What makes a house fly off the market?

I just finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Don’t worry; I won’t tell what happens to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named to Those-Who-Have-Not-Yet-Read.

The real estate topic that I can draw from these books is the ever-magical issue of “what is it about style that makes a house fly off the market, or not?”

The Dursley’s house (Harry Potter's much-hated uncle and aunt)is a nice, neat suburban home, much like its neighboring homes. It’s in a little town outside London -- sort of Britain’s answer to Long Island. Were it in America, it might be a ranch or a Cape Cod or a split-entry built in the 50s,60s or 70s.

This Sunday, Richard Lewis’s Separate, barely, and not equal missed the point. The difference between the house in Foxboro which took 310 days to sell and the house in Franklin which sold in a month was style, not location. In that magic formula I mentioned before: location + size + condition (with some variation for charm/style) = price, Mr. Lewis overlooked the impact of style.

Any buyer with a prejudice against Dursley-type housing will notice immediately that the Foxboro house was a split-entry and the Franklin house was a Colonial. The buyers of the split-entry in Foxboro should be happy; they got much more space for their dollar. Style does not matter as much to some; they can to supply their own charm.

To the buyers of the split-level: May your home be as happy as the Weasleys, not the Dursleys!