ECONOMIC VALUE OF "NAMES" � EVIDENCE FROM SINGAPORE'S PRIVATE RESIDENTIAL MARKET

Abstract

In Singapore’s highly competitive residential real estate, developers constantly strive to build attractive projects to land higher sales. Existing studies show creating attractive brand names are an important marketing strategy. With a lack of empirical studies on development names, the paper hopes to bridge the research gap through investigating 1) the impact of development names on non-landed private developments, 2) if transaction prices of non-landed private developments correlate with choice of development names. To analyse different development names, words in 2,162 condominiums were broken down into 11 categories – “Nature”, “Luxury”, “Architectural Structures”, “Articles, “Symbols”, “Lucky Numbers”, “Related to District”, “Urban”, “Homely”, “Unique” and “Relating to Address”. Combining with a sample of 393,985 transactions from Q11995 to Q42018, this study used a hedonic price model to conduct regressions on development names and non-landed private transactions to study its impact on each other.

The regression results showed that development names impact housing prices. Names under “Luxury” and “Architectural Structures” categories commanded consistent price discounts throughout all the test samples, while “Homely” names fetched a consistent. Other name variables showed varying results of premiums or discounts. The second hypothesis investigating if transaction prices impact the names choices of non-landed private developments showed a low R-squared value, but statistically significant values. The common intuition is that development names do impact prices either through a discount or a premium. Developers should look into different toponymies to possibly improve or enhance the attractive of developments.