Silence Is Golden, But ‘Quiet’ Won’t Sell a Luxury Home

A house on a quiet cul-de-sac may be the American dream, but advertising a high-end home as “quiet” isn’t always the best bet for sellers. Only 4.15% of listings for homes priced at $5 million or more contained the word, compared with 5.94% for homes under $500,000 and 6.36% of homes for $500,000 to $1 million, according to data from real-estate website Trulia.Many buyers assume that a high-end home will be quiet. “At a very expensive level, it goes without saying that it’s going to be quiet,” said Felipe Chacon, a Trulia housing data analyst.Most homes for sale in the U.S. are on low-traffic streets, according to Trulia, which ranked them on a scale of 0 to 15,000 based on their proximity to “nodes,” or traffic intersections. Roughly speaking, a home with a score of 10 would be on a cul-de-sac, while a score of 300 would put it on a multilane city street. With a 15,000 score, a home would have a front door on an expressway. In the U.S., 99% of properties scored under 300. And even if the score doubled—meaning it was close to twice as many nodes—the average listing price fell by only 0.2%. “Some people really do place a price premium on quietness, but other people place a price premium on centrality, so they just wash each other out,” said Mr. Chacon. Cindy Dunbar bought her six-bedroom home on a cul-de-sac in the Forest Hills section of Washington, D.C., in 1999. She and her husband had been living on a busier street, and appreciated the seclusion of the nearly 1-acre lot on a short cul-de-sac. With their children grown, the couple recently listed the property for $3.25 million; it is now under contract. In the listing, Erich Cabe, an agent with Compass based in Washington, D.C., described the home as “tranquil,” a word he said he uses frequently because it evokes privacy and serenity, not simply a lack of sound. (“We do actually hear a lot of birds,” admitted Ms. Dunbar, 57, a senior physician and scientist at the National Institutes of Health.) The term may be useful in urban settings and to capture online search traffic, said Deanna Kory, an associate broker with the Corcoran Group in New York who recently listed a five-bedroom townhouse on a one-block street in Lower Manhattan for $6.395 million. She highlighted both the property’s “quiet” location and “tranquil setting.”