Why a House Number Ending in 8 Sells for More: The Real Economics of Lucky Numbers in Real Estate

In 2016, a real estate agent in Victoria, British Columbia listed an ordinary Fairfield-neighborhood house for an oddly specific price: $888,888. The number wasn't a rounding accident. As ReMax agent Daniel Clover told CBC News at the time, "eight is a happy number for Chinese culture," and the listing drew 105 visitors to a single Saturday open house and 65 more the next day. That kind of pricing stunt looks like folk superstition dressed up as marketing. But behind it sits a body of published economics research showing that the effect is real, measurable, and has shown up independently in housing markets on three continents. Homes and apartments with addresses or floor numbers ending in 8 do sell for statistically significant premiums in markets with large ethnic Chinese buyer populations, and homes with addresses ending in 4 sell at a discount. This isn't marketing copy — it's been documented in transaction-level data by economists at the University of British Columbia, in Auckland housing records, and in apartment sales in Chengdu, China. This essay walks through what the actual studies found, where the belief comes from linguistically, and how it has visibly reshaped real estate practice from Hong Kong license-plate auctions to Bel Air street addresses.

The superstition isn't arbitrary numerology — it's a documented linguistic coincidence. In Mandarin, the number 8 (八, bā) sounds close to fā (發/发), the word meaning "to prosper" or "to generate wealth," as in fācái (發財), "to get rich." The resemblance is even tighter in Cantonese, spoken across Hong Kong, Guangdong, and much of the Chinese diaspora in Canada and Australia, where the phonetic overlap between eight and prosperity is closer still. This is why 8 shows up constantly in pricing, addresses, and even scheduling in Chinese communities — most famously, the Beijing Olympics opened at 8:08:08 p.m. on 8/8/2008.

The number 4 runs the opposite direction. In both Mandarin (sì) and Cantonese, four sounds nearly identical to sǐ, the word for "death." Linguists and cultural researchers refer to the resulting avoidance behavior as tetraphobia — the practice of avoiding the digit 4 in numbering systems, comparable to Western triskaidekaphobia (fear of 13). According to Wikipedia's entry on tetraphobia, the aversion is strongest in China, Japan, and Korea, and compound numbers can make it worse: 14 can be read as "is dead" or "will certainly die," and in some regions 74 is read as close to a phrase for "angered to death." Notably, the superstition is much weaker in Vietnam, because the everyday Vietnamese words for "four" (bốn) and "death" (chết) don't share the same phonetic root — the resemblance exists only in more formal, Chinese-derived vocabulary. That contrast is itself evidence that the effect is linguistic, not some universal fear of the numeral 4.

This isn't confined to real estate. The same tetraphobia shows up in Hong Kong apartment towers that skip entire floor ranges in the 40s, in Las Vegas hotels (including the Wynn) that omit floors 40–49, and in Singapore's SBS Transit, which avoids bus registration numbers ending in 4. In 2013, the town of Richmond Hill, Ontario — home to a large Chinese-Canadian population — banned the number 4 from new street addresses altogether, a policy move CBC News covered directly, effectively writing the superstition into municipal bylaw.

The importance of getting this origin story right is that it explains why the effect concentrates so specifically in Chinese and Chinese-diaspora buyer pools rather than appearing as a universal real estate phenomenon. It is not that '8' is inherently prettier or '4' inherently uglier — it's a homophone effect tied to two specific tonal languages, which is exactly the pattern the economic research below finds.

The most rigorous piece of research on this topic is "Superstition in the Housing Market," by Nicole M. Fortin, Andrew J. Hill, and Jeff Huang, published in the peer-reviewed journal Economic Inquiry in 2014 (Vol. 52, Issue 3, pp. 974–993), building on an earlier IZA/UBC working paper. The authors analyzed roughly 117,000 single-family home sales in Greater Vancouver between January 2000 and May 2005, merging the transaction data with 2001 Canadian census figures across 363 census tracts to identify neighborhoods with above-average shares of ethnic Chinese residents.

Their central finding: in neighborhoods where more than about 18% of residents were of Chinese ethnicity, homes with street addresses ending in the digit 8 sold for a 2.5% premium relative to comparable homes — on a mean sale price of roughly CAD $400,000 at the time, that works out to about $10,000 in extra sale value attributable to nothing but the final digit of the street address. Conversely, homes with addresses ending in 4 sold at an average discount of about 2.2%, or roughly $8,000 off the mean price, in those same high-Chinese-concentration neighborhoods.

The paper also found a behavioral pattern that strengthens the case this is a real cultural effect rather than statistical noise: in Chinese-majority neighborhoods, the actual frequency of homes being sold with addresses ending in 4 dropped sharply — from about 7.4% of transactions down to 3.9% — suggesting owners and developers were actively avoiding building or listing addresses ending in 4 in those areas, or that such homes changed hands less often. Crucially, the effects were concentrated specifically in neighborhoods with large Chinese populations and were much weaker or absent elsewhere in the same metro area, which is exactly what you'd expect if the mechanism is cultural/linguistic preference rather than some universal quirk of the numeral itself.

Fortin and her coauthors were careful to frame this as evidence of "superstition" in a fairly literal economic sense: buyers were willing to pay a real premium for a belief with no bearing on the physical, structural, or locational quality of the house. The Vancouver numbers have since been repeated in secondary press coverage — HousingWire and other outlets picked up the study's headline figures when it circulated — but the 2.5%/2.2% numbers and the $10,000/$8,000 dollar estimates trace back specifically to this UBC-authored, peer-reviewed paper.

The Vancouver study wasn't the first or only one of its kind. In 1999, economists Steven C. Bourassa and Vincent S. Peng published "Hedonic Prices and House Numbers: The Influence of Feng Shui" in the International Real Estate Review. They studied 2,164 residential sales in Auckland, New Zealand between 1989 and 1996, focusing on two adjoining area units (Cascades and Maungamaungaroa) where over half the population — 52.4% — was of Chinese ethnicity.

Using hedonic regression — a standard real estate economics technique that isolates the price effect of one variable (like a house number) after controlling for physical characteristics such as floor area, land size, age, and construction quality — Bourassa and Peng defined "lucky" addresses as those ending in 3, 6, 8, or 9 and "unlucky" addresses as those ending in 4, following the same Cantonese homophone logic described above. They found lucky-numbered houses sold for a statistically significant 2.4% premium, or roughly NZ$7,100 in 1996 dollars. Unlucky-numbered houses showed a negative price effect, but it wasn't statistically significant — the authors interpreted this as evidence that superstitious buyers were avoiding those listings altogether rather than buying them at a discount, thinning out the unlucky-address sample. Importantly, when they ran the same test in a comparison area with few Chinese residents, house numbers had no measurable effect on price at all — reinforcing that this is a culturally specific phenomenon, not a universal one.

A third study moved from house numbers to apartment floor numbers. Economists Matthew Shum, Wei Sun, and Guangliang Ye published "Superstition and 'Lucky' Apartments: Evidence from Transaction-Level Data" in the Journal of Comparative Economics in 2014, analyzing 12,685 apartment transactions in Chengdu, China from July 2004 to December 2006 (a 10% random sample of the market, split between 3,113 resale units and 9,572 new-construction units). They found that resale apartments on floors ending in 8 sold for about 235 RMB more per square meter than otherwise-comparable units — roughly a 7% premium on unit price. New-construction apartments, which developers typically price uniformly across floors, didn't show the same price gap, but "lucky" floor-8 units in new buildings still sold about 6.9 days faster than comparable listings, showing the preference expressed itself in speed of sale even when price couldn't move.

One especially clever piece of that Chengdu study: the researchers also had access to some buyers' phone numbers and found that buyers whose own phone numbers contained more 8s were measurably more likely to purchase apartments on floors ending in 8. That correlation is hard to explain as anything other than genuine superstitious preference (as opposed to, say, floor-8 units simply having better views or amenities that happened to be correlated with price) — it's a same-buyer-different-context repetition of a taste for the digit 8. Notably, the same paper found no statistically significant discount for floor 4 in their Chengdu data, a reminder that the size and even the direction of these effects can vary by city and dataset even when the cultural belief itself is constant.

Real estate is not the only market where this shows up — and the parallel markets help confirm the real estate findings aren't a fluke of one dataset. Hong Kong has held government auctions for personalized vehicle license plates since 1973, and the results are a clean natural experiment in willingness-to-pay for lucky digits, since plates are otherwise functionally identical. In February 2016, a plate reading simply "28" sold for HK$18.1 million (about US$2.3 million), as reported by Bloomberg. Cantonese speakers read "28" as sounding close to phrases for "easy" and "prosper," a similar phonetic logic to the standalone 8. Bloomberg also noted that plates reading "18" and "9" had previously fetched roughly $2.1 million and $1.7 million respectively at the same kind of auction.

The effect isn't limited to numbers. In 2023, a single-letter plate reading "R" sold for HK$25.5 million at a Hong Kong Transport Department auction, the South China Morning Post reported, after roughly 60 rounds of bidding that started at just HK$5,000 — dealers attributed the price partly to "R" being associated with racing cars and partly to its status as a lucky letter in Chinese fortune-telling traditions. It was the second-highest price ever paid for a Hong Kong plate, trailing only a "W" plate that sold for HK$26 million in 2021.

These figures matter for the real estate discussion because they demonstrate the same underlying willingness-to-pay mechanism in a market with none of real estate's usual confounds — no differences in square footage, neighborhood school district, or renovation quality to control for. When people are willing to pay millions of dollars for a license plate whose only value is its digits, it becomes much more plausible — and much less like an urban myth — that the same buyers would pay a few percentage points more for a house number or apartment floor with the same digits attached.

The pattern extends further into phone numbers, where telecom carriers in China and Hong Kong have long run premium auctions for numbers containing repeated 8s, and into wedding date selection, where couples pay extra to marry on dates containing 8s (or actively avoid dates with 4s). Taken together, this is less a single quirky real estate finding and more a consistent, cross-market willingness to pay for auspicious numerals — of which the house-number premium is simply the real estate expression.

As Chinese-Canadian, Chinese-Australian, and Chinese-American buyers became a larger share of the market in cities like Vancouver, Sydney, and parts of California, real estate agents and developers began adapting listings accordingly — not as academic theory, but as observed sales practice. The Victoria, BC listing priced at $888,888 described in the introduction is a direct, reported example of an agent explicitly pricing to the superstition rather than to the nearest round number.

In the U.S., HousingWire's coverage of the topic (citing reporting from realtor.com and quoting Bay Area broker Tina Ying of New Century Real Estate) pointed to a Bel Air, California home at 10888 Chalon Road that sold for $4,175,000 — about 36% above the price of comparably sized homes in the same neighborhood, according to that reporting. The same coverage noted the reverse pattern: agents and brokers in Chinese-buyer-heavy markets reported that homes with a 4 in the street address sometimes needed price concessions of roughly 5–10% to move, based on broker experience rather than a formal statistical study — a useful reminder to distinguish anecdotal broker reporting from the peer-reviewed Vancouver, Auckland, and Chengdu findings above.

Beyond pricing, the adaptation has shown up in civic policy, not just marketing. Richmond Hill, Ontario's 2013 decision (covered by CBC) to stop assigning the number 4 to new residential street addresses is a rare case of a municipal government formally encoding a demographic group's numeric superstition into its addressing bylaw — a sign of how seriously local governments took the preferences of a large and economically significant homebuyer population.

It's worth briefly noting the parallel Western tradition of numeric superstition in buildings: many North American hotels, office towers, and apartment buildings skip a labeled "13th floor" due to triskaidekaphobia, jumping from 12 to 14 on the elevator panel even though the physical 13th story obviously still exists. That practice has its own separate, deep history (a topic covered in more depth elsewhere on this site) but it's useful context here: Western developers have long been willing to relabel a building around a number their buyers consider unlucky, which is exactly the same commercial logic driving 8-heavy pricing and 4-avoidant addressing in Chinese-buyer markets — the target superstition is just different.

It's worth being precise about the limits of this research, because it's easy to overstate a real finding into an urban legend. First, every rigorous study above found the price effect concentrated specifically in neighborhoods or transactions with a substantial ethnic Chinese buyer presence — the UBC Vancouver study defined this as census tracts above roughly 18% Chinese population, and Bourassa and Peng's Auckland comparison area with few Chinese residents showed no house-number price effect at all. This is not a universal law of real estate pricing; it's a specific, well-documented effect within specific, identifiable buyer populations.

Second, the size of the effect is real but modest — a 2 to 7% premium or discount, not the kind of 20-30% swings sometimes implied by anecdotal reporting (like the Bel Air example, which is a single data point, not a controlled study). Academic hedonic-pricing premiums in the 2-3% range (Vancouver, Auckland) are the most reliably documented figures; the Chengdu floor study's roughly 7% figure applied specifically to resale units, not new construction, where uniform per-building pricing erased the effect on price (though not on speed of sale).

Third, some studies found asymmetric or inconsistent effects for the "unlucky" side of the equation. Both the Auckland and Chengdu papers found weaker or statistically insignificant results for the number 4's discount, compared to clearer, more robust results for the number 8 premium — likely because superstitious buyers avoid unlucky-numbered listings before they even reach a sale (thinning the sample and biasing measured discounts toward zero), rather than because the underlying belief in 4's unluckiness is any weaker than the belief in 8's luck.

Finally, distinguishing peer-reviewed research from marketing anecdote matters. The Fortin/Hill/Huang (2014, Economic Inquiry), Bourassa/Peng (1999, International Real Estate Review), and Shum/Sun/Ye (2014, Journal of Comparative Economics) papers are controlled, published, hedonic-regression studies with identified datasets and statistical significance tests. Broker quotes about a specific $888,888 listing or a single Bel Air sale are real, reported facts, but they are illustrations of the same underlying phenomenon, not independent proof of its overall market size — the careful distinction any fact-checked piece on this topic should preserve.

• Fortin, Hill & Huang, "Superstition in the Housing Market" (Economic Inquiry, 2014) — UBC working paper PDF
• "SUPERSTITION IN THE HOUSING MARKET" — Economic Inquiry, Wiley Online Library (published version)
• Bourassa & Peng, "Hedonic Prices and House Numbers: The Influence of Feng Shui" (International Real Estate Review, 1999)
• Shum, Sun & Ye, "Superstition and 'lucky' apartments: Evidence from transaction-level data" (Journal of Comparative Economics, 2014) — full text PDF
• Shum, Sun & Ye paper listing — IDEAS/RePEc
• CBC News: "Lucky number $888,888 price tag targets Chinese home buyers in Victoria"
• CBC News: "No. 4 banned from new Richmond Hill, Ont. street addresses"
• HousingWire: "Lucky numbers increase home prices?"
• Pro Builder: "Home Prices That Include The Lucky Number 8 Appeal To Chinese Buyers"
• Bloomberg: "Hong Kong Just Auctioned Off a 'Lucky' License Plate Number for $2.3 Million"
• South China Morning Post: "'Lucky' car number plate with letter 'R' sells for HK$25 million at auction in Hong Kong"
• Wikipedia: "Tetraphobia"