Dupont, Metro, Busboys and Poets: The Terms Used to Lure DC Renters

• May 24, 2016

by Nena Perry-Brown

Dupont, Metro, and Busboys and Poets. These are some of the terms most often used to market apartments in DC, per a new tool from Zillow. The infographic tool shows the most frequently-used buzz words that landlords around the country use to attract potential renters to their properties.

“Dupont”, with 1,327 mentions in Zillow rental listings, is the most often used term for DC rentals. Rounding out the three most frequent listing terms are “Circle” and “Metro station”, both with at least 300 more mentions than the next term, the much more-generic “nation.” Other often-mentioned and ultra DC-specific words and phrases include “Foggy Bottom”, “NoMa”, “Georgia Avenue”, “Wisconsin Avenue”, “Woodley”, “Orange/Blue”, “Busboys and Poets”, and “walk to Eastern Market”.

Some of the more random and less-apparent popular terms are “Scout”, “Vaughan”, “three distinct”, and “interior highlights”. Now if we could just see how effective each term is in garnering renters’ interest.

With the tool, Zillow examined all rental listings on the site from 2015 and abbreviated and tallied all usages of each term to ensure inclusion, so UrbanTurf used the correctly-spelled, complete version of each term for this article. The frequency was calculated by counting each instance of use and dividing by the total number of words in all listings for that jurisdiction.

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/how_dc_landlords_peddle_apartments/11271