Valuable addresses

Just weeks ago, the housing market in the U.S. was so hot it was record-breaking. Now that things are starting to cool off, what strongholds might there be against fluctwwwions in the future? Could certain street and neighborhood names influence home prices or reflect the income levels of the people who live there?

After compiling data from hundreds of thousands of home sales and listings, we observed how street names and suffixes correlated with affluence. Keep scrolling to see the most expensive street names in the U.S., the wealthiest suffixes and what your own street name may suggest about you.

Lucrative locations

Looking at the 500 most populous places in the U.S., we compared the addresses of all the homes currently listed for sale. Here's what the listings of today's most expensive homes sound like.

Addresses with "Beverly" in the name were by far the most expensive in the U.S., averaging $4.3 million per home. This group likely included some seriously expensive outliers, like Beverly Hills, California – a city boasting homes worth $30 million and above and holding the record for the most expensive house ever sold at auction. Addresses that evoked the beach or bodies of water also had high price tags: Those with words like "Bayshore," "Island" and "Ocean" in the name corresponded with average home prices of $2 million, $1.9 million and $1.7 million, respectively.

As far as suffixes were concerned, the most expensive roads to live on were "boulevards" ($1 million), "ways" ($874,600) and "drives" ($824,800). Adding these to the end of your street name may just come with a payday. Many areas even have clear-cut policies on how to change your street name, even if only for vanity-related reasons. Given how much of an impact a name can have, it may be something worth looking into.

Affluent areas

The net worth of neighborhoods also changed depending on their addresses. This part of our research explores which words in neighborhood names were associated with the highest median incomes in the U.S.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median household income is $64,994. Many different factors like age and education can influence how much money you make each year, but it turns out your neighborhood might also say something about how high your income is. In Washington, California, Texas and Illinois, median household incomes in neighborhoods with "Cross," "Pleasant," "Woodlands" and "Maple" were in the $90,000-$115,000 range.

"Boca" and "Woodlands" were the top two neighborhood names associated with the highest median incomes in the whole country, with incomes of $72,500 and $70,800, respectively. The lowest average incomes were found in neighborhoods with "Acres" in the name; those who live in a "Boca" neighborhood make nearly two times more each year than those who live in "Acres."

Most attractive addresses

Lastly, we looked at the street names that people wanted the most. We ranked them by the most and least desirable and by which ones sold the fastest.

Washington Street is the most desired street name in the U.S., which may explain why it's so popular. Washington is the name of nearly 5,000 streets in America and only slightly less popular than common street names like "Second" and "Third." But this historic name didn't necessarily help houses sell any faster.

The multisyllabic "Fauntleroy" was the most likely word to get a house sold quickly. On average, houses with this address took just 23 days to sell — far faster than houses by any other name. Perhaps it's because the name sounds so distinguished as it's derived from old French and means "the son of the king." Beware of trying to sell on streets like "Timber" and "Knoll," however, as owners of these homes waited more than a year to sell!

The sound of high home value

Money in the U.S. appears to have gravitated toward certain street names and suffixes. Places like "Beverly," "Boulevard" and "Boca" drew high-income earners and high home sale prices, but they weren't necessarily the words people most desired in their home addresses. Instead, familiar and patriotic "Washington Street" was the most wanted street name in America.

Methodology

Data was scraped from the U.S. Census Bureau for the top 500 most populous Census Designated Places (CDPs) in the United States. A CDP is a concentration of population used for statistical purposes only and is not legally incorporated. We then scraped addresses for sale on Redfin in each CDP, text analyzed the top 500 most frequent words in the addresses and determined the average property value associated with each word. When analyzing median incomes, data was pulled from the census as median values, which were then averaged together to get the average value for each neighborhood word. When looking at specific states, analysis was limited to words appearing more than five times.

We also conducted a short survey of 1,002 Americans to explore desirable address names. Of these respondents, 44% were female, 55% were male and less than 1% were nonbinary. For short, open-ended questions, outliers were removed.

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Fair use statement

If you think these findings would resonate with your neighbors or your larger audience, you're welcome to share our research. Just be sure your purposes are noncommercial and that you link back to this page as a credit for our work.