Do homes on 'auspicious' floors fetch bigger profits?

A unit’s floor level, rather than floor number, may have a greater impact on its profitability

- Christine Sun

You would think that if your home is on the 44th floor, it would command a better price than, say, a similar unit on the 38th floor.

In reality, that is only half the story because in Chinese culture, numerology is important, with auspicious-sounding numbers like 38 believed to bring good luck or have special significance.

So on the average, many buyers are willing to pay a premium for homes on floors with such auspicious numbers, which can command average gross profits of over $520,000. In comparison, owners of units on the 44th floor have gained average profits of over $458,000.

Numbers such as 6, 8 and 9 are considered auspicious because they sound similar to words or phrases associated with wealth, prosperity or longevity. But the number 4 is less desirable because it sounds like "death" in Mandarin.

Not surprisingly, in Hong Kong and China, some developers would avoid having a "fourth floor", and the floor after the third would be known as the fifth floor. In Singapore, some developers may dangle discounts for fourth-floor units, which are usually less popular, and charge more for the auspicious eighth- or 18th-floor units.

To shed light on the "lucky floor" topic, we analysed the profitability of private homes of different floor numbers (without considering unit numbers) from a data-driven perspective.

MOST PRIVATE HOMES ARE PROFITABLE

We found that over the last 30 years, 83 per cent of private home owners made profits. This means most buyers are likely to make a profit, regardless of the floor level.

For the profitability study, individual units' gross gains and losses based on sale prices alone were calculated by matching the Urban Redevelopment Authority's Realis new sales caveats between 1995 and 2023 to the resale caveats of the same units over the same timeframe.