Your MLS Remarks Are the Cheapest Marketing You Own. Denver Agents, Use Them.

Jerad Larkin
1 hour ago
7 min read

A Denver agent showed me a listing last month with four hundred thousand dollars of renovation in it and a description that opened with "Welcome home!" Three sentences later it said "must see to appreciate." That was the whole ad.

MLS remarks are the only piece of listing marketing that is free, permanent, and copied word for word onto every portal, every app, and now into every AI tool a buyer talks to before they ever call you. Most agents spend four minutes on them.

How should a real estate agent write MLS listing remarks?

Lead with the property's single best specific feature, name real materials instead of adjectives, describe the home and never the buyer, then close with a next step. In Denver Metro, lead with what the comps do not have.

I am Jerad Larkin, a Sales Executive with Chicago Title Colorado, and I teach listing marketing to Denver Metro agents most weeks of the year. Remarks come up in nearly every class, usually because somebody just watched a week of showings evaporate behind a description that told buyers nothing they could not already see in the photos.

Here is the structure I hand out, the words that actually move a number, and the two categories of language that create real exposure for a Colorado broker.

Why Do MLS Remarks Still Matter in 2026?

Photos get scrolled. Video gets watched by buyers who already clicked. Remarks are what gets read in the gap between interested and convinced, and they are the only part of your listing that gets copied verbatim to every syndication partner you have.

Your remarks outlive the listing

Sold listings stay indexed. Third-party sites keep the description for years. Long after the sign comes down, that paragraph is still the public record of how the property was presented, and it is still shaping what the next appraiser, the next agent, and the next buyer believe about that block.

Remarks are input for AI tools now

When a buyer asks an AI assistant about a Denver Metro neighborhood, the model is working from whatever text exists about those properties. Generic adjectives give it nothing to repeat. Specific nouns give it something to cite. It is the same principle behind how AI search decides which agents to name. Specificity is what gets pulled.

What Should Go in the First Sentence?

Not a greeting. The first sentence should name the one thing this property has that its competition does not.

This is not a style preference. Zillow's analysis of more than one hundred thousand sold listings found that concrete feature language, terms like shaker cabinets, subway tile, and barn door, tracked with homes selling faster and closer to or above list price. Vague praise did not.

So instead of "Beautiful home in a great location," write "South-facing 1908 Baker bungalow with a fully permitted basement conversion completed in 2024." One of those is searchable. One of those is filler.

What Is the Five-Part Structure That Works?

Five parts, in this order. Once you have done it twice, the whole thing takes fifteen minutes.

1. The differentiator

One sentence. The single feature a buyer cannot get in the three comps down the street. If you cannot name it in two minutes, you do not have a copywriting problem, you have a pricing conversation waiting for you.

2. The flow

Walk the house in the order a buyer walks it. Entry, main living, kitchen, primary suite, secondary bedrooms, basement, outdoor space. Buyers build a mental map while they read, and a description that jumps from the backyard to the kitchen to the roof breaks it.

3. The proof

Systems with years attached. Roof 2021. Furnace and air conditioning 2023. Sewer line scoped and replaced. Class 4 impact-resistant shingles, which carry more weight in Denver Metro than almost anywhere in the country because of what our insurance market has done to hail claims. Dates beat adjectives because dates cannot be argued with.

4. The location line

Name real, verifiable things. The trail, the park, the light rail station, the specific commercial corridor, the distance in blocks. Skip subjective claims about what the neighborhood is like, which is exactly where most agents wander into the trouble covered further down this post.

5. The close

One line about what happens next. Keep showing logistics and your own contact information out of the public field, for reasons I come back to below.

Which Words Help and Which Words Hurt?

Words that help

Materials, brands, model years, dimensions, and named systems. Quartz. White oak. Pella. Mini-split. Nine-foot ceilings. Sixty-five hundred square foot lot. Detached two-car with 240-volt service. Those are the words a buyer searches for, an appraiser confirms, and an AI tool can safely repeat.

Words that cost you money

"TLC," "as-is," "motivated seller," "bring all offers," and "priced to sell" all read as the same instruction to a buyer's agent: negotiate hard. If the condition is real, describe it factually and let the price carry the message. That is the same discipline as the condition conversation with Denver sellers, where turning condition into arithmetic beats apologizing for it.

Words that do nothing

Charming. Cozy. Stunning. Must see. Won't last. Welcome home. They occupy characters and communicate nothing. In a Denver condo listing competing against roughly six months of supply, every wasted character is a character you needed for the HOA fee, the reserve study, or the parking situation.

What Are the Fair Housing Traps in a Listing Description?

This is the part worth slowing down on. NAR's fair housing guidance for brokerages is direct about the rule of thumb: advertising should describe the property, not the people expected to live in it.

That rules out "family-friendly," "perfect for retirees," "great for a young couple," "safe neighborhood," and "exclusive." It rules out referencing a nearby house of worship as a selling point. It rules out describing the current or future residents at all, even warmly, even by accident.

And intent is not the test. If a complaint gets filed, the question is whether the advertisement indicated a preference or a limitation tied to a protected class, not whether you meant it that way. Colorado agents trip on the same three every time: "family," "safe," and "walking distance."

What Does REcolorado Allow in Public Remarks?

Public Remarks exist to describe the listed property for public display on portals, brochures, and flyers. REcolorado's MLS Rules and Regulations prohibit personal and third-party advertising in that field, which includes phone numbers, email addresses, and other ways to contact someone.

Showing instructions, lockbox details, compensation language, and your contact information belong in the broker-only fields. Violations can be reported by any other subscriber through REcolorado's ReportIt tool, and they are. Every Denver Metro agent should read that rules document once, on purpose, instead of learning it through a violation notice.

Where Does the Specific Information Come From?

Specific beats clever, and specific comes from data. Part of what I do as a Sales Executive with Chicago Title Colorado is get Denver Metro agents the property information that makes remarks concrete: what actually closed nearby, what the lot really is, what is recorded against the parcel, and how the current owner took title. Most of those free tools are already sitting in an account agents never log into. If your description is vague, it is usually because your research was.

What Should You Do Before Your Next Listing Goes Live?

Six steps, about twenty minutes.

One. Write the differentiator sentence before anything else. If it takes more than two minutes, the price is the story and you should go have that talk first.

Two. Walk the house in buyer order and write one clause per space. No paragraph breaks needed, just order.

Three. Add every system that has a year attached to it. Pull the years from the seller disclosure and the permit record, not from memory.

Four. Delete every adjective that is not attached to a noun a buyer could independently verify.

Five. Read it once looking only for language that describes people instead of property. That pass takes ninety seconds and it is the one that protects your license.

Six. Move every piece of contact and showing information out of Public Remarks and into the broker fields where it belongs.

Then read it out loud. If it sounds like a brochure from 2009, rewrite the first sentence and run it again. The same rule applies to the sign-in copy and follow-up in the Denver open house playbook. Specific language wins in every channel, not just this one.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long should an MLS listing description be?

Long enough to cover the five parts and not one character longer. Most strong Denver Metro descriptions land in the six hundred to nine hundred character range. Check your own MLS field limit before you start writing, because limits vary by system and getting truncated mid-sentence on a portal looks careless.

What words should Denver real estate agents avoid in MLS remarks?

Avoid anything that describes the occupant rather than the property: family-friendly, perfect for retirees, safe area, exclusive. Separately, avoid value-destroying shorthand like TLC, as-is, and motivated seller unless you are intentionally signaling a discount. The first list is a compliance problem. The second is a money problem.

Can I put my phone number in MLS public remarks in Colorado?

No. REcolorado prohibits personal and third-party advertising in Public Remarks, and that includes phone numbers and email addresses. Put contact details and showing instructions in the broker-only fields instead.

Do MLS remarks affect how AI tools describe a listing?

Yes, indirectly. AI assistants summarize from whatever text exists about a property, and syndicated remarks are usually the largest block of text there is. Specific, factual language gives a model something accurate to repeat. Adjectives give it nothing, so it fills the gap from somewhere else.

Should I use AI to write my listing description?

Use it to draft and to check, not to decide. Feed it your own specifics: systems, dates, materials, measurements, permit history. Then review every line for fair housing language yourself. An AI tool will happily write "perfect for a growing family," and your license number is the one attached to the listing.

If you want the remarks template I hand out in class, or the property data that makes a description specific enough to be worth reading, come get it at milehightitleguy.com. That is also where the upcoming Denver Metro classes and the free Chicago Title tools for agents live. Reach out and I will send it over.

Jerad Larkin

Sales Executive | Chicago Title Colorado

milehightitleguy.com

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