MLS Update

Greater Lansing Association of REALTORS®

A buyer scrolling listings on their phone, or asking an AI assistant to find a home nearby, gives your description one shot to earn a second look. Soon, that description gets five times more room to make it.

Starting Sept. 14, GLAR is expanding the MLS listing description field from 800 characters to 4,000. On the surface, that is a technical change to a data field. In practice, it changes how well a listing gets found, understood, and trusted, by buyers, by search engines, and increasingly by the AI tools buyers now use to search.

“Every added character is a chance to help a buyer picture the home, and to help search engines and AI tools understand it.”

The Accessibility Case

Not every buyer experiences a listing the same way. A buyer using a screen reader does not see the photos. The description is the home, described in words, and it is often the only part of the listing that assistive technology can fully convey. An 800-character description that reads “3 bed, 2 bath, updated kitchen” tells a sighted buyer almost nothing and tells a buyer relying on a screen reader even less. A fuller description, one with room to describe the layout, the natural light, and the flow between rooms, gives every buyer an equal chance to understand the home before they ever schedule a showing.

The Search and AI Answer Case

Search engines and AI answer tools do not reward length. They reward specificity. A description that names the neighborhood, the school walk zone, the recent roof replacement, and the way a primary suite addition works for a multigenerational household gives a search engine or an AI assistant real content to match against a real buyer’s question. A description capped at 800 characters rarely has room for any of that, and it reads the same as every other short listing nearby, which makes it easy for both people and algorithms to skip past.

What This Means for Your Listings

The fix is not to fill every character. It is to finally write the description the home deserves: specific, accurate, and complete enough that a buyer, a search engine, or an AI tool can understand exactly what makes this home worth a closer look.

Start thinking about your next listing description differently. The room to describe it well is here. Use it.