From the latimes.com:
Pity the poor Arcadia couple trying to sell a house with a street number 44. Most local buyers are Chinese — and for them, such a number can kill a deal.
That’s because, in Mandarin and Cantonese, the word for four sounds like the word for death. So 44 essentially adds up to double death.
Josh Grohs, managing partner of Sol-Mur Development, LLC, buys up Arcadia houses, tears them down and then builds new homes. He knows his market and the dangers of picking the wrong property.
“This property is worth $1.4 million if the address was not two fours. If they don’t change it, that would knock $300,000 to $400,000 off the property,” Grohs said of the owners of No. 44, who do not want their street name mentioned for fear of making a bad situation worse.
“No one would have thought anything of it 30 years ago,” he said. “Now it definitely, 100%, does not make their home that attractive.”
Twenty years ago, Arcadia dealt with similar complaints from residents about numbers when the city started seeing a dramatic rise in Chinese homeownership. At the time, like numerous other San Gabriel Valley cities, it decided to allow people to change inauspicious numbers — for a fee. But five years ago, it abandoned that program after city workers complained about how onerous and confusing the process of changing addresses had become.
Lately though, with Chinese buyers providing the only bright spot in a slow real estate market, complaints about bad numbers have been on the rise again.
“I don’t remember the last house I built I sold to a white person in Arcadia, except maybe for one,” said Grohs. “The only reason we’re not feeling the pain of, say, Glendora and Monrovia is because of the Asians.”
This month, the City Council voted 3 to 2 in support of bringing back the old address-changing program, pending a study of the costs. The council will revisit the issue next month.
Some of those facing numbers problems bought their properties many decades ago, before the Asian influx. Asians, predominantly Chinese, now make up nearly 60% of Arcadia’s population.
“If we can save somebody from taking a financial bath, we should,” said Bob Harbicht, the council member who first brought the topic up.
But his colleagues don’t all agree.
“There are 20,000 homes in Arcadia. One in four has a number four in it. That’s a potential of 3,000 addresses that could be changed,” said Councilman Roger Chandler, who is against restarting the program. “We have people who want to change the entire 1400 block. And a lady who lives in apartment No. 911 who feels it’s bad luck. Where do we stop?”
Supporters say changing building numbers isn’t such an unusual thing. After all, they say, when President Reagan left office, he and Nancy took up residence at 666 St. Cloud Road in Bel-Air but had the address changed to 668 to avoid the “number of the beast.”
“Many high-rises don’t have a 13th floor. It’s harder to rent them,” said Harbricht. “It’s strictly a business decision.”
Veteran Arcadia real estate agent Imy Dulake of Coldwell Banker tried to show a condominium at 444 W. Huntington Drive to Asian clients about five years ago.
“We drove up there and the buyer saw the number 444 and didn’t even want to see it,” said Dulake.
At the time, the city still allowed residents to change one digit of an address, but changing the number of a condominium building would have been too hard. Around the same time, though, Dulake got a listing for a house at 444 Oxford Drive. She persuaded the homeowner to get a new number, 448, which was an improvement because eight sounds like “to prosper.”
Armed with its new address, the house got multiple offers and sold within a month, she said.
With younger Chinese and very rich buyers from mainland China who pay for multimillion-dollar homes in cash, the number four is not necessarily a deal breaker, but it’s not preferred, said real estate agent Cordella Wong of Coldwell Banker.
“Psychologically, changing the number four would make the buyer more comfortable, and it’s good for resale value,” said Wong, who recently helped a client change an address in San Gabriel, one of several nearby cities where it is allowed.
As for herself, Wong says she once lived in a house numbered 2440. “Nothing bad happened to me,” she said.
The house in utc where the jet hit the house had address 4444 and 4 people were killed and they were Asian. My friend was born April 4 and died an unfortunate early death. I believe in this and I’m white
Can I change my address to a transcendental number — π, e, and so forth?
> Can I change my address to a transcendental
> number — ?, e, and so forth?
How about Chaitin’s Constant, or Aleph-Naught?
Easy fix… Change all 4’s to 8’s
I’m not trying to sound snarky or anything, but..
I just left South Florida after a business trip. Half of everything is in Spanish and the language is everywhere you go. I’m all for multilingual fluency, but on what or whose terms.
By the time you get up to the Tampa Orlando area, the prevalence of Spanish for commerce starts to wane. English is the language of business and casual conversation.
World culture is full of all kinds of unique distinctions and standard practices that differ from American culture. Big question: Are we suppose to change and accept in whole form all foreign customs, or, are we suppose to ask (require) all new citizens to conform to current American culture?
In the past we’ve assimilated and demanded new immigrants conform to American standards of language and general behavior (even while those cultures changed aspects of our culture).
Over the last 40 years we seem to have put much less emphasis on teaching English and so forth.
If it was ok for Reagan to get rid of his “666”, and high rise builders are fine with not having floor #13, why is it not ok for an Asian immigrant in Arcadia?
Consultant, yeah the concept of “fit in or f*ck off” is dying in this country, and good riddance.
The “spanish for commerce” you fret about is also called “good business”, or “free will”.
Jack. Just as a slight clarification. The address was 4406. The adjacent house, 4416 was also destroyed. But other houses on the same block were unscathed… even though the house addresses started with 44.
But it’s a good story.
Consultant,
America is made up of many cultures, in case you hadn’t noticed, and I’m not talking about language or ethnicity. The culture of New Yorkers is very different from folks in the deep south for example.
Which “American culture” is the one, true culture that we should all be adhering to?
Consultant, you’re using an interesting tidbit about culture issues that affect a market to make an unrelated right-wing talking point. Whether English is or should be the preferred language is unrelated to the intangible reasons people will or won’t buy a house. House had a murder or had someone who died in it? People may shy away. House has a number that is disfavored in Western culture? Same thing. If you had a street called “Devil Dog Road”, an evangelical person might not want to buy. These are all examples of otherwise irrational beliefs affecting people’s home buying decisions. That this one is from a culture from one other than your own doesn’t it make it less relevant to potential buyers in a particular area.
I have heard about this number thing for years and thought it was a joke. After reading this I guess it is not.
To the whole language thing… Should we force Irish and British to change their accent and ensure the Canadians here to start spelling favor the “correct” way?
Language is only a way to communicate. Maybe we should have thought police and only allow people to think in small words.
Seriously.
Chuck
There are buyers out there who aren’t Asian but won’t buy a house with the number 13 (Asians, otoh, consider odd numbers lucky). Other buyers will reject homes with swimming pools. And how many articles have we seen telling you not to paint your house pink or purple if you want to sell it?
It’s not as if there’s some law saying you have to make your home appeal to Asian buyers.
Here in Silicon Valley there are a lot of listings with asking prices ending in 888. The Chinese in particular seem to place a lot more emphasis on numeric superstitions than other Asians, although I had never heard the “sounds like death” explanation. And its not just about your own comfort, but also how other Chinese view you. I’ve noticed that unlike other immigrant groups, the Chinese can be not very nice to each other.
“I have heard about this number thing for years and thought it was a joke. After reading this I guess it is not.”
In this case it’s not numerology so much as it is phonetics. Imagine if you were considering a home in another country and the name of the street in the native language sounded a lot like “Pedophile Lane” in English. Even if you know that’s not at all what the name means, it might still give you the creeps to live there.
Ross, in most Asian cultures, superstitious people believe that bad luck is contagious.
I live on floor 12A of a residential tower. I would have preferred if it were properly numbered 13. I like to go against the trend and would go after the properties with “undesirable numbers.” 🙂
Then I’d have the number changed and sell the property at a huge profit! 😀
They’ll only let you have ℵ0 if you’re the last house on the street :-).
To address this earlier question:
“Big question: Are we suppose to change and accept in whole form all foreign customs, or, are we suppose to ask (require) all new citizens to conform to current American culture?”
In a free market economy, that would presumably depend on how much money the new arrivals are bringing with them and how much you want to attract them as customers.