How to save money on property

Cape Town property prices are regularly described as being “like, fully out of control, bru”.
If you’ve already got your foot on a rung of the property ladder, that’s not something that will really bother you. Maybe you might even consider it good news. But if you’re yet to move into property ownership, then that first step can seem ridiculously far out of reach.

This is widely touted as a problem which is new to Millennials, but only by anyone who never tried buying anything decent in Sheffield (or anything at all in Oxford) on a microbiologist’s wage in the 1990s.

Just saying.

So, you want to find a way of getting more for less, and who can blame you? Everyone loves a bargain. Step forward then, some high school girls from the Sacred Heart College (SHC) in Geelong, Melbourne, Australia.

If you are looking for an affordable home in your preferred suburb, it may pay to find the street with the silliest name.
House prices on streets with silly names are significantly lower than houses on nearby streets, a study by Victorian school students has found.

(That’s students from a state in Australia, as mentioned above, not from the late 1800s.)

Working with staff from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the University of Sydney and a Melbourne real estate agent, the girls analysed house sales on the streets over the past 47 years.
They found that property prices in streets with silly names were about 20 per cent lower than properties in the normally-named roads.
As the report notes, that amounts to a $140,000 saving on a median-priced Melbourne house.

That’s R1.4m, which (after some rudimentary calculations) also tells us that a median-priced house in Melbourne costs R7m and kinda puts those wild claims about Cape Town back into some kind of perspective.

The students identified 27 streets in Victoria with silly names, including Butt Street, Wanke Road and Fanny Street.

STOP SNIGGERING AT THE BACK!

I’m rather busy at the moment, so I don’t have chance to follow up on this in too much depth right now, but there’s a De Cock Avenue in Deurdrift:

And a Dikkop Close in Pelikan Park:

And I even found a Fanny Avenue in Joburg:

The biggest issue with that last one being that not only do you live on Fanny Avenue, you also live in Joburg. (Also, “Lung Candy, Norwood”?!?)

I don’t know if the house prices in any of these roads are lower than their local peers, but if you are looking for a way to knock a bar off your first (or next) house, then this would seem to be the best way of going about it.

Thank me later.

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