"story book"

Cottage
Bungalow
comfortable
Enchanting
Perfect for a single
Perfect for retired
Perfect for a starter

"Adorable" and "charming" are the big ones around here.

Great potential

Hee... "great potential" here means "it's a total dump and needs a very expensive or extremely time-consuming amount of work" and never has anything to do with the size of the house. It's the replacement for "handyman special" which seems to have been phased out since it's usually taken to mean "on the verge of collapse" these days. :-)

LOL johnmari! "great potential" means the same thing here. Also, anything labeled "as-is" is code for 'dump'.

I love 'realtor speak'! Our house has a one acre retention pond behind it, and houses in this neighborhood are referred to as 'lake front', and even 'waterfront'! I'm waiting for the day when small houses are referred to as 'green' or 'ecologically responsible'. LOL

Yeah, we stopped looking at anything with "as-is" in the description about halfway through our house-hunt last year, since it usually meant either "repossessed and stripped", "flipper ran out of money halfway through a gut remodel", or "old house that needs new heating system, roof, plumbing and electrical to be habitable, and the seller isn't going to do anything about it or lower his price a cent further". One "as-is" we looked at - or rather, walked in the kitchen door, picked our jaws back up off the floor, and walked out! - not only had the cabinets, appliances and fixtures all been removed, as is not that uncommon with repos, but someone had torn all the copper wiring and plumbing pipes out of the walls to boot! That was probably a break-in, since copper theft from construction projects and vacant houses is getting to be a big problem, but was the price reduced further? Of course not.

We did actually put in an offer on one bank-owned as-is house because the price was good enough that we would have been able to afford the repairs/updating, it would have been livable (had heat, functioning electric and plumbing) during repairs, the lot was absurdly large for its close proximity to downtown, and the house DID have real potential. Mostly it was just an ugly-inside (exterior was rather nice) 1000sf 1960s ranch, complete with orange shag carpet and fake knotty pine paneling, but the layout was perfect to turn the 3 tiny bedrooms and 1 3/4 cramped baths into two generous bedrooms with good-sized ensuite baths. A developer got it with a cash offer, though, and our realtor told me he had plans to tear the house down to put up EIGHT new houses on the two-acre lot. Yuck.

flgargoyle, I see "green" on the occasional new-construction listing (I'm masochistic enough to still be getting the RE listings by email)... and invariably it's a big house in a subdivision. I suppose if you have SIP construction and Energy Star everything and so on and so forth you can call your house "green" even if it's 4000sf, but to me it's sort of mutually exclusive or even outright greenwashing, especially if such a mega-house is only occupied by three or four people. Big LOL on the "waterfront" label for the retention pond though.