the listing is sufficiently descriptive and has images online.
Indeed, the Internet has revolutionized the way properties are marketed, enabling buyers not only to view photographs but to take virtual tours. Yet photographs can be embellished, too. "People are trying to enhance their photos," said Ms. Silver of Bellmarc. "Now we have professional photographers and professional stagers and people who come in for lighting."
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, yet at the end of the day the building must "live up to the words," Mr. Solomon said. Whether the market will do the same remains to be seen. For some, words are but white noise. "People will always want to live in New York," Ms. Zucker said. "It all averages out in the end."
Still, if you feel the market is too frothy for comfort, you can always retreat into your grand apartment, climb into your spa-bath and wait for a resurgence.