Writing a listing that fills the room

The photos do most of the work

People decide from the photos and then read the words to confirm it. Four to eight is the right number. Fewer and it looks like you are hiding something, more and nobody gets to the end.

• Shoot in daylight with the curtains open and the big light off. Phone cameras handle daylight far better than a ceiling bulb.
• Stand in the doorway for the first shot so people can see the shape of the room. A close-up of a duvet tells them nothing.
• Show the bathroom they would use and the kitchen. Leaving them out makes people assume the worst, and they are the two rooms every single message asks about.
• Tidy, but do not stage it into a showroom. A real room that looks lived in beats an empty one.
• Nothing identifying in shot. No post on the hall table, no house number through the window.

We strip the GPS data out of every photo in your browser before it uploads, so the location baked in by your phone never reaches us.

The title

Area, room type, and the one thing that makes it worth having. Skip the rent, because it shows on the card already.

The description

Answer the questions you would otherwise answer twenty times by message. Around 120 to 250 words covers it.

1. The room. Size, bed, storage, desk, window, which way it faces.
2. What is included. Heating, electricity, broadband, bins. Be specific, because bills included means different things to different people.
3. The house. Who lives there, how many share the bathroom, whether there are pets, whether it is a quiet house or a busy one.
4. Getting about. The bus that actually runs, how long to the town or the campus, parking.
5. The arrangement. Full week or Monday to Friday, how long, deposit, and whether the room is free over the summer.

Say the awkward thing rather than leaving it out. A room with no parking, a dog and a 7am shower queue will still let. It will let to somebody who knew all three before they arrived, which is the point.

The price

Too high and the room sits there. Too low and you spend a fortnight wading through fifty messages. Asking prices on listing sites run well above what rooms actually let for, so do not price off what you see advertised.

The calculator works it out from RTB figures and shows you where the rent lands against the €14,000 you can earn tax free. Worth two minutes before you post.

Where the law actually sits

Plenty of guides tell homeowners that the Equal Status Acts govern who they can let a room to. For a room in the home you live in, that is wrong, and it is worth knowing the real position.

The Equal Status Acts do not cover accommodation shared with the owner. Citizens Information puts it plainly: somebody renting a room in their landlord's home is not protected by those Acts. So the ten discrimination grounds, and the housing assistance ground, do not bind you the way they bind a landlord letting a whole property.

The exemption is narrow. It is about sharing your own home. Let a whole house, or a room in a property you do not live in, and you are letting a tenancy, the equality rules apply in full, and the RTB comes into it too.

General information, not legal advice. If a particular case matters, a solicitor is the person to ask.

Our listing rules

Our rules are tighter than the law, deliberately. The law says what you may do in your own home. This is a public site, and a listing is read by hundreds of people who are not going to live with you.

So the rule here is simple. Describe the room, the house and the arrangement. Leave out who you will and will not accept. The one thing we do allow is saying the household is all women or all men, because that is a fact about the house that people genuinely need before they enquire.

The rewritten versions are not just safer. They work better. Every one of them tells somebody something useful about living there, and the originals only tell them who to be.

Common questions