What’s your unlucky investment property number?

photo credit: Phil Romans

When selecting a new investment property to add to their portfolio, what do most buyers look at first? The price tag? The location? What about the number on the front of it?

According to the BBC, some people are seriously put off buying homes for sale just because of their house or street number – in the UK 13 is considered most undesirable, even to the extent that some local authorities are banning its use in developments.

A real estate market myth?

The broadcaster says agent Linda Hayden has noted two ’13s’ have proven hard to shift in the town of Bewdley, quoting her as saying: “We are a society that can justify most things in life, and yet we’re still frightened by superstition that living in number 13 is not where we’d like to be.”

It might just be me but this is one of the oddest things I’ve heard in a long time – there’s the saying ‘age is just a number’, which is a tad on the optimistic side, but a house number really is just a number.

Of course, 13 is a UK-based superstition, but in China number four is supposedly a bad idea and now I think about it I’ve seen condo complexes with 12a and 12b as floors but no 13.

Just ‘unlucky’ property?

There’s plenty of general ‘unlucky property’ theories and incidents out there too – last year one man in Karlshoefen, Germany, started to get fed up when a car span off the nearby road and smashed into his house – for the tenth time.

There’s a debate here somewhere, and I wonder if any other investors have experienced problems with buildings due to an ‘unlucky’ number or form of supposed curse?