Herrooo Hunnaaaay! Welcome back to our channel. Did you know May is Asian and Pacific Islander American Heritage Month? Well if you didn’t, now you know.
Devona Wu and my Chinese name is Wu Wai Shan.
Lysandra Wu and my Chinese name is Wu Chee Lin aka Ling Ling.
Since its Asian and Pacific Islander American Heritage Month, we wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to create these videos for you guys. We wanted to raise awareness about our culture and how it relates to our lives and our business. We are real estate agents in South Florida and work with quite a few Chinese clients. We’ve had to adapt to applying our culture to the real estate home buying process.
You probably didn’t know that door numbers, a layout of the house, closing dates, and position of your homes (facing N, E, S, W) matter when looking for properties. We covered some basic feng shui tips for you in our previous videos, If you haven’t checked them out. Do so by clicking this link right here!
Let’s dive right in so you can get a better understanding of what we are talking about today! There are over 200 dialects in Chinese. We speak Cantonese so the examples we are going to give you will be in Cantonese.
We mentioned closing dates playing a significant role in our real estate transactions. The reason for this is because Chinese families follow this book “Tung Sing” which deals with what is suitable to do on each day, for example, purchasing a home, selling a home, signing big contracts, wedding ceremonies, funerals, birth and etc.
Tung Sing is the Chinese Almanac Calendar. The book of Tung Sing contains information on auspicious and inauspicious days for these big and little events in your life. We have clients that ask for specific closing dates in order for a contract to be signed, they live by this calendar for all major events in their lives.
Numbers- why do numbers matter when buying a home? Or your life in general?
In the Chinese tradition certain numbers are believed to be auspicious and inauspicious based on the numbers having pronunciations that are similar to words with lucky or unlucky meanings.
Two auspicious numbers are 6 and 8
6 is pronounced (Lok) and good fortune is pronounced (Lu) - you see how that sounds very similar to each other? Here is another example, 8 is pronounced (baat) and to prosper is pronounced (faat). 8' is the most favored number in modern China due to its association with wealth and luck. The Chinese love this number both in trivial matters and in big moments. 8 is given the highest priority when buying a house.
For example, an apartment on the eighth floor will be most coveted in that entire building. The number 8 is viewed as such an auspicious number that even being assigned a number with several eights is considered very lucky.
Here are some Fun facts about the number 8:
The opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing began on 8/8/08 at 8 minutes and 8 seconds past 8 pm local time
The Air Canada route from Shanghai to Toronto is Flight AC88.
The United Airlines route from Beijing to San Francisco is Flight UA888, the route from Beijing to Newark is Flight UA88
As part of the grand opening promotions, a Commerce Bank branch in New York's Chinatown raffled off safety deposit box No. 888.
An inauspicious number is 4
4 is pronounced (Sei) and is considered an unlucky number in Chinese because it is nearly homophonous to the word death in Cantonese, which is (Séi). Many buildings and apartments in East Asia omit the 4th floor and room numbers containing the number 4 due to this reason. It’s similar to the Western tradition of not having the 13th floor because 13 is considered an unlucky number.
So let’s tie these numbers into real estate and your home.
Here is a great example… We took our Chinese clients to a new project to look for potential homes. The townhouses were great, priced well, beautiful high ceilings and layout but let me show you one of the models we walked into. Look at this door number 4444. As soon as we saw it, we knew this will not work for our client and of course, they saw it and mentioned DIE DIE DIE DIE!
So we move onto the townhouse next door. This time the door was 4424 which is pronounced Sei Sei Yee Sei, basically translates die easily. Long story short this was no longer an option for our client.
Let’s talk about some good numbers though.
Our grandmother and grandfather’s house growing up had the door number 12932 which is yut yee gau sam yee. Sounds similar to gau saan yee (an abundance of business). We aren’t sure if that’s part of the reason for them choose this home, we should ask our family about this.
The numbers 168 is pronounced yut lok faat - fortune all the way. And with that said, Chinese love money!
We hope you enjoyed the information we shared with you and that hilarious clip, it’s pretty accurate! Thank you so much for supporting our channel by watching, liking, commenting, and subscribing. We appreciate you! If you haven’t subscribed, please click that button below. We have another house tour coming your way and we will be releasing a series for First Time Home Buyers, so stay tuned. See you next time, Byeeeeeee!
