One in 14 buyers are prepared to pay more for home with a name rather than number and 40% say perceptions of a property would improve if it had a name, the research from property website Globrix shows.
It found that 7% of potential buyers said they would be prepared to pay more for a home just because it had a name such as Orchard House or Courtenay Cottage, rather than an ordinary house number.
With the average house in the UK valued at £216,968, this would work out as over £2,000 extra for the same property that simply had its postal address changed to a name. Land Registry transactional data reveals that 5.4% of the 26 million homes in the UK, that is around 1.4 million, have names.
Some 40% of those surveyed also said their perceptions of a property would change positively if it had a name rather than a number while one in five, 21%, would assume it’s an older property with character if it had a name. Almost the same amount, 19%, would think it’s in a nice area. While 11% would think it is expensive and 4% would assume its occupants are wealthy.
The survey also shows how perceptions of property are changed by the name of the street they are on. The preferred names for streets are Gardens with 18% saying that they would like this in their address, followed by Avenue at 13% and Lane at 9%. The least popular street names are Circle, Passage, Rise and Row.
The street names that had the biggest positive increase in people’s perceptions were Gardens with 39% saying that their perceptions of a property would improve if it had this word in its address, followed by Green at 33% and Mews at 32%. In contrast the biggest decreases in perceptions were caused by Passage, 40%, Circus, 38%, and Parade, 31%.
‘It may sound ridiculous but it’s part of human psychology that small changes in perception can affect what we’re prepared to pay for something and that includes homes. A property with a name has connotations that people are prepared to shell out extra for, so perhaps canny sellers should re-christen their abodes as soon as they can,’ said Jennifer Warner from Globrix.
