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Prof. Steven Swidler featured in Philadelphia Inquirer story about how certain word choices can increase property value
Steven Swidler, Walter E. Hanson/KPMG Professor of Business and Finance, was featured in a Feb. 1 Philadelphia Inquirer story about research he did with colleagues from University of North Carolina at Charlotte about how certain descriptors increase property value.
The word “adorable,” in particular, could add more than $43,000 to the value of what is often a small, hard-to-sell property, the research showed.
The researchers examined more than 700,000 homes in the Charlotte, N.C., area between 2001 and 2018. The data collected by the team spanned the 2008 financial crisis and crash of the real estate housing bubble. Swidler told the Inquirer that he and his colleagues had not studied whether certain descriptive terms could have even marginally helped some houses sell.
“Would ‘adorable’ have helped you during a real downturn?” he said. “The answer is I don’t know, but maybe we should look at it.”