Monopoly Rents

The following table shows the costs of properties and the levels of rents in the UK version of the famous game, Monopoly. The data are taken from a game marked as being ©1972; the author does not know if games of other dates had different prices or rents.

There is some pattern to the numbers:

• The mortgage value of a property is always half its cost.

• The site-only rent is typically £4 less than one tenth its cost, though this rule is breached by Whitechapel Road, Piccadilly, and both of the dark blues, Park Lane and Mayfair.

• The rent with one house is typically £20 less than half the cost of the property, though this rule is breached by Whitechapel Road, Bond Street, and the dark blues.

• For 15 of the 22 properties on which it is possible to build houses, the rent with two houses is triple the rent with one house. The seven exceptions are Pentonville Road, Bow Street, Marlborough Street, Vine Street, The Strand, Fleet Street, and Park Lane.

• For the 14 properties from Pall Mall to Oxford Street, the rent with three houses is 6 × the rent with 1 house, plus £140, rounded to the nearest £50.

• The rent with four houses is generally close to, but never exactly, £210 plus 7 × the rent with one house.

• For the 10 properties from Northumberland Avenue to Piccadilly the rent with a hotel is £600 plus 5 × the rent with one house.

More about the game of Monopoly can be found via the Open Directory Project.

A 1985 French version of the game has similar prices and rents (assuming an exchange rate of £1=F100), except that Rue La Fayette, the equivalent of Piccadilly, has a site-only rent of F2400 rather than the UK game’s somewhat eccentric £22.