October is the month of ghouls, ghosts, spells and superstition. With this in mind, we thought we’d investigate further into the housing market and we were fascinated to discover one quite extraordinary anomaly with the number 13.
It appears that a great many people don’t buy houses that are number 13.

Here at reallymoving.com we analysed sales of all the number 13 properties in from 1st January 2014 to 31st July 2016. According to The Land Registry for properties in England and Wales, that’s 2,240,575 transactions in 31 months.

Much to our surprise, we discovered that the volume of properties sold numbered ‘13’ drops well below the national average for properties numbered 12 or 14. Here’s what the national average of property numbering looks like. There should have been over 15,000 number 13 sales. In fact, there were approximately 10,000.

Delving into this information a little deeper, it appears Birmingham has the lowest number of number 13s relative to average 11s, 12s, 14s & 15s. It makes us wonder whether our Midland friends don’t have 13 guests to a dinner party, have a 13th floor in a block of flats or even get married on the 13th of the month.

The region of England and Wales that appears to be the least sensitive to the number 13, is Romford. The South East of England is generally least concerned about the number 13, but Romford in particular has a disregard for the legend around the number 13.

The country as a whole appears to be increasingly superstitious – the superstitiousness index for the England and Wales overall is 37% whereas for new build properties it is 57% - developers appear increasingly likely to avoid using number 13 in new property developments. There is no evidence, however, that the 13s sell for a lower price than other properties.