We're in the process of buying some lots in Oak Hill with a few other buyers but they don't like the name of the street and want the developer to change it. The street has a really cool name--Sisquoc. The Chumash Indians from California translate Sisquoc as stopping place. There's a California river that they call Sisquoc River. The other buyers are having a hard time saying and spelling it. The city is having the name of the street changed to "San Lucas."

So this has gotten me into thinking of the different names of Austin's streets like those that have more unfavorable names than Sisquoc. For example, the South Austin's Shady Hollow subdivision has streets with names including "Shoot Out," "Six Gun," "Shotgun," "Ammunition," and "Gun Fight."

Who would want to live on Shoot Out Street or Gun Fight Street? Somebody on the liberal party might give up his dreamhouse on "George W. Bush Blvd." Would a vegetarian give up a home on Brisket Lane? Buying a home on Devil's Cove is something a pious Christian Conservative would maybe need to think about. So can the name of a street have a big role when deciding on selling or buying a home? I went on to study more about this.

I did a multiple listing search for houses in Shady Hollow that were sold since 2000 that are located on the aforementioned streets with gun-related names. There have been 71 sales on those streets. In dollars, 179,677 is the sales price on the average with $98 per square foot. I then looked for the rest of Shady Hollow, filtering out houses newer than 1993 because all of the aforementioned houses are built before 1993 and we don't want to pollute the results with homes that are expensive and newly built. Six hundred six houses located on streets with less explicit western names were sold. In dollars, 225,713 is the sales price on the average with $103 per square foot. From this research, houses on streets with politically incorrect names are not a hit in comparison other houses on other streets.

What's interesting to note here is that politically incorrect homes are sold at an average of 37 days and the other homes at an average of 50 days. This seems counterintuitive based on the gap in the price. The politically incorrect homes have an average size of 1811 square feet and the others averaged 2144 square feet, which would explain the sales price gap. But smaller homes, more or less, are sold for a higher per-square-foot price, and in this case they do not, which suggests something is out of balance.

This is not an exact scientific test. Nevertheless, a buyer should put into consideration whether or not the street name might have an effect on the home's ability to be marketed in the future.