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Write a title and description that converts
Guests skim. Your title and the first line of your description do most of the work in deciding whether someone taps into your listing at all, long before they scroll down to floor plans or amenities. Getting those first few words right is worth more than almost anything else you'll do to the listing itself.
Title formula that works in Lagos and Abuja
Vibe plus room type plus neighbourhood is a formula that works almost every time: "Sunlit studio in Lekki Phase 1" beats "Nice place to stay" because it tells a guest three useful things in five words. Avoid generic filler like cosy, must see, or amazing - guests skim past adjectives that could describe any listing on the platform. Instead, name the one concrete detail that makes this room different from the twenty others in the same search results: a balcony, a specific street, a view, a floor number in a serviced building. If you're short on inspiration, look at your best photo and describe out loud what makes it worth a second look - that's usually your title.
Lead with what's unique
Pool? 24/7 power? Walking distance to a market or a bus stop? Open your description with the one thing that makes your place different from similar listings nearby, not with a generic welcome line. Guests reading five listings back to back remember the specific thing, not the friendly tone. If you genuinely don't have a standout feature, lead with the strongest practical detail instead - reliable water pressure, a quiet street, a newly renovated bathroom. The goal of your first sentence is to earn the next ten seconds of attention, not to summarise the whole listing. Save the full feature list for the structured amenities section further down, where guests expect to find it.
Be specific about what's included
Generator, inverter, water tank, fast WiFi, secure parking - list the practical, Nigeria-specific essentials in a short bullet list near the top of the description, not buried in a paragraph. These are the details that decide bookings here more than almost anywhere else, because guests have been burned before by listings that quietly left them out. If your WiFi is genuinely fast, say the approximate speed; if your power backup only covers certain appliances, say so plainly rather than let a guest discover it the hard way. Precision builds trust, and trust is what turns a browse into a booking, especially with a guest who has no other way to verify your claims before arrival.
Match your tone to your guest
A description written for a long-term tenant reads differently from one written for a short weekend stay - a tenant wants stability, quiet, and practical living details like refuse collection days and estate rules; a short-let guest wants convenience, vibe, and things to do nearby. If you host both, keep two versions of your description ready and switch based on the enquiry, or write a version general enough to serve both without losing specificity. Either way, avoid a description so generic it could apply to any of the two - a guest can tell, and it reads as low effort even when the listing itself is genuinely good. Read your description back as if you were the guest you're trying to attract, not as the host who already knows the space intimately - details that feel obvious to you are often exactly the ones a stranger needs spelled out.
Structure it so it's skimmable
Break your description into short paragraphs or a few labelled sections rather than one dense block of text - most guests are reading on a phone screen while comparing several listings in other tabs. Two or three sentences per idea, then a line break, reads far better than a wall of text that guests give up on halfway through. Bold or capitalised mini-headers like "The space" or "Getting around" help guests jump straight to what they care about. A description that's easy to skim gets read more fully than one that's technically more complete but visually intimidating on a small screen. Put your single strongest selling point in its own short line near the top rather than burying it in the middle of a paragraph - guests scanning quickly often only absorb the first sentence of each block, so that's where the highest-value information belongs.
Say what's nearby, precisely
Instead of close to everything, name the actual walk time to the nearest bus stop, the market, or a landmark guests would recognise. "Eight minutes' walk to Shoprite, Ikeja" tells a guest something they can verify and plan around; close to shopping tells them nothing. If you're near a well-known company, hospital, or university, mention it directly - a huge share of Flatmates search traffic is guests specifically looking to stay near one destination. This single addition often does more for bookings than almost any other line in the description, because it answers the question guests are actually asking before they even open the listing. If getting to your area involves a specific route - a particular bus line, a well-known junction to watch for - mention that too, since it removes a real source of pre-arrival anxiety for guests unfamiliar with the area.
Review it after your first few bookings
Once you've hosted a handful of guests, revisit your description with their actual questions in mind. If three different guests asked the same thing before booking - about parking, about the water schedule, about the gate code process - that's a sign the description should answer it upfront next time. This pairs naturally with refreshing your listing on a regular basis, and once your description is converting well, the next thing worth checking is whether your price is doing its share of the work too, since a great description can't fully compensate for a price that's out of step with the market. Treat the description as a living document that improves with real feedback, not a one-time task you finish and never revisit again.
