There is a road about four minutes' walk from where you live – maybe less – and the houses on it are structurally identical to yours. Same brick, same vintage, same number of bedrooms, probably the same boiler. But they are worth noticeably less than yours, or noticeably more. Neither of you quite knows why, except that everyone sort of knows why.
Your House Has a Credit Score
Your house has a credit score. Not the kind a bank runs when you apply for a mortgage – though that's happening too – but an older, murkier one that the neighbourhood has been quietly compiling for decades, and that no single person invented or maintains. It is built entirely from signals, and most of them have nothing to do with your house at all.
How much does a postcode affect house price?
The postcode suffix is the first signal. Within a single outward code – say, a fictional BS6 – there are inner codes that behave like different countries. Estate agents know which half of the street carries which suffix, and they know that one of them sells faster and asks more, even when the properties are twins. The suffix absorbed its reputation gradually: from planning decisions, from which schools ended up where, from which direction the development crept. Now it simply radiates status, the way a confident person makes other people in the room feel more confident.
The railway line is another one. Not the existence of a railway – commuter access is good – but which side you are on. One side has the nice pub and the deli; the other has the scrub land and the cash-and-carry. The trains don't cross the social border. They just mark it. Your house, having done absolutely nothing, is ranked by proximity.
What makes one road more valuable than the next?
And then there's the road name itself. It sounds absurd, but naming conventions carry genuine weight. Avenue beats Street in most markets. Close suggests a quiet cul-de-sac, which sounds safe to the part of your brain that still worries about wolves. A road named after a local dignitary sits above one named after a geographical feature, which sits above one that was clearly named by a bored council planner in 1973. For a longer look at exactly how this neighbourhood ranking system mirrors the way websites get ranked online, Your House Has a PageRank works through the logic properly.
The Same Mechanism as PageRank
The mechanism underneath all of this is the same one Google built its early search engine on: authority flows between neighbours. A house next to high-value properties absorbs some of their status, exactly as a webpage accumulates credibility by being linked to from credible pages. The reverse is also true – being next door to the road nobody wants to be on drags your value down in a way no amount of loft conversion corrects, because the loft conversion is inside your four walls, and the credit score lives outside them.
What makes this slightly maddening, and also slightly fascinating, is that it all happened without anyone sitting down to design it. No committee met to decree that the left side of the line should outrank the right. It accreted, the way reputations do. Through tiny consistent signals, repeated over long enough that they hardened into fact.
Your house didn't earn its ranking. It inherited it, the way most of us inherited most of our circumstances, and now it quietly earns or costs you money while you get on with living in it.
Questions this raises
- Why do identical houses differ in price street to street?
- Can a street's reputation change?
