Real estate gurus and HGTV stars will tell you to buy the worst house in the best neighborhood. That will theoretically improve your chances of making money when you sell the house later. If you’re looking to get the most house for your money, however, a group of high school students says you should look for houses on streets with silly names.
Nobody wants to live on Butt St., but it might mean you’ll get a better value on the property. According to ABC News Australia, a group of high school students from Sacred Heart College looked at their city’s office of statistics and local real estate info, and they determined that prices really are lower for houses on streets with “silly” names.
High school girls created an extensive analytical project to figure out the financial effect of silly street names.
To start with, of course, they had to figure out which streets have silly names. They looked over all the options, and picked 27 deemed “silly.” They had names like Butt, Fanny, and Wanke. Others included Beaver St. and Willys Avenue. If the name would make a teenager giggle, it was added to the study.
Then they found adjacent streets with normal-sounding street names and added those to the list. Then they went through the intense work of analyzing real estate data for all those streets for the past 47 years. That’s more than 4,500 property sales. And it turns out that buying on silly street could save you a ton of money.
According to the young women’s research, houses on silly streets sell for about 20 percent less on average than houses on normal-sounding streets. That amounts to a $106,000 saving on a median-priced Melbourne house.
Living on Butt St. could save you $106,000.
To figure out why real estate prices were so much lower for silly-sounding streets, the students surveyed 323 adults about street names. A third of respondents said they’d be embarrassed to give a name like Beaver St. when telling someone their address.
That’s a pretty amazing amount of work, and these kids did it as part of an after school club project. Sacred Heart has a club for kids interested in longer-term STEM projects like this one, which teaches the kids by having them approach a particular problem–in this case, how do people feel about silly street names–then spending a long time figuring out how to solve it. It took a lot of work, research, and creativity to find out, even if they also got to laugh about “Butt St.” a lot.
(Image: iStockPhoto / tribal-warrior)