A database of average home price by street name

February 4, 2015 3:14 PM

The Secrets of Street Names and Home Values
posted by d. z. wang (34 comments total)

I keep getting the same link for all the links. My street says 21% below average so I am not liking the same link.
posted by 724A at 3:26 PM on February 4, 2015

Mod note: Looks like the sub-links take a second to load. Try it out, if it doesn't work for people let me know. It's a neat set of examples, though.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 3:27 PM on February 4, 2015

All five of those links just take me to the top of the FPP NYT article. (Firefox on Android tablet). Then it wants me to tap to see the article, then it just shows the same article.
posted by Autumn Leaf at 3:30 PM on February 4, 2015

I want to punch that interface in the mouth.
posted by Sphinx at 3:32 PM on February 4, 2015 [6 favorites]

Aww. That wasn't the effect I hoped to create. It sounds like restless_nomad knows what I tried to do, though, so I'll let him edit my post as he sees fit.

I don't know about these mobile devices, though. They will surely cause the youth to contradict their parents, gobble their food, and neglect the exercise of both mind and body in favor of idle chatter.
posted by d. z. wang at 3:37 PM on February 4, 2015 [5 favorites]

Sphinx: I'll hold that interface for you, so you can get a good shot.
posted by easily confused at 3:39 PM on February 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

My street name, which is just a number, gets -13%. But if I lived around the corner on Serpentine Ave it would be +2%. And Serpentine Place, if it existed, would be worth almost twice as much as average!

I approve of this; maybe it'll lead to more cool street names and fewer bland ones. Or maybe rich people are better at naming their streets. I'm not sure what to take from this, other than that it feeds into my wish that my street had a better name.

P.S. (please don't stalk me)
posted by The corpse in the library at 3:40 PM on February 4, 2015

This is very definitely US only. The closest match to my Toronto street name is supposed to make my house worth 60% more than average (ha!), while the houses one street over are worth 37% less than average.
posted by maudlin at 3:41 PM on February 4, 2015

Obligatory Chris Rock joke.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 3:55 PM on February 4, 2015 [4 favorites]

I thought my street name was unique - no match in any other part of the country!
posted by King Sky Prawn at 4:00 PM on February 4, 2015

I'm betting shibboleth-y names like Bryn Mawr have a big multiplier.
posted by leotrotsky at 4:00 PM on February 4, 2015

My street's not on the list. Which is a shame, because I wanted to see whether Cheap Street is accurately named in the US. (It is, for its very central location, fairly accurately named here in England).
posted by ambrosen at 4:01 PM on February 4, 2015

Be great if there were a ranking.
posted by leotrotsky at 4:02 PM on February 4, 2015

I live on a president street (Johnson - the first one) in a neighborhood where the streets go in order of the president's term, so it's pretty educational in addition to just marking a place.
posted by triggerfinger at 4:07 PM on February 4, 2015 [3 favorites]

Wow, my whole neighborhood is a total disaster. My street is 37% lower than average, and it's the highest one in the neighborhood. I wonder if it's just a reflection of vintage: neighborhoods that were laid out in the mid-19th century are likely to be cheap, maybe?
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 4:07 PM on February 4, 2015

Some of the effects are pretty big, my street gets +585% more. And seems to only exist in California and Mississippi.
posted by thefoxgod at 4:08 PM on February 4, 2015

I also have one of those only-one-in-the-country street names. I already knew that though because I can start typin it on google maps and by about the 6th or 7th letter it knows the city/state/zip
posted by RustyBrooks at 4:09 PM on February 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

OK, switched to the PC and after allowing NewsDev scripts I can finally see what those links do. There's no "St" provided for where I grew up but if I had grown up in the US on a "Rd" it'd be worth 23% less than average and as a "Ave", 14% more.

I guess that clever scripting of the APIs at https://www.zillow.com/howto/api/APIOverview.htm could give you rankings and other cool stuff, for a price.
posted by Autumn Leaf at 4:15 PM on February 4, 2015

Malcolm X Blvd (which starts almost directly across the street from where I live) gives you a 376% boost in value. Malcolm X Street drops the value by 95%. I suspect this has a lot to do with Bedford-Stuyvesant being the next upcoming neighborhood in Brooklyn, but I could be wrong. Honestly, I'm surprised. It's a street name that is even more indicative of an African American population than MLK Drive. I'm not surprised about Malcolm X Street though.
posted by Hactar at 4:27 PM on February 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

One problem with this is that zillow is ridiculously wrong on my side of my city. I recently moved two miles to another neighborhood. My old street says +37%, which is wrong (it should be negative) and the street I live on now is even more wrong (maybe very slightly less negative.) I looked at my old house on zillow less than a year ago. It said it was worth 3X its true market value. This was for a bog-standard 3BR ranch on a slab in the Midwest. There's certainly no bidding war here. Results are similar for other houses in this area.
posted by double block and bleed at 4:32 PM on February 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

The vast majority of streets here in Tokyo are unnamed.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:56 PM on February 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

I thought my street name was unique - no match in any other part of the country!

Hah, mine too. And it's a small street, so it's only like 25 homes.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 4:58 PM on February 4, 2015

Part of this functions on street name distribution. How a street gets its name has a lot to do with local geography, local flora/fauna, local/regional history & persons of interest, as well as tradition. Street names, beyond the old chestnuts of Main, West, and School are localized. There won't be a Birch St in a region where birch trees don't grow. Therefore, a "high value" street name is just showing you have a higher probability of living in a high value real estate market due to that name's average geographic distribution.
posted by missmary6 at 5:46 PM on February 4, 2015

I guess to finish my thought, I got annoyed at the NYTimes article framing it as the SEKRET of street names, when, presumably, if you have a street name in mind, you already are curious about a specific location. And therefore, you already have the info to just.....check out the local real estate market. The idea that a street name adds "extra" info is silly. Maybe I'm just hitting NYTimes infographic overload.
posted by missmary6 at 5:55 PM on February 4, 2015

Chardonnay Armani Estates Drive
Rancho Whispering Isle Place
Chateau St. Novelty Blvd.

Seriously, you just start mixing and matching this shit, like Carolyn Burnham.

Crystal Heritage Hill Turn
Mediterranean Lemon Memory Circle
The Trilogy at Newcastle End
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 6:57 PM on February 4, 2015 [4 favorites]

How a street gets its name has a lot to do with local geography, local flora/fauna, local/regional history & persons of interest, as well as tradition.

Or, in the case of the Boston area, you just recycle the same two dozen or so street names over and over again in each town.
posted by DiscourseMarker at 7:33 PM on February 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

I used to own a place on Centinela Ave. There's only one, and it's in West LA, so it's 221% higher than the average. But for people who live nearby, Centinela is known as a busy thoroughfare. There's one quiet section of it at the northern end that people aren't aware of since it isn't actually continuous with the rest of Centinela, which is where my house was. I remember thinking when we sold the place that it probably would have gone for a lot more if the people who named my street had picked a separate name for that quiet northern bit of Centinela, since my suspicion is a lot of buyers didn't even bother to come look because they heard "Centinela" and thought it was busy and loud. I actually saw people make a sour face a few times when I told them I lived on Centinela, and I almost didn't click through to the listing when it went up for sale and I was looking to buy, for the same reason.
posted by town of cats at 8:00 PM on February 4, 2015

Some of the surrounding 'burbs here have a few wind-y disorienting areas where you'll get lost in a sea of the same street name every which way...I learned that this is because it's cheaper for housing developers to buy up a few specific street names and then spread them out into "courts" and "drives" and "ways" and such because they have to pay the city / county / whatever for each unique "proper" name but they can alternate "drives" and "courts" and "ways" within a certain amount of reason to stretch out their purchase.
posted by aydeejones at 8:12 PM on February 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

Nationwide, homes on streets named The Alameda are worth 29% than the average U.S. home.

Well, since I'm paying $2700 for a 2BR apt, there must be a bunch of $50 shitboxes somewhere else in the US to tank the average.

There are no other streets with that name in the data.

???????
posted by sideshow at 8:19 PM on February 4, 2015

Mediterranean Lemon Memory Circle

Wasn't he one of those old Italian blues guys?
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:29 PM on February 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

aydeejones, do you live in Atlanta by any chance?
posted by madcaptenor at 7:34 AM on February 5, 2015

I used to do deliveries all around Atlanta. one of the places I'd drive up to was this suburban development up in Alpharetta, GA that was a middle-class, retail wasteland of a place filled with newish red brick apartment buildings, stores, and houses.

I used to turn right on to Ronald Reagan Blvd off the highway, a four-lane boulevard with concrete medians. the vibe of the place was bleak, even in the spring, just lots of concrete and yellowing grass. I never saw a single person using the sidewalks and there were rarely ever any cars on the road, even during afternoon rush hour. no animals, no birdsong, just me in my white van blaring podcasts.

there's a light along the road that always favors the turn on for the closed off, well-manicured apartment complex and a total dead end failure of land development. this was the intersection of Nancy Reagan Dr and Ronald Reagan Blvd.

metaphors write themselves, sometimes
posted by saucy_knave at 7:35 AM on February 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

I was about to come in here and complain about using "average" as a measure of home price and then I read the article and looked at the details and the NYT used median! Someone using the right statistical measure has totally made my day.
posted by LizBoBiz at 10:57 AM on February 5, 2015

Well, I'm glad I seem to be on an upward trajectory overall since I moved to the States (with one blip):

Edwards Place -> +21%
Doran Street -> +103%
Central Avenue -> -24%
Atoll Avenue -> +138%
Emelita Street -> +188%

Sky's the limit!
posted by Hairy Lobster at 11:35 AM on February 5, 2015