Page 14 - IAV Digital Magazine #439

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Property Prices Lower on Streets With Silly Names, High School Students Find
By Simon Leo Brown
If you are looking for an affordable home in your pre- ferred suburb, it may pay to find the street with the silliest name.
House prices on streets with silly names are signif- icantly lower than houses on near- by streets, a study by Victorian school students has found.
High school girls at Sacred Heart College (SHC) in Geelong conduct- ed the research with guidance from the school's head of science, Adam Cole.
The students identified 27 streets in Victoria with silly names, including Butt Street, Wanke Road and Fanny Street.
"We looked at
them on Google Maps and found two adjacent streets with rela- tively normal names," Dr Cole told ABC Radio Melbourne's Jon Faine.
Working with staff from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the University of Sydney and a Melbourne real estate agent, the girls analyzed house sales on the streets over the past 47 years.
They found that
property prices in streets with silly names were about 20 per cent lower than prop- erties in the nor- mally-named roads.
As the report notes, that amounts to a $140,000 saving on a median- priced Melbourne house.
To explore the reasons behind their findings, the girls surveyed 323 adults about their attitudes towards silly street names.
One third of those surveyed said they would not be happy liv- ing in a street with a name like Beaver Street, Willys Avenue or Grogan Court.
Dr Cole said it was likely this affected the sup- ply-and-demand equation for properties on those streets.
"We think that there is a propor- tion of people that would not be comfortable living in those streets, so they don't compete for
those properties and that would drive prices down," he said.
The silly name effect was more prevalent in the capital city sub- urbs than in regional areas, Dr Cole said, which was "prob- ably because there's more sup- ply, there's more choice in Melbourne".
The price dis- crepancy was also greater in lower-priced properties than more expensive ones.
The team behind the study ana- lyzed more than 4,500 property sales totaling nearly $1.5 billion to reach their findings.
The research was conducted by members of SHC's Bradbury Club, which stu- dents can elect to join to pursue long-term sci- ence, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) projects.
"We don't talk about science, we don't talk about coding or geography or anything like that," Dr Cole said.
"We just have a project to do, and we get it done, but along the way the girls will be learning."
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