The devil really may be in the details.
The owners of a Ridgewood, N.J., home were eager to sell because they had already bought another place. After a couple of months went by without an offer, they cut the price and stripped the outdated paneling from one room. But buyers weren’t biting, and they thought they knew why: Their street address was 666, which some Christians believe is a sign of the devil, based on a biblical passage.
So the homeowners got the address changed to 668, and the place sold.
It was just one example of how seemingly minor issues can make — or break — real estate transactions. In most cases, there are only a couple of big-picture items that sellers can control when they put their homes on the market: the home’s condition and its price. For that reason, sellers are usually urged to set a competitive asking price and spruce up the property by painting, refinishing hardwood floors, and upgrading the landscaping.
But sometimes, unexpected or oddball details — not always in a homeowner’s control — can be the difference between success and failure.
“A home purchase is a very emotional thing,” said Beth Freed, an agent with Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty in Ridgewood, N.J. “If you feel at home, for one reason or another, that very often is all it takes.”
Jeana Cowie, listing agent on the Ridgewood house that used to be No. 666, said she was surprised when people commented that the address might be a problem. One buyer at an open house told her it was a “weird number.”
To change the address, the homeowner went to Village Hall; each town has its own procedure for this, but usually the tax assessor has to be consulted to make sure there’s no conflict with another address. Emergency services and the U.S. Postal Service must also be notified.
“I don’t want to say that 668 sold the house,” Cowie said. But she thinks it helped.
Hedy Weiss, a Coldwell Banker agent in Franklin Lakes, N.J., also closed a sale after the homeowner changed the address. The house was on a corner in Franklin Lakes, facing a busy street, but also had an entrance on the side street.
“Because people could see it was on a main street, a lot of people didn’t pursue it,” she said. The homeowner had the address changed to the side street.
“We started getting more showings with the new address,” Weiss said.
Within two months, the house was sold.
Freed says one of her home sellers got a boost when the village lowered the speed limit on the street to 25 mph. Suddenly, the property became more attractive to families with young children, and it sold soon after.
Other numbers also can make a difference. Some agents have favorite pricing tricks. Orly Steinberg, a Coldwell Banker agent in Ridgewood, for example, ends her prices in “888.” She started doing it 20 years ago, to catch the eye of agents paging through big multiple listing books.
She wanted to be listed just ahead of the agents pricing their listings at more common numbers using 9s — for example, pricing a home at $299,888, instead of $299,900. Over time, it became her signature; her license plate even reads “SOLD888.”
“It gets you a little bit more attention, which is what you want,” Steinberg said. Later, she discovered that 8 is a lucky number in Chinese culture.
For that reason, 8s are included in 20 percent of the asking prices in real estate markets with a large Asian population, the real estate website Trulia recently reported. (And 13 is uncommon in prices everywhere, Trulia says.)