Summer time often means long road trips away from home.  While the freedom to travel wherever you please makes for great summer vacations, the trips themselves can sometimes hit entertainment road bumps.

Keep your road trip companions on their toes and be the Jeopardy champion of factoids with these quirky and intriguing real estate facts:

1. India’s richest man built a 27 story home.  With 6 floors dedicated to parking and 400,000 square feet of living space, it requires 600 staff members to maintain it.
2. The day you list your home matters.  Homes listed on Thursday and Friday get more buyer tours, sell faster, and for higher prices.  Homes listed on Sunday get more online views.
3. The smallest home in Great Britain measures just 10 feet by 6 feet.  It was once inhabited by a 6-foot, 3-inch fisherman.
4. A FROG is actually a room.  The Finished Room Over Garage is a term used often in the Southeast U.S. (and there’s even an unFROG when unfinished).  Other parts of the country refer to it as a bonus room or great room.
5. In Scotland, homeowners paint their front door red when they pay off their mortgage.
6. In the Pacific Northwest, bathrooms can disappear before your eyes.  A house with two powder rooms (1/2 bath + 1/2 bath) and two more baths with standup showers (3/4 bath + 3/4 bath) actually has 2.5 bathrooms total.
7. Brass hardware actually disinfects itself.  There’s an ionic effect in the metal that is toxic to all kinds of germs and pathogens.
8. Dead bodies heat homes.  In Sweden and Denmark, crematoriums pass the heat from their incinerators on to the local utilities for residential use.
9. It’s not just the home.  8 out of 10 buyers would give up square footage for the right neighborhood, and 6 out of 10 would give up yard space for a shorter commute.
10. Real estate listings with the words “beautiful” or “gorgeous” in their listing descriptions sell 15% faster than other listings.  They also sell for 5% higher prices.  Is that just correlation or some great marketing causation?  Ask your Realtor.

 Cover image via RoxysKitchen

Sam DeBord is managing broker of Seattle Homes Group with Coldwell Banker Danforth, and a state director for Washington Realtors. You can find his team at SeattleHome.com and SeattleCondo.com.