In her three years hawking condos in downtown Toronto, Danielle Desjardins has fielded the gamut of buyers’ objections. It might be that the neighbourhood is too far from a subway. Maybe the balcony hangs over a roaring roadway, or that it’s too small to accommodate a canine’s meandering. But the strangest source of unease she hears stems from entirely immaterial concerns and runs counter to the straitlaced, secular zeitgeist of the era. Some people tell her they’re scared of the numbers on the door.

The elevator board at H&W Development Corp.'s new development in Markham doesn't have a 4th, 13th, or 14th floor. ( Cole Burston / Toronto Star ) Amy Wang, H&W Development Corp.'s vice president of strategy, says any unit or floor that has the number 4 in it may be a tough sell with the many Chinese buyers in Markham. ( Cole Burston / Toronto Star )

“Yes,” she sighs over the phone. “I do encounter that … it’s pretty common.” You’re probably familiar with the phenomenon of the omitted 13th floor, with some builders labelling it as 14 to avoid running afoul of superstitions. Lesser known — but increasingly common, according to developers and real estate agents — is removing all instances of the number 4 from unit doors and elevator buttons. Amy Wang is vice president of strategy at H&W Development Corporation, which builds condos in Markham that are entirely cleansed of the numbers 4 and 13. Many of their buyers are Chinese, she explains, and the word for 4 in Mandarin and Cantonese is alarmingly similar to the pronunciation of “death.”

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That makes for a tough sell. “It’s just superstitious. From a sales perspective, it would be infinitely harder to sell a unit that had a 4 in it, or even 13,” Wang says. “It shrinks the clientele that would be interested.” Pandering to numerical unease is well-entrenched. Two years ago, Richmond Hill City Council banned the number 4 from appearing in new developments. The municipality was already skipping 13 when listing new addresses. “This is very common in new buildings, especially in areas that are fairly ethnically diverse,” Wang says. Vancouver moved recently to ban the removal of certain floor and unit numbers from new buildings. There were worries that first responders could get confused in an emergency.

“It was very hard to justify why we were doing this if something were to go wrong,” the city’s chief building officer told the Vancouver Sun. Those concerns aren’t shared by the Toronto Fire Service. Cpt. Mike Strapko told the Star that Toronto firefighters haven’t had trouble navigating buildings with floors and units that are numbered out of sequence. “We easily understand it and accommodate to it,” he said.

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Wang and Desjardins have accepted it, too, even if superstitions can sometimes make sales difficult. “I worked with buyers who don’t want that (the number 4), as well as north exposure, where the door is positioned to the staircase … I worked with one client (where) we had to make sure we wrote the offer on a day that was good luck,” Desjardins said. “It just makes it a little more challenging.”

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