Have you heard the superstition that when you move, you should leave your old broom behind, so you don’t carry bad luck into your new home? Or that you should bring bread and salt, then boil milk to create abundance? How about the old saying, ‘A Saturday flit is a short sit,’ meaning if you move on a Saturday, the stay in your new house will be brief!
Silly old wives’ tales? Perhaps! (Plus, who wants to be charged a removal fee by the new owner for leaving that old broom behind!) But we can be a superstitious bunch in this country! A YouGov Realtime survey found 34% of Brits stated they were either “very” or “somewhat” superstitious, with some even suffering from Triskaidekaphobia (the fear of the number 13)! It’s why you’ll often see the number skipped in buildings, lifts and hotels. In the past, some local councils, including Lewes district council and Herefordshire county council, even banned new housing developments from using the number because people were put off living there.
We wanted to see if there was much truth behind this, so we carried out an analysis on how door number 13 performs when it’s put up for sale. We compared the door number to numbers considered lucky: 7 and 8.
A Compare My Move survey actually found one in five Brits would be put off buying a property if it had 13 in the address. Of those surveyed, 64% believed the number was unlucky, 51% said they were superstitious, and 43% thought it might affect the resale value. So perhaps that’s the reason why we found that 38% of streets in the UK have no number 13 house at all.
Do the numbers back up the claims?
Let’s see what our analysis says…
The average last transaction price of homes with a door number of 13 was £232,707.73. For doors numbered 7 and 8 (considered “lucky”), it was £234,919.50. So, whilst not a huge difference, we are seeing door numbers 7 and 8 achieving slightly higher prices, with door number 13 being worth £2,211.77 less than door numbers 7 or 8.
We didn't find any evidence that door number 13 was withdrawn more from the market. In fact, it was withdrawn slightly less than door number 7 or 8, with door number 13 experiencing 19.3% of withdrawals and doors 7 and 8, 20.2%. The same happened for fall-throughs, where 9.3% of door number 13's fell through compared to 9.6% of door 7 and 8, so a negligible difference. For price reductions, the difference was just a percentage point, with 21.1% of door number 13 experiencing a price reduction versus 22.1% for doors 7 and 8. Ultimately, in terms of market performance, door number 13 does not appear to perform poorly. Even Time to Sell, (the number of days it takes for a property to go from New Instruction to Sold Subject to Contract), we saw barely any difference between door number 13 versus 7 and 8. Door 13 takes an average of 74.68 days to sell, compared to, again a negligible 74.85 days for door 7 or 8.
It's an interesting result, especially considering that when we looked into whether people avoided moving on Friday 13th in our analysis here, it appeared that they did. This date was noticeably less popular than other Fridays in the calendar. The data suggests buyers are fine with door number 13, so long as they don’t have to move in on Friday the 13th! Perhaps we have more Brits suffering from Paraskevidekatriaphobia (fear of Friday the 13th) than triskaidekaphobia!
Conclusion
Ultimately, whilst door number 13 may sell for slightly less than door 7 or 8, homeowners living at door 13 can breathe a sigh of relief! The fact that a third of Brits claim to be superstitious suggests you may have a smaller pool of buyers, but the numbers show that overall homemovers are not perturbed by the number enough to stop them from putting in an offer on their dream home.
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