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Op-Chart

The Secrets of Street Names and Home Values

Spencer Rascoff and

IN “Romeo and Juliet,” the young Miss Capulet poses one of literature’s most famous questions: “What’s in a name?”

When it comes to a street name, the answer is: a lot.

Street names tell stories. They tell us if a neighborhood is expensive or affordable, brand-new or decades old. With street names alone, we can uncover all kinds of insights.

This might seem surprising, especially given the relatively random process by which streets get their names. A real-estate developer might come up with a motif that seems relevant to a particular place, or just an arbitrary theme — Caribbean, equestrian, or United States presidents. Some developers hold competitions among employees and then pick the winning names. The local government usually takes a look at the resulting map, just to make sure the names won’t confuse mail carriers or ambulance drivers. And that’s about it.

But if you look at enough data, patterns start to emerge. Even randomness has an order.

Turning to the same database we use to estimate and analyze home values, we looked at years of data about sales and listings. We learned three things about the relationship between home values and street names: First, names are better than numbers. Second, lanes are better than streets. Third, unusual names are better than common ones.

Imagine that one of us (Spencer) lives on 10th Street and the other (Stan) lives on Elm Street. With only this information, we can guess that Stan’s house is probably worth more than Spencer’s. On average, homes on named streets are 2 percent more valuable than those on numbered streets. (We looked only at single-family homes, condos and co-ops. Large apartment buildings — especially in New York City — would skew the data.)

For some cities, this named-street premium is higher — greater than 20 percent on average in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Riverside, Calif., and San Francisco. We found only three cities where named streets don’t have the upper hand. In Atlanta and New York, named and numbered streets are roughly equal. Denver is the sole city where numbered streets are more valuable.

Next we looked at street suffixes — the “roads,” “drives” and “boulevards” — and found that, for instance, homes on “Washington Street” are usually different from homes on “Washington Court.”

For one thing, a house on Washington Street is probably older. Different street suffixes were popular at different moments. “Streets” and “avenues” were stylish in the 1950s, “ways,” “circles” and “courts” in the late ’80s.

Street suffixes also offer clues about the size of their neighborhood. Boulevards and avenues include the most homes on average, while courts and lanes include the fewest.

Most significant, suffixes have a lot to say about home prices. Homes on “streets” are almost always among the least valuable. If you’re looking for a higher-value home, you’re much more likely to find it on a “way” or a “place.”

Which brings us to our third rule: You should also look at streets with uncommon names.

Nationally, the most common street names tend to have the lowest home values. Look at Main Street. It’s by far the most common street name in America. It’s also the least valuable. Main Street homes are worth, on average, about 4 percent less than America’s median.

On the other side of the spectrum are “Lake” and “Sunset.” Homes on “Lake” average 16 percent more than the national median home value, and “Sunset” houses are a close second.

We aren’t recommending that you start a petition to rename your street. Correlation is not causation. Homes on “Lake” aren’t more valuable because of the name; generally they’re more valuable because the descriptive name reflects a truth about the real estate. In this case, they’re probably next to — you guessed it — a lake.

And of course, all of these rules reflect broad national trends. There are plenty of exceptions; like politics, all home values, trends and characteristics are local.

No matter where you look, however, street names have meaning. They are artifacts from a neighborhood’s genesis, bearing data that we finally can uncover.

Just a few years ago, real estate information was guarded in county courthouses and secret databases. Shopping for a home was like being in a dark room. An agent might shine a flashlight on two or three homes — but all you wanted was to flip the switch and see it all for yourself. Today, real estate information is more transparent and democratized; the connection between street names and home values is only the beginning. Buying, selling, renting, regulating and financing all have been illuminated.

Spencer Rascoff is chief executive and Stan Humphries is chief economist of Zillow. They are the authors of “Zillow Talk: The New Rules of Real Estate.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: The Secrets of Street Names. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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