Several people answered your question correctly like Debbie Gartner  and Barbara Todaro  and Tammie White . 

The true definition of short tail and long tail is about how much competition each phrase has, not necessarily the length of the phrase. 

Florida Real Estate is a short tail keyword because it is 1. very competitive, and 2. Very broad. 

Florida Homes for sale is also a short tail keyword. It is very competitive and still very broad. 

It used to be that most SEO companies would tell you to go after those kind of short tail keywords because there is more traffic for those keywords. IN other words, more people type those into Google to find the info than they do other keywords. 

But those companies have NO zippo nada experience in what works in a real estate space. They go by generic filters. You can not do that in real estate if you are not Realtor.com or another big company like zippo, etc. 

Not only that, short tail keywords that are this broad - are NOT the kind of traffic you want to deal with in the first place. 

It takes at least me 4 hours to get from Keywest to where we live and another 10 hours to get to Tallahasee and the panhandle, the other side of the state. So no way would anyone putting a search like that into google be ready to buy a house. They don't even know where in Florida they want to move. Not a good quality lead. 

Long tail keywords do not always have to be long. There are a lot more long tail keywords being indexed by Google than short tail keywords. It is the accumulation of the long tail keywords altogether that benefits you when you set up your website and blog with longtail. 

So going back to my example: 

Loxahatchee homes for sale is considered a longtail but Chicago homes for sale would be considered short tail. This is because the competition for Chicago homes for sale is much fiercer than Loxahatchee homes for sale and more searches are done for Chicago. 

Wellington equestrian properties for sale is a long tail because the search is medium, the competition is strong BUT I can rank for it and zippo does not do well with ranking for avatar based keyword phrases. 

It is not as simple as just answering the question:) There are a lot of variables involved. You want to fly under the radar of zippo so choose keywords that will get you to to the top of google and get you some leads. 

If you are in a very competitive market you will need more longtail keywords because as we said, you don't get as many searches... however.. the traffic that you do get, will be highly targeted and the leads will be very qualified without you having to chase them down. Hope that makes sense. Katerina 

I think, there is a webinar here in the Rain about them. I think it was from Nestor & Katerina Gasset , Katerina posts a lot of great info on SEO and marketing.

If you are targeting neighborhoods, go with long tail. 

Nestor & Katerina Gasset can give you some great advice.
Debbie Gartner  posted an answer already.

You should use long tail to try to rank better. (if you do enough of these, sometimes it will help you rank for shorter tail as well over time).

short tail are shorter/broader phrases (e.g. New Jersey real estate).  More searches, but less targeted and much harder to rank for.

Long tail are more specific (e.g. 2 bedroom condos for sale in maplewood NJ, 3 bedrooms homes with a pool in Mahway, NJ,  how to find an affordable home in XYZ neighborhood, etc)

that's a great question for Nestor & Katerina Gasset (katerina)..... short tail, as I was taught, have much more competition for you than longtail.... can't really compete with the big boys until you've been recognized as a player....but I hope Katerina tunes in to this for you....

short tail would be Elkhart Real Estate-the buyer has no idea where they want to live.

Gingerbread Subdivision, Elkhart In home for sale 3 bed 3 ba with basement is someone who knows what they want and where they want it.  They are close to picking a home.

Short: Thousand Oaks homes for sale

Long: Single story thousand oaks pool home for sale

Longer has less competiton (right now).  For the short I can't rank at all on Google.  For the long "What is my <city name> home worth" I'm in the top 3, with several #1 spots and almost always beating out the "brand name sites" of ZTR

short tail gets 11 times more visibility than long tail.

Here is the description: long-tail-versus-short-tail-keywords

same with urls....

Wayne and Jean,

You have some wonderful answers.

Absolutely the longtail keywords which will fine tune the search and enable you to dominate in that category. The short tail ones are mostly owned by Z, T, R. Nobody can compete with that.

I have learned a bit from the answers here, thanks for asking this

It's tough to rank with short tail terms as you're up against the big boys and girls who have millions of dollars to support it.  You can rank by using long tail terms and get found in your area all while building a niche.

Thanks for Q and the very helpful A's offered here Wayne and Jean Marie Zuhl 

Long tail is what is recommended.

G is getting very good on long tail. I would no longer consider long tail as 3 words. I've typed in some unbelievable sentences & G gets it spot on.

Don't forget that the more you drill down on the keyword phrase, the results will get smaller obviously.

Short tail: home, for sale, real estate. Terms that are searched for a lot.

Long tail: abc subdivision, split floor plan, city level search words. Terms not searched for as often,

The idea is that long tail search strings are easier to rank higher in the search engines.

The difference between the two should be the closeness to the citizen to making a decision.

Long distance: Remove stain from carpet

Short distance: remove cat pee from wool carpet.

But it really boils down to what you can afford. Can you afford to support lots of people who are way upstream or fewer people ready to act.

I am not an SEO guru, but why not plan on using both. If you read the article that Sam Shueh posted you can go after the more competive key words or the less earched key words and dominate that. Personally I would go more targeted with less competition at first. It's easier to see results and get results that way. Then move on to the mroe competitive ones. That's just me though.

Wayne and Jean Marie Zuhl -- Thanks for asking this question. I agree that Katerina knows and teaches this best. I have known about long tail keywords for a long time but I have not been taking advantage of them.

parked and reading...

You have some good answers. I am not good with keywords.

You should be using all of them

Wayne and Jean Marie Zuhl - I think ActiveRain University has few good webinars on this.

Go for long tail - based on what I learned from that.

This is an area I have issue with

This is a great question and I'll have to read the answers, but as I understand it, the long tail questions are more honed in on what market you want to target. 

You should talk to Dick Greenberg he helped me so much on this subject.

Good question.

Kenneth has a great answer.

Good question and members with a far better understanding of the subject have provided some good answers.  

I have nothing more to add than what Kenneth J. Jones said. 

Sam Shueh has provided a great link to the differences and I also recommend using both, when possible.